Black & White Negative Scanning: Not offered
- First, most customers who own B&W negatives do not appreciate the fact that B&W negatives always have scratches and dust on them. Since these are not visible to the naked eye (only visible during scanning), people assume that the negatives were pristine. We are yet to encounter a single B&W negative frame that has not needed serious manual dust and scratch removal work.
- Secondly, since B&W negatives require a lot of manual work in Adobe Photoshop (usually upwards of an hour), it makes the scanning and restoration of B&W negatives cost prohibitive.
- We did contemplate providing a “scanning only service” for B&W negatives but decided not to offer that service since the end product would not be of high quality
Why do B&W negatives have more scratches and dust on them?
We find that all of the black & white negatives we receive have far more scratches than color film and this is primarily due to the presence of silver halide grains in the B&W negative film which are not present in developed color films. These silver halide grains are brittle and can easily scratch the surface even with a gentle shearing type force. These scratches on the negative are not visible to the naked eye, however, you will find plenty of scratches in the high resolution scanned image. Also, in B&W negative scanning, dust particles show up more visibly on a black/grey background than in a color image.
Why doesn’t Kodak’s Digital ICE software automatically detect and remove scratches from B&W film?
Kodak’s ground breaking Digital ICE dust and scratch detection and removal software does not work with black and white negatives because the infrared light that detects dust and scratches is not compatible with the silver grains on black and white negatives. You don’t have this problem with regular color negative scanning and slide scanning.
Kodak’s Digital ICE technology relies on two scans: an infrared light scan and a separate while light scan. The infrared light scan is used to locate the surface defects (dust and scratches) which is then subtracted from the white light scan resulting in a clean image. However, in the case of B&W imagery, the silver halide grains cause artifacts in the scan that do not produce a clean image for Digital ICE to process. Therefore, manual photo restoration using a tool such as Adobe Photoshop is essential to get a quality black and white scan.
