Creative and extreme scanning

CREATIVE SCANNING
Scanning is such a pain… or is it? Well, it doesn’t have to be. You can think of scanning as a chore or move up to creative scanning.
Creative scanning is just a term to describe another cool way of cheering up the chore of scanning your negatives.
Unlike extreme scanning, which uses the scanner’s own settings, creative scanning is about using other materials as well, such as placing the negative underneath a glassine (or any other type of translucent paper) and then scanning as usual. It will create a soft painterly look. Using textured transparent paper will enhance the effect even more.
Another way of scanning creatively is scanning the image along with other objects placed on or around the image to create an interesting collage.
Also, placing multi-grade filters on top of the negatives can yield an interesting effect.
And of course, if you’re really adventurous you can always combine extreme and creative scanning together.

EXTREME SCANNING
Ok, don’t try looking up Extreme Scanning in the dictionary; it’s just a term I came up with to describe a technique I developed (it actually developed itself) while scanning my negatives. So this is how it’s done: You begin with an already scratched up or neglected negative and skip the cleaning up stage of scanning (as you can tell, this is a very good method for the lazy among us). You then play with the scanner’s settings; contrast, color balance, etc. until you like what you see and then simply scan away!

NYC 2006 / Extreme and creative scanning

creative and extreme scanning

This image is the result of a combining extreme and creative scanning.
Not only I gladly skipped the cleaning-up-the-negative part and somewhat pushed the settings, I also added some more flaws of my own to the process.

creative scanning

This image is the outcome of scanning a negative through a glassine paper envelope.
I inserted the negative inside a glassine envelope which is often used to store photos. I placed it on a flatbed scanner with settings pointed to normal color negative.

As you can see, scanning through a see-through paper results in a soft painterly effect.

What I like about it is that the final effect is unpredictable and varies from one image to another. Although sometimes the end result can be too blurry and distorted, more often it works out quite nicely.