Glass Plate Negatives – The Challenge

Glass plate negatives have a high resolution. Due to defaults during production or development as well as inappropriate storage conditions – damages can manifest themselves in metallic tarnishing, fading and separation, growth of micro-organisms or breakage. Digitisation of glass plate negatives should therefore always be combined with an improvement of archival storage conditions of the plates themselves. Because of their sensitivity to heat, pressure and humidity it is not advisable to use scanners for the digitisation these objects.

The Approach

We are able to provide a careful method of digitisations based on photographic procedures and without any harmful scanning. Defaults of images – promoted by the above mentioned causes – may be largely compensated for by professional digital enhancement. In this way pictures can be developed in their “original” appearance.

The Treatment

This is a transmission of data and the development of a correctly grey toned image, which is executed according to your exact wishes. We provide all options: from the simple recording of the current condition, to a close restoration of the original image’s appearance up to the production of “optimal” photo positives according to professional points of view.

All treated data are being accompanied by a colour profile and can be delivered in any desired format, resolution and size exactly to your wishes. If required, we can certainly issue all digitised pictures with archival numbers and/or subject catalogues for indexing.

Additional Services

If desired a sensor size of up to 200 Megapixel can be used for digitisations
Supply of “contact develops” for ease of stock survey
Print outs in every desired format and execution incl. gallery prints
We are happy to transfer the sensitive glass plate negatives into appropriate re-housing systems after digitisation has been undertaken.

Technical details concerning the photographic recording

For the safety of the glass plate negatives, no scanners are being used for the photographic recording. The objects are not being subject to harmful heat caused by scanners, which may lead to significant damages of the objects. Digitisation is executed with the aid of a digital Hasselblad middle format equipment camera. Size of sensor 50 Megapixel (6132 x 8176 Pixel).The size of a 8 Bit TIFF picture amounts to approximately 150 MB. This equals a picture of c. 50 x 70 cm at 300 ppi. The saturation amounts to 16 Bits.
The camera is equipped with a multi-shot mode, which provides additional sharp definition and accuracy of details.