My Moynahan Genealogy Blog: Family Photos & Negatives

Tuesday, October 27, 2020

Family Photos & Negatives

Recently, I de-cluttered a storage closet and found a large number of old family photographs and negatives. Some of the photographs were in pretty rough shape and the negatives were quite old as well.

Many of the negatives in these yellow envelopes had photos from the 1930s

Scanning Negatives With Your Smart Phone

When I told my sister about the large quantity of negatives, she told me that she had downloaded an app to her smartphone called FilmBox by Photomyne! Once I downloaded the app and developed a method for holding on to the negatives (using tweezers), I was able to go quickly and capture images of the negatives on my iPhone.

Negative scanned and colorized by FilmBox; Left to Right: Grandson Danny and brothers Ernie, Raymond and Gerald Moynahan

Despite some issues that I experienced with the auto-crop feature, I found that this app provided really good results and I also enjoyed the colorizing feature. (See more examples below)

Helpful Hints

Here are some tricks that I found useful and helped me achieve the best results with my variously sized negatives:

For my backlight, I used my iPad with the screen brightness set to the highest setting, and logged on to the Photomyne web page with a blank screen for scanning https://photomyne.com/backlight.
My older negatives kept curling and it was difficult to hold them straight while I scanned, so I used two plastic rulers and a clip. I would put the edge of the negative between the rulers, clip it, then use the clip to hold the negative in front of the screen.

Whenever the auto-crop feature would crop my photo in a way that I didn't like, I would turn the negative upside down in an effort to trick the AI. This worked most of the time.
I also found it helpful to have my phone mounted on a stand to keep it steady and as a way of always using the same distances between the three parts: the phone, the negative and the iPad back-light to get consistent results.

I thought that the scan quality would most likely be better on my flatbed negative scanner until I set up my Epson V370 and realized that it only handles 35mm negatives (I had a wide variety of negative sizes).

Overall, I am very pleased with the quality of scans (I did 103) and some results were actually quite spectacular.

Negative scanned by FilmBox; Left to Right: John and Patricia Moynahan (c. 1935)

Negative scanned by FilmBox; Left to Right: Patricia, Ernie and John Moynahan (c. 1937)

Negative scanned by FilmBox; Rhea (Coughlin), Ernie Sr, Ernie Jr. Patricia and John Moynahan (C. 1936)

More information about FilmBox can be found at the Photomyne website https://photomyne.com/

Photo Repair Software

The Ontario Genealogical Society (OGS) was promoting Vivid-Pix Picture Fix Software and I had discovered a photo of my great uncle Gerald Moynahan in a fox-hole in WWII and was eager to see if the software could help fix the photo.

Gerald Moynahan (left) and unknown soldier overseas in WWII

Vivid-Pix was offering a Free Trial and I was entitled to a further OGS discount if I opted to purchase the software. The trial required installing software on my computer which went smoothly. I found the interface intuitive and user-friendly.

The results fell short of what I was hoping for. It adjusted the colour but did not "fix" the other areas. Perhaps I was expecting too much.

Vivid-Pix result

The Vivid-Pix software also had a document repair feature which I also tried with similar results.

Written on back of photo: "a dugout I used during the early stages ... Gerald ... illegible"

Vivid-Pix result

If you want to give Vivid-Pix a try, you can fix ten photos in the free trial and no credit card is required for the trial period. Visit: vivid-pix.com

Vivid-Pix Software can be found here: https://vivid-pix.com/

Here are a few more apps that I plan to test in the future:

Scanning Your Old Photographs

Google's PhotoScan https://www.lifewire.com/google-photoscan-4687341

Scanning Negatives

FilmLab https://www.dpreview.com/news/3520224777/filmlab-is-a-film-negative-scanning-app-for-smartphones

Colorizing Photographs

Colorize by uploading a photo online https://demos.algorithmia.com/colorize-photos
My Heritage Colorize Photos online. (See my photo from above colorized at My Heritage here: https://myhr.tg/1xAPtIoh )

Negative scanned by FilmBox; Colorized at My Heritage

After experimenting with the above app and software, I shared many of the photo treasures online with my family and friends. These photos, some never seen before, brought great joy and fond remembrance of our loved ones, many gone now but never forgotten.

Negative scanned by FilmBox; Colorized at My Heritage

In closing, I wanted to demonstrate how colorizing Gerald Moynahan's WWII photo at MyHeritage actually provided the MOST satisfactory result for the tattered photo (mentioned above)