A big part of creating analogue images is producing a final usable result.
When working with large format, this is further complicated because the equipment for mechanically enlarging the negatives is harder to find, more expensive, and harder to accommodate.
We’ve been looking into doing contact prints, which would give us a physical copy made entirely using the old methods, but this would be limited to prints of 4x5 inch size.

So, we also need to scan the negatives so that we can print them digitally. Our first attempts at this process involved using a flat-bed scanner and then reversing them in software to produce a positive image.

We thought the results were passable, but blamed our analogue process for the quality of the results:

Initial attempts at scanning were less than perfect!

Although this method captured the essence of the old process, it really doesn’t reflect the quality that is possible from a large format camera.
So…we kept looking.

Our scanner can scan 35mm negatives as well as medium format, but there’s no option for large format…but photoshop can stitch images together, so we thought we’d try that.

The mask is just a big piece of black card, roughly cut to shape

And it works!
I had to make a mask to put on the glass of the scanner, and we have to move the negative twice for each scan then feed the two images into photoshop.

The results are night and day between the two methods (the new scans are shown after the old ones):