Damaged Negatives

I had thousands and thousands of negatives stored in "glassine" pages. At some point, some sort of chemical spilled into some of the pages and was not discovered until many years later. Most of my negs are okay, but some were welded to the glassine. Washing got them loose, and got the paper removed, but the damage is obvious. I've tried cleaning with various cleaners (water, PEC-12, Edwal Film Cleaner), but nothing seems to help. I've scanned these negs as is, so I have little to lose at this point. Any suggestions (besides PhotoShop) on what to try next? A scan of one of the negs is attached.

Looks like the fibers of the "glassine" material may be embedded in the emulsion gelatin.

Take one strip of your "least important" negatives and try reprocessing the film. Go through the whole process; presoak, developer, stop, fix, wash and examine them to see if the fibers lift out and the emulsion smooths out. Of course you won't have to worry about doing it in the dark, just be sure to do the entire process.

This is rewashing film. We do it often for dirty film, but nothing as drastic as this, but it's worth a shot.

aaaaaaaand that's why I avoid glassine. The few that I had in glassine sleeves look just like yours. Luckily they are negatives I can live without. Sorry this happened to you.

If the "full process" rewash works, it might work about as well to soak the negatives for half an hour in a borax or sodium carbonate solution. The alkalinity will help soften the gelatin, and the full swelling will give the best chance to even out the surface. Once done, you'll want to give a full wash (either running water type or Ilford method) and Photo-Flo (equivalent) final rinse before hanging them to dry as if freshly processed.

Using a squeegee to flatten the wet film, emulsion down, onto clean glass is another possibility -- the hazard here is that gelatin can adhere to glass well enough that gelatin glue is used to literally pull chunks off the glass to make certain kinds of textured panes, so there's a window during drying in which the gelatin is dry enough to come off well smoothed, but not so stuck to the glass as to be impossible to lift. I don't recommend this unless nothing else works.

Kino said:

Looks like the fibers of the "glassine" material may be embedded in the emulsion gelatin.

Take one strip of your "least important" negatives and try reprocessing the film. Go through the whole process; presoak, developer, stop, fix, wash and examine them to see if the fibers lift out and the emulsion smooths out. Of course you won't have to worry about doing it in the dark, just be sure to do the entire process.

This is rewashing film. We do it often for dirty film, but nothing as drastic as this, but it's worth a shot.

Click to expand...

maybe wortha try but,I can't see how that woul fixthese negs; I'm afraid, they are lost.

Agree with Donald: a full swell-wash-dry routine is your best bet. If that doesn't work, I'd count those negs as a loss.

Good luck rewashing/soaking. I tried that with my negatives, and it did nothing. I hope you are successful, though!

Thanks for the suggestions. I've got plenty of these damaged negs to try them all out. I'll report back as soon as I've had a chance to give these remedies a shot.