Can you enhance scans from negative?

[David H]

I have just scanned in a 35mm negative and wondered if it was possible in any way to enhance the detail on a small area of the result with a road sign on it to make it clearer? I had to blow it up and crop it and the normal sharpen functions I have make little difference as clearly not up to anything like that. The actual writing is lost in the distance but the little picture is clear enough to recognise albeit blurry.

[NazNomad]

Scan it at a higher resolution maybe?

[David H]

Now had it been a scan from the positive that would be a very good idea, but as I've only had the slide scanner a short time have never needed to try that yet and not sure it has any options- my Canonscan asks me the resolution when I press the button and can ramp it up to around 2Mb if required. I'm very impressed someone else is up this late as well and will see if it can be done on the slide machine tomorrow, thanks!

[NazNomad]

The only other suggestion (that I can think of at this unearthly hour), if you can't 'up' the resolution is to open it in Photoshop and try looking at the RGB channels separately to see if anything becomes clearer.

[jaydah]

If you open it in Paint & enlarge it you could draw in pixels it lacks.

Might save hours of work if you enlarged the original photo print through standard photographic enlargers.

[TTG]

If its colour, try converting the picture to black and white.

[AB Editor]

Something like these might be of use: http://www.amazon.co....ative+scanner&x=0&y=0

your standard scanner probably doesn't scan to the level you want for enlarging.

[David H]

Thanks all, I could ramp it up, I did a full resolution scan which got the original all the way up to 10mb, which I then cropped to just over 2. But as Noth guessed, if the detail wasn't there it couldn't be added. but thanks for all the advice and now at least I know. It was an old road sign on the junction of my road in the 90s and although I never got round to taking a picture of it it did creep in by chance when I took one for another reason but you can imagine how rough it looks in the distance and blown up. You can see the little symbol on it but blurred and nothing else so got the main part I needed at least.

[David H]

The good news is I had it printed from the negative and the enlargement was fine, the scanners clearly miss a lot of the detail from the negatives so make them look awful if blown up at all.