How to reproduce and display CDV’s from an album

Bdracey

Cadet
Joined
Apr 1, 2020
I am lucky to have some Carte de visite photos of some relatives in the civil war. They are in an album passed down to me. Am wanting to somehow copy/reprint/reproduce and enlarge for framing and displaying or hanging on a wall. I have simply taken a picture and got prints but that doesn’t seem to do them justice.
Any thoughts/ideas/suggestions on how to do it?
Thanks!
 
My first thought was to take pictures with your cell phone, but if that didn't work out, scanning them on your printer at a high resolution might be the ticket. Don't try to take them out of the album, but scan the page and crop out the area around the photo. We used a printer to scan my great grandfather's glass negatives and then reversed the polarity on them, and they came out probably as well as they would have if I had access to a darkroom to make contact sheets with. (At 5 x 7, they were too big to fit into a normal negative holder to get the image onto the photo paper). Below is a sample of an image scanned with my printer.

001.jpg


Baby Eric Nissen.jpg
 
I sort of inherited two photo albums with both paper CDVs and tintypes. I was able to very carefully cut two of the bottom corners of the paper that held in the photos with a razor blade such that I could remove them from the albums with tweezers without noticeably damaging the albums (hard to describe; have to see it). Then my wife - who is a good photographer and has high-quality equipment - took high-resolution photos of the photos and used processing software to clean up the images so as to remove scratches and the like that were on the originals. She was also able to adjust things like contrast to make them as sharp as possible. After all that we printed them on heavy stock on her printer which she uses to print her photos. I was then able to make copies of the images, reduce their file sizes, and email the copies to a cousin (she didn't need or want actual paper).

Taking a good photo is your best bet. Scanning can work but it could be almost impossible without removing the photos depending on where they are in the albums and the size of the albums. Also, the quality of your scanner is critical. My only scanner is my printer which is OK for many things but isn't good enough for quality prints or if you need to clean up the images (you want the highest-density image you can get for that to work well).

Taking a photo is also the best way generally to get prints of old slides too. You project them onto a good screen and photograph that.
 
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