The photos you see here on Shorpy are not just resized versions of the images found in the Library of Congress archives -- they are extracted from the LOC's full-resolution reference tiffs: a process that generally takes anywhere from half an hour to several hours per monochrome image, depending on the amount of work that needs to be done to bring detail out of the shadows, suppress overexposed highlights, and remove blemishes caused by dust, scratches and mold. Color images require correction for color cast as well. The before-and-after composite above shows the condition of some of these old glass negatives a century after they were exposed, and how they look after a day at the digital restoration spa. This one is from 1908. View full size. Below is the 36 mb archival tiff resized to 512 px wide. The restored version is here.

Below is another before-and-after example. Restored version.

Below: Another monochrome example. Click to enlarge.

"Man demonstrating ship rescue apparatus" circa 1915 somewhere near New York City. View full size. 5x7 glass negative, George Grantham Bain Collection.

"Amplifiers at Bolling Field, 1921." Two giant horns with ear tubes, evidently designed to listen for approaching aircraft. View full size. National Photo Co.

April 1942. "Aircraft construction class. The flame of welding torches has replaced the soft lights of a nightclub in Daytona Beach, which has been taken over for a vocational school to train war workers for Florida's pooling program. Pictured above is instructor C.C. Gravelge showing one of his classes the difficult art of overhead welding in preparation for their initiation into aircraft welding jobs on the De Land pool's war contract." View full size. Medium format safety negative by Howard Hollem for the Office of War Information.

Butler's signal tower at Bermuda Hundred, Virginia, circa 1865. Wet-plate glass negative, left half of stereograph. Photograph from the main Eastern theater of war, the Army of the James, June 1864-April 1865. View full size.

"Marconi Control Table" at a radio station in British Mandate Palestine circa 1939. View full size. | Alternate view. Glass negative from the archives of the Matson Photo Service, which documented the American Colony in Jerusalem.

A radio mast in Ramallah, British-Mandate Palestine, sometime around 1939. View full size. 5x7 glass negative, Matson Photo Service. Alternate view.