Re: filmscanners: Grain, Noise, et al

["Rob Geraghty" <harper@wordweb.com>]

"Norman Unsworth" <unsworth_norman@aclink.org> wrote:
> Vuescan's ability to manually focus (actually, slightly out of focus) and
> grain reduction to reduce what I'm calling grain but obviously there are
> drawbacks in the form of reduction of sharpness, in either of these
> solutions.

Out of interest, have you tried comparing the apparent grain in a scan of
the same frame with Vuescan and Minolta's software?  It seems to me that
Vuescan with my LS30 "sees" more grain in things like bright sky in a neg
scan precisely because it tries to retain every bit (pardon the pun) of data
and compress it into the output.  The same grain in skies is lost with
Nikonscan because it clips the output of the scanner to 8 bits per channel.
I think I have to experiment more with setting the white point to find out
if a happy medium can be achieved.  I don't like most of the grain reduction
methods I've tried due to the loss of sharpness.

> From a practical, rather than a causative approach, how have folks dealt
> with this issue, both in terms of minimizing apparent grain from scans and
> in improving (ie: reducing) the appearance of 'grain' in Photoshop?

Where-ever possible I shoot slide film or 100ASA print film.  The only film
I've found to be essentially "grainless" in scans on the LS30 is Fuji Provia
100F, but the density of the film makes shadow detail a challenge.  Low
contrast images in Provia 100F are astounding.  The lowest apparent grain
I've found in print film would be one of Fuji Superia 100, Reala or Kodak
Supra 100.  It's very hard to pick the difference in apparent grain between
these three, so I tend to shoot Superia 100 simply because it's a lot
cheaper.

So my answer to your question has been to try to stick to films that have
such fine grain that the problem is minimised in the first place, since I
can't afford a 4000dpi scanner.

Hopefully this will last me until someone produces a digicam with an
equivalent resolution at a reasonable price. :)

Rob