RE: filmscanners: Grain, Noise, et al

["Norman Unsworth" <unsworth_norman@aclink.org>]

Without a doubt, Rob, that's the best answer re: fundamentals. I've been
shooting a lot of 400 speed, albeit quality films (Supra, Fuji NPH). The
Supra 400 isn't too bad at all, really, but I've had some very grainy
results shooting NPH with a flash. No question, I'm 'shooting' myself in the
foot here and am just now starting to move in the direction of standardizing
on 100 (sometimes 160) speed films.

Interestingly, I just shot 2 rolls of Kodak T400CN for a local newspaper. I
used Kodak mailers and when I got the pics & negs back, all the pics had a
pink cast (fortunately, the negs were great)! I don't know the technical
reason for this, although I know that the CN film can be printed on either
color or B&W paper, but wouldn't you think the techs at the Kodak labs would
look at the prints and ponder whether prints with a pink cast could possibly
be right? Dumb.

Norman Unsworth


> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-filmscanners@halftone.co.uk
> [mailto:owner-filmscanners@halftone.co.uk]On Behalf Of Rob Geraghty
> Sent: Friday, July 13, 2001 8:40 PM
> To: filmscanners@halftone.co.uk
> Subject: Re: filmscanners: Grain, Noise, et al
>
>
> "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
>
>
>
>