Surely you are both right? What gets taken for grain in the scan is an artefact resulting from digitisation of the projected grainy image. Even if the negative was grainless the scan would show some noise. But the scan of a grainy negative will look ‘grainier’ than the scan of a fine-grain negative, typically more so than a darkroom print. I thought all that was well established?Look at the examples I posted in #39 and tell me what part of the noise you're seeing is grain, and what part is digitally-originating noise.
What you do sounds sensible and is similar to my workflow, but strictly speaking, this doesn't reduce noise ('apparent grain') in the image. It does prevent artefacts introduced in the scanning process and those resulting from resizing an originally large image to a smaller format. I'd call that avoidance of part of the problem, and not reduction.
What I do agree with, is that avoidance in the sense you're practicing it is perfectly adequate/acceptable for my personal purposes, for the most part, although it depends on the scanner I'm using. I find that some degree of noise reduction is sometimes preferable on scans I make with the Flextight, but not so when using e.g. the flatbed scanner. See (again) the examples I posted earlier, which demonstrate how much of an impact choices in scanners have on the phenomenon, and thus, digital workflow decisions will need to keep these into account. Thus, I wouldn't state that one approach would be 'best' for any given situation.
In general, my workflow focuses, like yours, mostly on avoidance of excessive compound artefacts and overlaps with your choices:
(1) Disable any sharpening or detail 'enhancement' options during scanner, insofar as possible.
(2) Apply unsharp-masking only to the final image, after any other editing, in particular downsampling.
(3) Adjust unsharp-mask parameters to the structure of the image. Key parameters are indeed radius, amount and also threshold (which I often leave at 0, but not necessarily always).
I think it depends on the material you start out with and the end result you want to arrive at. So no, I don't think it's possible to suggest a single type of shoe that will fit any given foot on the planet.
Look at the examples I posted in #39 and tell me what part of the noise you're seeing is grain, and what part is digitally-originating noise.
Your Minolta scanner is a fine machine, but as I said in #42 this is not about whether a scanner is any good. The fundamental phenomenon that the noise you see in the image is the sum of all aspects of the preceding imaging chain. The statement that you could separate them out is akin to arguing you can mix two colors of paint and then sort them back out while viewing the painting.
Surely you are both right? What gets taken for grain in the scan is an artefact resulting from digitisation of the projected grainy image. Even if the negative was grainless the scan would show some noise.
So true. Like so many other "help" threads, there seems to be a tendency for us to rush in and try to solve the problem before we really understand what the problem is. Not critisizing, just an observation about human nature. (Here I might define "human" as "men-of-a-certain-age." And if I am pointing fingers, I notice there are three fingers are pointing back at me ;-)So I wouldn't really fret about it too much. We have no samples from OP. We don't know what it is exactly that they want to minimize.
So true. Like so many other "help" threads, there seems to be a tendency for us to rush in and try to solve the problem before we really understand what the problem is. Not critisizing, just an observation about human nature. (Here I might define "human" as "men-of-a-certain-age." And if I am pointing fingers, I notice there are three fingers are pointing back at me ;-)
Can you show proof of this happening? How do you establish the negative is grainless? What is your baseline? A microscope photo of the grainless negative? Or a wet print?
My scanner has a resolution of about 80 lppm and I scanned Adox CMS20 II ,~800lppm, and Adox HR50, ~287 lppm. It appears from these figures that each "pixel" of scan would likely cover many grains in the films.I haven't seen this question posted recently, so... In my scanning journey, I of course have noticed the film grain that comes along for the ride when you scan the negative. It occurs to me that there's a lot of software that will reduce image noise in digital images, but I don't recall having seen any that deals with analog grain, which is a different animal.
But out of curiosity, what does a scan of an XP2 negative look like? I don’t use the stuff myself.
@snusmumriken, I have a roll of 135 Ilford XP2 Super posted here: https://garywright.smugmug.com/Photography/Ilford-XP2-Super-Aug-Sept-2023
These were camera scanned - details in gallery caption. Be aware: I do post processing to taste, nothing extreme, but no heroic attempts to standardize my digitized film processing for controlled comparisons.
EDIT: I just noticed an oddity in the way my SmugMug website works. If I want see a photo at 100% magnification, I must first Right Click> Open in a new tab, and then click that to see the full enlargement.
While processing the scans, I didn't really notice the "texture" at the time. The brighter blank areas (sky) seem pretty clean to me, but I do see the texture you mention in some of the darker areas. I did especially notice the grain in the tree fungus shot, but that frame was pretty thin due to being underexposed.I really wasn’t expecting the blank areas to appear so textured in scans. Did it surprise you? Thanks for sharing.
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