Digital BW, The Print

You have brought up a very valid point.. Typically getting rid of the grain is at the price of a trade off. That being said my exposure to the grain reducing software is minimal.... What I do , and it's not perfect, is to scan initially or convert the image to Lab rather then RGB.. It holds the image information differently and in cases such as this often times gives you a bit more room.. Anyway.. in either the a or b channel select the channel that has the most offending grain and lesson it don't remove it from the other channels only the most offending channel.. Don't do this to the L channel as that is the Lightness channel.. When you view it after doing this you'll see it's much improved.. but you'll also see you may have lost a tad but it'll be less then doing something to an RGB file.. You can also experiment with a slight sharpening to the other color channel.. If you blur "b" then add a slight sharpening effect to the "a" channel.. You may not like it but sometimes it'll raise the bar.. Sharpening technique can really make a difference here a sharpening mask is preferred.

jimbo

 ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: pdesmidt tds.net 
  To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com 
  Sent: Tuesday, August 09, 2011 12:59 PM
  Subject: Re: [Digital BW] Grain/aliasing, CoolScan 5000 and VueScan


    
  Whether noise reduction will be useful depends a lot on the size of the
  problem and how you want the grain, if any, to appear in the image. With
  very grainy film, film that'd have a very visible grain pattern in an 8x10"
  print from 35mm, I found that the Nikon scanner lost detail because of the
  exacerbation of grain compared to my Canon 9950F consumer flatbed.
  Software noise reduction could get rid of the grain (and a bunch of detail),
  but for those images grain was an important part of the final look. Trying
  to minimize grain of Nikon scan, i.e. making it less noticeable but not
  gone, led to a nasty smearing of the grain. In these cases, my Canon flatbed
  gave significantly better results than that Nikon film scanner. I was going
  to investigate wet-mounting and using diffusion with my Nikon, but I ended
  up getting a Screen Cezanne, and so I sold my Nikon.

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