Digital BW, The Print

Another approach to controlling the appearance of film grain is using hardware. Enlarging the scanner aperture slightly reduces grain and has little effect on image detail. Many drum scanners can do this but I don't know about other scanners.

Randall R Bresee

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "pdesmidt tds.net" <pdesmidt@...> wrote:
>
> 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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