Digital BW, The Print

There is a product I was just told about, but have had little chance to
test--called Neat Image (http://absoft.hotbox.ru): it is designed to reduce
noise in digital camera files, but I intend to try it for this very problem,
it looks promising and its free!

Wendel

> -----Original Message-----
> From: atmcintyre2001 [mailto:amcintyre@...]
> Sent: Saturday, January 26, 2002 7:53 AM
> To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: [Digital BW] Excessive grain in scanned images
>
>
> I have some 6cm x 6cm b&w negatives exposed back in the early '60s on
> Tri X Pan Professional. They blew up to 20" x 16" quite successfully
> using a DeVere cold-cathode enlarger.
>
> Recently I had some of these negatives scanned by a bureau through an
> Imacon Flextight machine, but grain has become so pronounced that the
> scans are virtually unusable.
>
> I understand the problem. Light in a scanner is highly collimated -
> the light beams are nearly perfectly parallel. So the grains don't
> just block the light - they scatter it creating greater apparent
> density. The so-called "Callier Effect." And it will have been made
> worse because I neglected to tell the bureau *not* to sharpen the
> image!
>
> However I wondered what 'work-round' others in this group have tried
> to reduce grain on silver negatives.
>
> I have tried blurring  the image lightly in Photoshop, followed by
> unsharp masking but am not very happy with the results.
>
> I have also read somewhere that some old-timers digitise their images
> via a conventional photographic print and a flat-bed scanner. By
> printing with a diffuse light source and a relatively soft grade of
> paper they suppress grain while capturing a tonal range that can be
> enhanced in Photoshop. Doubtless this works, but it does seem 'the
> long way round' and since it introduces an extra step in the process,
> image quality is bound to suffer.
>
> Of course I'm now running trials with the newer chromogenic films but
> that doesn't solve my problems with the archival images I still have.
>
> Any ideas on this theme would be most welcome!
>
>