Digital BW, The Print

I do not think you have your facts right.  I always thought that the 'grain
enhancement' problem was more of a problem on drum scanners using PMT (?)
technology rather than CCD capture devices that scanners like the Imacon use,
and more of a prolem with color 35 mm film than B&W.

I suspect that the biggest problem is the sharpening...It will *really* enhance
the appearance of grain.  Although it could be 'grain aliasing' as well.

You should never have a service bureau sharpen an image.  Sharpening should be
the *last* thing you do to a file before sending it to the printer.  It is
actually difficult to get a scanner not to do any sharpening, many are
'hardwired' to sharpen, but you should request as little sharpening in the scan
as possible.

And while on the subject of sharpening:  There are about 10 different ways to
sharpen an image, Photoshop's 'unsharp mask' being only one of them, and perhaps
not the best, especially if you are worrying about grain enhancement.  I cannot
recommend any because of lack of knowledge on my part, but many on this list can
(and no doubt will).  :-)

It has been my observation that many people really over sharpen their files and
cause them to be far more grainy and granular in appearance than necessary.
This was evidenced at the Photo Expo in NYC last Fall at the Epson booth.
Almost all the large prints displayed at the exhibit showed these
problems....This was not grain, it was over sharpening.

Finally, as to your specific scanning problems:  There are 2 listservs that
might be able to more precisely advise you:  ScanHi-End@yahoogroups.com  which
is (obviously a Yahoo group), and there is also, apparently a very active
'Imacon' group, although I have no info on it, but Mark Tucker recently
mentioned it in one of his posts.  A Google search should help.

Harvey Ferdschneider
partner, SKID Photography, NYC


atmcintyre2001 wrote:

>  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!





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