Digital BW, The Print

the new scanners come with ICE and GEM. GEM is supposed to totally
remove grain. Anyone know for sure if this works?

Jerry



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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