Reducing appearance of grain

[not_the_real_bob_wilson]

Hi all

 

I've been trying to find good 800 and 1600 speed films and have

tried Fuji?s offerings. However I find the grain ugly and intrusive ?

though some of the pictures I?ve seen posted here look fine. Can

anyone offer some tips on how I can reduce the appearance of grain?

[nikos peri]

B&W? Change developer, reduce agitation.<br>

Color negative? Change film.

[paul.droluk]

The reason they look so good here is that at the maximum resolution for posting, you

could get away with Tri-X pushed to 3200! Almost none of what you are seeing on a

monitor from ISO 800-1600 film would look very good if PRINTED to A3 size. Unless of

course you like the look of grain. I've seen some wonderful work over the years that

almost looked pointalistic.

[aa2000]

The fine grain shots from ISO1600 films saw on the net are likely to

be digitally enhanced. <a href="http://www.neatimage.com/">Neat

Image</a> is a great tool for removing noise.

[saraunlimited]

Have you tried Fuji's Press 800? It's got very fine grain.

[carl photography]

For color negatives, you might try Portra 800.

 

Scanning negatives can exaggerate the grain, so either use ICE (when scanning color film) or some post-processing software. Petersen's Photographic ragazine just recommended an ICE-based PhotoShop plug-in, Kodak's "Digital GEM" -- try before you buy, at:

 

http://argon.asf.com/asf/product.asp?pid=1000&tc=9999&catalog%5Fname=ASF&category%5Fname=Software+Plugins&product%5Fid=GMP

 

"Brandon's Dad"

[paul_tobin]

With respect to Fuji NPZ 800 color print film, rating it at 600 reduced the grain so it could not be seen with the unaided eye using a 6x7 camera. If you're using a smaller format you might consider giving this a try if you have not done so already.

[jimdesu]

I don't know if this will work well for modern emulsions, but Mortensen use to underexpose his film and then overdevelop it to increase the contrast sufficiently to straighten up data from the toe of the H&D curve, aiming for a thin neg, which he claimed was less grainy. I haven't tried this out yet, but it may be worth a shot.

[steven_clark]

Dumb idea with c41. Underexposing C41 gives incredibly large ugly grain .

[jim kerr]

Well,NOT BOB, the one thing that I did that lessened the appearance of grain for me was when I replaced my enlarger's condensor head with it's color head(making it a diffusion enlarger). The condensor head has been in it's box in a closet for the last 25 years now. Can't say my negatives get anything special done to them. My Tri-X and HP5+ negatives get enlarged from anywhere from 9 to 12 times, showing practically no grain. Hope this is of some value....Jim