If Only The Food They Served In The Restaurants Was So Good...
By tony_dummett
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Scanned as an exercise in capturing noise-free shadow detail with a Flextight 848 (on demo loan). The shadow details in this scan are very true to the original, although some slight blurring of noise was required in the darkest areas. This scanner holds up well in the BLUE channel (a perennial problem with CCD scanners).
The algorithm for reducing noise artefacts in the shadows was:
"SELECT" [shadow areas, however you define them]
"GAUSSIAN BLUR, Radius=0.5 pixels"
"FADE GAUSSIAN BLUR, 'Darker'" [this restores the lighter areas of the pre-blurred shadows while keeping only the areas made darker i.e. the noise speckles. This is only one way of accomplishing noise reduction. You really have to suck it and see, depending on the individual characteristics of each photograph scanned]
Some post-scanning selective souping-up of the contrast in these shadow areas was also required. No increase in noise was apparent when this was done (as most of the noise was gotten rid of with the BLUR procedure outlined above). That's a Big Tick for this scanner.
It's fast, too. This was originally a 115 mb scan. Normally this would take 30 minutes on the old Precision-II. The 848 did the whole scan in under 2 minutes... better than the P-II could ever do.