chris.hulley

Thanks Ed_Ingold ... No, you didn't say I did a crappy job, that was me ... I think the photo's just not very good, if the exposure was better I think there wouldn't be so much grain visible, as there isn't in quite a lot of the others. Thanks for all advice; I've just got so many negs to scan I'm just batching them through. I'll probably discard 7 out of 10 of them (especially the diving ones, there one shot worth keeping on a roll was doing well in the old days), and I just can't tell enough from the thumbnails to decide, and the previews take so long. Of course, what I wanted was a scanner that would do about the same job as a commercial film printer, i.e. produce a reasonable result with minimum effort from negs that are under or over exposed!

Thanks everyone for the tips and help. Life is weird, or maybe it's just me ( :-) ) This morning, looking through my scans (500 so far), I find the grain less objectionable than I thought. I'm going to keep on scanning, then discard the obvious ones, then look at the rest, and for critical memories I want to keep where the grain is visible, intensively rescan with various parameters to get the best result I can - probably what any of you would have advised me to do in the first place, no doubt!

Hi Rodeo_JOE, yes I'm sure you're right about the greater dynamic range of slides. However, there is another factor at work: on a slide, the darkest bits are where there is the most emulsion. Less light will get through, and any grain will tend to get 'lost' in the darkness. If you boost the light to bring out the shadows, you'll see the grain for sure - but as the regions are darker, you can apply more strenuous noise suppression, at least locally, without too much of a problem. In the areas where it's lightest, there is the least amount of emulsion left, and there's no real grain in the transparent base. For a negative, the darkest areas are going to get inverted to being the lightest areas, and the grain's going to come out because what's there will become light to possibly even white, and the grain will show as a variation on that. That's what I'm sort of talking about with my technically vague and inaccurate saying of 'darker'. I think!

So, crappy photography it is, then lol .... Sad thing about all this is, when I take the Nikon scan and apply all the filters necessary to get the noise level down to the point where I am ok about saving it into my 'memories' folder, I've lost so much detail it's not very different from the 'cheap' scanner result, or indeed the scan-of-the-print. Of course, if I have a good shot it can do better. Ho hum.

Thanks one and all for all your helpful comments. Rodeo_joe, here's a scan of the IT8 calibration slide http://www.jera.com.au/IT8005.jpg - 'basically, everything off', done on the Nikonsoftware and one done at 16x http://www.jera.com.au/IT8006.jpg Basically the difference I see here is that there is less grain, but also it doesn't vary much with the oversampling. Of course, negatives are inherently darker than positives, due to the orange colour cast. I guess I'm wondering if there could be an effect from just simply being a crappy amateur photographer, and for darker, compensated photos it's going to bring the grain out, of whether there's something inherently wrong with the scanner, e.g. it's not getting enough light to the neg for darker photos, so the noise becomes more prevalent, and I guess what most here seem to be saying is, not, this is about what you can expect from the scanner, if you can't take a better shot. Certainly, some shots seem to come out better, e.g. http://www.jera.com.au/Europe213.jpg Cheers ChrisH

Hmmm well, I'm using ISO 100 film. If it's grain, why does it improve with 16x multisample? Also, the noisy effect doesn't seem to go away at 2000px, which is much less than the 'cheap' scanner

I bought this secondhand, and while it works fine it seems the negatives I'm scanning result in a very noisy jpg. The film I'm scanning is a Fuji, marked G-100 E09. The negs are about 25 years old I suppose. I'm scanning with Silverfast 8.8, and using Multiple Exposure, IR dust removal, SRDX, scanning at 4000dpi. The best of the profiles I've found is Fuji Superia 100. This is the result I'm getting: http://www.jera.com.au/Silverfast.jpg I've tried it a number of different ways. I've also got a cheap and nasty scanner, a Glanz (14mp) which produces http://www.jera.com.au/Cheap.jpg Although not as pleasant a scan, there seems to be far less noise evidence? I've tried it with the Nikon software and a 16x multisample, which gives a better result as far as noise is concerned: http://www.jera.com.au/Nikon16x.jpg The reason I wonder if there's something wrong with the scanner is, various opinions that scanner noise is reasonably low in the Nikon, but if multisampling fixes it, it is probably scanner noise rather than grain, which wouldn't be affected. Another way I tried was simply snapping the negative handheld with a Canon macro lens and inverting in photoshop: http://www.jera.com.au/Photo.jpg And finally, a 600dpi scan of a print done from the neg http://www.jera.com.au/Print.jpg Any thoughts appreciated. I've seen comments that dirty optics can be a problem, but that it usually manifests as lens flare which doesn't seem to be a problem. Thanks ChrisH