Scanning problems

I haven't used the Epson4990 in more than two years, since I got the coolscan 9ked for both medium format and 35mm. Abstracting other considerations there is simply no comparison between the quality of a flatbed scan and a dedicated film scan, at any resolution.
Of course: a film scanner won't scan a document, but we're talking photography anyways.

Now, I use a second hand coolscanV for 35mm: its workflow is faster than the 9000. I also have a LOT more 35mm to scan than MF so there is also the thought of conserving the 9ked for the stuff where it excels.

One thing I do remember from the Epson days: scan at the max non-interpolated resolution - 4800 - then apply grain reduction and sharpening and only after that downress. It produced the best results by far, although nowhere near the class of the film scanners.

I use Neat Image for grain reduction and Focus Magic for sharpening: both produce superior results compared to plugins or USM. They cost me under $200 but the time they saved paid for that many times over.

I'd suspect the V500 is superior to the 4990, but not my so much that I'd trade it in for any of the film scanners. But I have an established workflow.

For 35mm, the coolscanV is tremendous value. Nikon discontinued it but there are plenty of second hand or leftovers around at very good price.

The 9000 is a different beast: it is definitely professional calibre but it needs an investment in time to learn to extract the best out of it and not all are willing to commit to.

So the lines between using a flatbed or the 9ked for a medium format newcomer might be hazy. I'd still scan at max rez on the v500, though.
 
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I find the EpsonScan sharpening to be pretty bad, so I turn it off.

Out of curiosity, have you tried scanning a film that's different from the one you normally use?
 
wizofz2k said:
I haven't used the Epson4990 in more than two years, since I got the coolscan 9ked for both medium format and 35mm. Abstracting other considerations there is simply no comparison between the quality of a flatbed scan and a dedicated film scan, at any resolution.
Of course: a film scanner won't scan a document, but we're talking photography anyways.

Now, I use a second hand coolscanV for 35mm: its workflow is faster than the 9000. I also have a LOT more 35mm to scan than MF so there is also the thought of conserving the 9ked for the stuff where it excels.

One thing I do remember from the Epson days: scan at the max non-interpolated resolution - 4800 - then apply grain reduction and sharpening and only after that downress. It produced the best results by far, although nowhere near the class of the film scanners.

I use Neat Image for grain reduction and Focus Magic for sharpening: both produce superior results compared to plugins or USM. They cost me under $200 but the time they saved paid for that many times over.

I'd suspect the V500 is superior to the 4990, but not my so much that I'd trade it in for any of the film scanners. But I have an established workflow.

For 35mm, the coolscanV is tremendous value. Nikon discontinued it but there are plenty of second hand or leftovers around at very good price.

The 9000 is a different beast: it is definitely professional calibre but it needs an investment in time to learn to extract the best out of it and not all are willing to commit to.

So the lines between using a flatbed or the 9ked for a medium format newcomer might be hazy. I'd still scan at max rez on the v500, though.
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Wow. thanx a lot for this. I will definitely start trying 4800 dpi. I tried the "actual" max resolution the other day and it basically froze my computer when I tried to open it in photoshop.

So do you think scanning at 4800 dpi with no adjustments selected except digital ice, and then adding a Grain Reducion Filter and an Unsharp Mask Filter in Photoshop CS3 while it is still full size will get me my best results or do you think I need to buy other programs for the grain reduction and USM?
 
JeremyLangford said:
Wow. thanx a lot for this. I will definitely start trying 4800 dpi. I tried the "actual" max resolution the other day and it basically froze my computer when I tried to open it in photoshop.

So do you think scanning at 4800 dpi with no adjustments selected except digital ice, and then adding a Grain Reducion Filter and an Unsharp Mask Filter in Photoshop CS3 while it is still full size will get me my best results or do you think I need to buy other programs for the grain reduction and USM?
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You'll need about 1GB of memory in your computer, at a minimum. If you use Windows, you also will need to reduce the eye candy in the user interface: that uses up a lot of memory. I have 2GB in my pc with WinXPPro and I scan 6X7 at 4000dpi and 16bit colour without the slightest problem. The output files are around 500MB each.

You will always get better results by using higher resolution scans and image correction at that size, followed by downressing the output. I don't have experience with the grain reduction in Photoshop as I don't use that product. But I have used various flavours of USM in the past and I can confidently say Focus Magic beats them all by a country mile, if not in actual output certainly in speed and convenience.

This is a 35mm 4000dpi image taken with Astia film, Neat Image applied to reduce grain, Focus Magic applied to increase sharpness and then downressed. Click on image to see bigger. The original file is in excess of 20MP in size.

This is a very small crop (300X200) of the full sized image: you can see what sort of detail is achievable by comparing it to this, an equivalent size crop of a Canon 5DM2, the latest whitest and brightest 21MP dslr. Not much difference in IQ, eh?
If anything, I'd say mine exceeds the 5DM2 shot in detail and sharpness. 😉
But this is not a film vs digital debate: I'm just providing the above as a measure of what can be achieved with careful post-processing of high res 35mm film scans.
 
wizofz2k said:
I use Neat Image for grain reduction and Focus Magic for sharpening: both produce superior results compared to plugins or USM. They cost me under $200 but the time they saved paid for that many times over.
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I use Neat Image too, to an extent.

It was intended to be for reducing digital noise, but it works to reduce the intensity of grain as well. It will bite you if you OD on it, however, as it will kill the texture of stone, grass, etc. if misused. (I think the Noritsu minilabs use something like this by default, and I've seen this effect on Noritsu scans as well.)

As for sharpening, I haven't really felt the need to do it much. I know that some say you should always sharpen when scanning. I suspect that both the Fuji and Noritsu do it by default. There's sharpening in Neat Image, but I usually have it turned way down.

There's USM and 3 other sharpen options in Photoshop, but I seldom use them. Too many people OD on these and the results are artificial looking.
 
Indeed, there is such a thing as overdoing any post-processing.

With Neat Image, I've built profiles for both the grain/noise pattern and the amount of "blurring" it does for each of the films I use. These help a lot in streamlining the process: I just set them for a film and batch the whole lot of images in one go.

I tend to err on the under-correction side precisely because of the blurring that may happen. Typically, I set the threshold to -25 or -30 and the amount of correction to 40 for most film, with max (100) chroma correction. That seems to work well without wasting any major detail, particularly in big uniform colour areas - sky is a good example - where scans tend to show notable "grain".

USM can look "over-sharpened" very easy, at very low levels of sharpening. Halos are a dead giveaway. There are techniques to work around this, mostly with cumulative multi-pass sharpening.
With Focus Magic, the major advantage I've found is that it rarely produces halos unless one plainly ODs on it and I have yet to need a second pass. Anything up to 6 in the sharpen setting rarely produces any side effects and I stay usually way below that, at around 4.

Most of the downressing needed for online screen display already produces a form of sharpening, anyway. This is only really relevant for big print blow-ups. One thing that makes a marked difference is the method used to downress: I use lanczos now.

One last point is to not use noise reduction or sharpening from the scanner software: have yet to find one that really works well. That includes vuescan's sharpening and Nikonscan's one. As well as others like GEM. They truly produce "overdone" results. Of course: Frontiers and Kokis are completely different animals.

DEE from Nikonscan works quite well, though. But that is just D-lighting in disguise.
 
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Jeremy, based on your initial comments and the extensive discussions here I think you should probably buy another scanner. You may have a bad one. It does happen.
 
Thank you all for your help. I have started comparing my results with the V500 set to 4800 dpi instead of 1300. It really looks a lot better.

One thing I want to know is what dpi Walmart scans at. They have a final size of 1818 pixels on the longer side which is roughly 1300 dpi with 35mm film. Based on this, I assumed they scan at 1300 dpi. That is why I set my Epson V500 at 1300 dpi when making comparisons. Is it possible that they scan at a higher dpi, and then downsize the finals before putting them on a cd?
 
JeremyLangford said:
One thing I want to know is what dpi Walmart scans at. They have a final size of 1818 pixels on the longer side which is roughly 1300 dpi with 35mm film. Based on this, I assumed they scan at 1300 dpi. ... Is it possible that they scan at a higher dpi, and then downsize the finals before putting them on a cd?
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They tell me (the ubiquitous "they") 🙂 that the scanner in the Frontier minlabs is capable of scanning at 5000 dpi and that if you sweet-talk the operator into going out of procedure, you can sometimes obtain scans at that resolution.

My guess is, however, that the company (Walmart, Wally World, etc.) sets the standards company-wide, perhaps using the Fuji-suggested defaults for high-volume consumer photos.

I've watched them do the scans, and with the speed I saw -- the whole roll went through the scanner in maybe 10-15 seconds or so, I doubt if they are scanning at that resolution, but more like 1200-1300 or so. I doubt if they would take the extra time to scan at a higher resolution and then intentionally down-res for the scans they give you.

I know that not all labs use the same settings. An independent camera shop here (Rockbrook Photo) uses a similar Frontier, and when they scan, they give you the same res, roughly 1800x1200 per shot, but the files are more like 5 megs or so, at a higher .jpg quality.

The manuals for those minilabs used to be on the web. You might google a bit and you'll find all the options they have for those things.
 
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