Getting rid of scanner noise??

[Jamie123]

I have a portrait photo I scanned that was a little underexposed. I can bump up the exposure until the skin tones look good but then there's horrible noise in the dark areas of the photo. Is there a way to avoid this??

By the way, I use an Epson 4990 scanner and the film is Portra 160VC 120 film.

Any kind of help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[dmr]

The Neat Image plug-in was originally made to reduce digital noice. That might help. I use it for reducing grain, which does work quite well.

 

[xvvvz]

I second the Neat Image advice. They used to have a free demo version that you could try although it only worked on jpg files. You can get around this by doing some file format conversions but doing this isn't always convenient. I also tried Neat Imaging a copy of the file after converting it to jpg and then just pulling the areas I wanted into the other image via layering. Noise Ninja is another thing you can try. EpsonScan has the grain reduction feature although it can be a bit too drastic in many instances.

Doug
---
www.BetterScanning.com

 

[GeneW]

Neat Image and Noise Ninja both work well for grain reduction. I opted for Noise Ninja when I purchased because it works in both sides of my Windows/Linux dual-boot workstation.

Gene

 

[Pherdinand]

I noticed a weird thing, although with FUji NPH400 film and EPson V700 scanner.
The grain and the noise was MUCH lower when i scanned in "no colour correction" mode in EPson Scan. This means I scanned as negative film in 2400 dpi, 48-bit mode and in the "Epson V700/750 Transparent" colour space but applied no correction at all resulting in cyan coloured flat frames, and then in PS I used the levels curves etc to get back to the correct tones. ALl in 48 bit.
No correction means no colour correction, no grain reduction, no sharpening, NOTHING.

When I scanned with other setting, ANYTHING other, the grain was higher OR the sharpness was severely lost (in case of "high" grain reduction setting).
Here's the example that I noticed this the most with.

 

[Jamie123]

Thanks for all the advice. I still haven't quite figured out how to solve my problem. Tried NoiseNinja but the result was too soft.
I may try the EpsonScan and do what Pherdinand suggested. At the moment I'm scanning it with SilverFast SE.

 

[RayPA]

I'm not familiar with Silverfast and whether you get control over curves. If your negative was underexposed and you're bringing it up to get acceptable density it sounds like your adjustment is brining the shadows up too. Color film gets noisy and "grainy" when you underexpose it, scan it and do what you're trying to do. I've played around and experimented with this effect (it can add some "grit" to street shots), but the grain/noise can get big.

You can try pulling the shadows back down to "hide" the noise by raising the black point or use another adjustment to isolate and control shadow levels, but then your image is probably going to go in a different direction. I don't know of a way or method to completely eliminate that kind of noise. Maybe a high number of multi-scans or a professional scanner can pull it off (?). I'd love to here if anyone comes up with something.

edit: also don't sharpen that can help some
🙂

 

[Jamie123]

I usually do hide the noise by raising the black point. Works fairly well with most pictures. The problem with this one is that it's a portrait shot and if I darken the shadows too much the mascara around the eyes starts to look horrible. I'm still working at it with lots of layers etc. but I can't really get rid of the grain.

I don't know why I bother so much. The photo isn't even very good 🙂

 

[rich815]

With an underexposed neg you're kind of screwed as bringing up the file to compensate is gonna show all that noisy shadows that resulted from the underexposure. Even with NeatImage best you'll get is a useable file but nothing that looks great. Multi-pass scanning might help a little.

It's why I always set my cameras for at least 1/3-1/2 overexposure with color neg film. Many color neg films just love that slight overexposure (NPH, 400UC in particular), especially for scanning.

 

[Jamie123]

I guess I was a little too optimistic interpreting the meter reading. With my Hasselblad I really can't go slower than 1/125th for handheld shots so I try to shoot at the smallest aperture possible at that speed for street photography.
Well...next time I know better.

 

[rich815]

I guess I was a little too optimistic interpreting the meter reading. With my Hasselblad I really can't go slower than 1/125th for handheld shots so I try to shoot at the smallest aperture possible at that speed for street photography.
Well...next time I know better.

Know what you mean! Heck, with my SL66 I try not to go below 1/250th if I'm using it hand-held, which I do for sometimes for casual portraits of my young son around the yard and house. And for that reason, when doing that I almost always try to use something faster than my usual Fuji Acros or Delta 100, like Tri-X or XP2. I find I'd rather have a bit more grain than either underexposed negs or unsharpness from going at 1/60th or so.

 

[Jamie123]

Know what you mean! Heck, with my SL66 I try not to go below 1/250th if I'm using it hand-held, which I do for sometimes for casual portraits of my young son around the yard and house. And for that reason, when doing that I almost always try to use something faster than my usual Fuji Acros or Delta 100, like Tri-X or XP2. I find I'd rather have a bit more grain than either underexposed negs or unsharpness from going at 1/60th or so.

Usually I try to stay at 1/500th or 1/250th handheld, too, but since it can be tricky to quickly focus with a waist-level finder I try to get all the dof I can.

Faster film is probalby the best solution. I bought a 5-roll pack of Portra 160VC and knew the minute after I bought it that I probably should've gone with the 400. I can't really notice a big difference between iso160 and iso400 anyway with medium format film.

Anyways, here's the photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jmavila/266298815/

I did a diptych. The photo that was giving me trouble was the one on the right. I got tired working on it since it's not that good to begin with.

 

[Pherdinand]

The left one looks extremely funny, like she has a very excentric hairstyle😉

The contrast is very high in these shots. I wonder if that's due to the scanning and your struggle with the black point vs noise.

Regarding the scanner noise: sometimes you get (or better said, I get) a one-pixel scanner noise which gets amplified in one colour when I bring shadows up. Often it's only the green channel, sometimes the magenta, depends on what I do with the colours. That's not too difficult to get rid of: either a gaussian blur filter on sub-1 pix radius, then USM on a several pixels radius, or, "despeckle" filter (the latter does not always work).

 

[Jamie123]

The left one looks extremely funny, like she has a very excentric hairstyle😉

The contrast is very high in these shots. I wonder if that's due to the scanning and your struggle with the black point vs noise.

Regarding the scanner noise: sometimes you get (or better said, I get) a one-pixel scanner noise which gets amplified in one colour when I bring shadows up. Often it's only the green channel, sometimes the magenta, depends on what I do with the colours. That's not too difficult to get rid of: either a gaussian blur filter on sub-1 pix radius, then USM on a several pixels radius, or, "despeckle" filter (the latter does not always work).

It took me a while to realize what you meant with the hair remark but now I see it. Well...it could've been her hair...you never know with those excentric fashion people (it was shot in front of a tent for fashion week that was starting in Paris that day).

The contrast is indeed quite high because of the struggle with the noise which was most obvious in the dark areas. I may try the gaussian blur+usm that you suggested though I'm not quite sure if the results will be much different from the ones I got with Noise Ninja (too soft).

I think I'll just have to overexpose my shots from now on with negatives. Lesson learned.

 

[Jamie123]

I am surprised you say that. I find my 500EL to be real easy to handhold down
to 1/30 or sometimes 1/15 with the 80 Planar. Have you tried to go lower ?
Not holding the camera as on your avatar of course 🙂 I use it with WF
on my belly.

Roland.

it's not really the handholding that bothers me at speeds below 1/125th but the mirrorslap can become a problem. I can go much lower when I pre-release the mirror (did 1s recently with the bottom edge of the lens hood pressed against a window for support). However, this is not practical for fast work.

BTW, that photo in my avatar is one of the only few times I've used the prism finder. 🙂 I much prefer the waist-level finder.