ranger9
Well-known
I like the tones I'm getting from the scans, just not sure about the whole graininess thing.
The graininess thing is “grain aliasing” — exaggerated appearance of graininess caused by interaction between the film's grain structure and the pixel structure of your digitizing device — and basically you can never avoid it when scanning traditional b&w films. It isn't a problem with color films because their image structure consists of overlapping semi-transparent dye clouds, while conventional b&w films' image consists of mostly opaque, hard-edged granules.
Things you can do about it are:
— Defocus your lens during capture (yuck) or blur the scanned image (double yuck.)
— Lie to yourself that it doesn't exist.
— Lie to yourself that there's some magic software that will fix it.
— Tell everybody it's “character” or “wabi-sabi”
— Shoot on a larger format. Aliasing still happens, but doesn't look as bad because you need less magnification to get the same output size.
— Don't worry about it and accept what the process gives you. Your images are terrific and their tonality is beautiful. I'd say just run with that.