Help, help, not enough info. What size prints are showing excessive
grain? Produced how and by whom? What film? Does the grain look the same
when viewed on the film through a loupe?
I ask all this for a couple of reasons. First, many current 400 speed
films don't produce grain that's even noticable in 8x10s. Second, there
are some particular grain size/scanner resolution combos that produce an
effect that looks like really bad grain, but is an artifact called grain
aliasing. I've posted this before, but it is still a good example of
grain on a good 400 speed film scanned at 2700 dpi. You can see it on
the screen in the full pixel example at the equivalent of a 24x36"
print, but even then it is pretty moderate
<http://www.geocities.com/dreammoose/TechMisc/>.
If it is really grain in the film, the only immediate solution is grain
reduction software (the long term solution is to buy good film!).
Vuescan has a grain reduction function that I've never tried. Fred
Miranda has a grain reduction PS plug-in for high speed films and there
are good stand alone programs. After reading reviews, I tried out Neat
Image <http://www.neatimage.com/index.html> and Noise Ninja
<http://www.picturecode.com/>. Both have demo versions that let you see
how well they work on your particular problem for free. The Neat Image
demo is actually fully functional for what you want to do, while the
Ninja demo outputs images only with a grid superimposed.
There is no free lunch, and the price you pay with grain reduction is
some loss of fine detail sharpness. In a portrait, this might even be a
good thing. You can balance reduction vs. sharpness in the software.
Looking at a review of the S20, is seems it should be up to the job for
at least 11x14 prints. Unless you have a pretty powerful computer with
lots of memory, processing the file sizes from 4000+ dpi scans can be
pretty tedious.
I can't really help with the printer. A review I found on the web said
it had great photo printing, so it should be at least decent.
Moose
Richard F. Man wrote:
>Hi Gary, first thing to do is to get the negative scanned by a lab. Make
>sure they scan it at 4000 DPI and not put it on "Picture CD" or whatever
>low res format. Then at least you will be starting with a a high quality
>scan.....
>At 04:18 PM 6/17/2004, you wrote:
>
>
>>I hope someone can help me with a digital editing project. I'm inexperienced
>>at digital photo touchups,............
>>
>
>
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