Railfan Technology > Negative Scanning and Work Flow Questions

Hello,
I am scanning my fathers 35mm color negative collection and the majority of the scans are coming out of the scanner with quite a bit of grain. 
The film being scanned is Kodak Kodacolor negatives using a Nikon Coolscan IV ED using Digital ICE set to fine, 8 bit scan, and 2x multi-sample output to a NEF raw file. I then open the NEF in Photoshop using the Camera Raw filter, and do a curves color correction. 

I have tried several methods of cleaing up the grain as described in Photoshop and other on-line videos, but I just can't seem to get the results the demo videos show, but of course none of the videos are working on 50+ year old railroad negatives. I also have the DXO NIK 7 Collection Plug in set, which does have a sky filter, but again the results are not great.

Are there any Photoshop wizards out there who can help teach me the ways to clean up some of these gems?

John Black
 



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/27/24 09:44 by M-636.

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Did you try scanning without ICE to see if there's a difference? What resolution are you scanning at? Have you tried a lower res? Sometimes scanners can "out resolve" certain films which can exaggerate grain.

Agree, experiment with turning the noise reduction or auto-fix-all features off. The images look good for the subjects but the sky goes grainy, or noisey. PS can work with the sky but it's better to have a clean file to begin with.

Try a few scans, dozens, before locking in a setting or work flow. Expect some slides to need attention, which can be weeded out for later. The concept of archiving is tough to deal with at the beginning and usually has some corrections later on.

No, actually scanning without Digital ICE turned on had never even occured to me since it does such a great job with E6 slides. The file size I am getting is averaging 11mb for the NEF file out of the Nikon Scanner.

As a quick "sky fix," save the original digital scan intact, make a copy and use PS' "sky replacement" feature to improve it.  There are many choices and you can make the sky lighter or darker to match the lighting on the subject matter.  It works very well in most situations and sure cleans-up the photo's over-all appearance.

Another PS feature which helps to reduce grain is it's "Camera Raw" Filter which is a bit tedious but provides good improvements to multiple issues found in the original image.  PS is an amazing asset for improving old photos that have issues.

One of the issues in using a "grain-reducing" tool by itself is that it tends to reduce the sharpness of other things in the photo.

Very nice photography, BTW.

Greg Stadter
Phoenix, AZ



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/28/24 10:39 by E25.

I use Photoshop Elements and an add on by Topaz called Denoise AI.   Also an add on called Gigapixel.  They work well in cleaning up grain.  These are older versions, I think there are new versions available.
Worth looking into.
I scan 35MM at 2400dpi.

From experience with other scanners should not go beyond optical scan dpi, what I read is 2900 for this unit??but you could look further. After optical limit what I know software is upsampling. Not sure what the 2x output means.

Bob Jordan

Posted from Android



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/29/24 09:31 by robj.

You can also use the photoshop "Dust and Scratches" tool on the sky to reduce grain there.  You can use the two knobs in that tool - radius and threshold - to control how much smoothing of the image it will apply.  To use that tool, I select the sky area using the "magic selector tool", copy the selected area to a new layer, and then apply "Dust and Scratches" to just that new layer.  You can then blend that layer back into the main image by setting the layer opacity before combining them - adjusting so that you get a good result that doesn't make the sky look fake.

Kit Courter
Canyon Lake, CA
LunarLight Photography