Canon FS4000US advice sought

[John]

I just got one of these from Ebay and am highly delighted - in fact its so
good that on some film the grain becomes apparent before pixellation! Is
there any way to minimise the grain effect without losing too much detail on
the picture? Also can the picture take some unsharp mask afterwards as when
grainy sharpening makes it look worse. What I am after is to try and enhance
fine detail on some older film which is a little grainy (old 126
'Instamatic' type film, which actually fits in the 35mm holder)

Thanks.

If replying direct please remove all Z's from address.

 

[Bart van der Wolf]

I just got one of these from Ebay and am highly delighted - in
fact its so good that on some film the grain becomes apparent
before pixellation! Is there any way to minimise the grain effect
without losing too much detail on the picture?

After scanning, you can consider "Neat Image" (http://www.neatimage.com/).
Its most recent incarnation (V 4.0) was further improved to avoid sharpening
halo and maintain as much detail as possible while reducing
graininess/noise. It now also has more means of automating the noise profile
creation, and it has a built in noise profiling target for printing. The
best just became better .

Also can the picture take some unsharp mask afterwards as when
grainy sharpening makes it look worse.

That's one of the nice things of Neat Image. It sharpens based on spatial
frequencies, and does so after noise removal.

Bart

 

[Kennedy McEwen]

I just got one of these from Ebay and am highly delighted - in fact its so
good that on some film the grain becomes apparent before pixellation! Is
there any way to minimise the grain effect without losing too much detail on
the picture? Also can the picture take some unsharp mask afterwards as when
grainy sharpening makes it look worse. What I am after is to try and enhance
fine detail on some older film which is a little grainy (old 126
'Instamatic' type film, which actually fits in the 35mm holder)

Given that the image from an Instamatic is not likely to stretch the
capability of even older film, there is a very good chance that you can
reduce, or even remove, the grain without any detrimental effect on the
image content using either Kodak's GEM or Neatimage. You might also get
useful results with some gaussian blur and a radius less than 1, or a
smart blur with appropriate radius and threshold. This latter option,
together with Neatimage and GEM, are adaptive filters so you might be
able to apply some un-sharp masking afterwards to sharpen the image up
without introducing too much distortion.

GEM is at: http://www.asf.com/
Neatimage is at: http://www.neatimage.com/download.html

Both are available as demo versions.

 

[Bruce Graham]

After scanning, you can consider "Neat Image" (http://www.neatimage.com/).
Its most recent incarnation (V 4.0) was further improved to avoid sharpening
halo and maintain as much detail as possible while reducing
graininess/noise. It now also has more means of automating the noise profile
creation, and it has a built in noise profiling target for printing. The
best just became better .


That's one of the nice things of Neat Image. It sharpens based on spatial
frequencies, and does so after noise removal.

Bart

Thanks Bart! I had not noticed the arrival of version 4 of Neat Image.

Bruce Graham

 

[Grant]

What did you pay on Ebay?

grant