Reducing Film Grain

[Steve]

I have a canon FS4000US film scanner and some of my film has bad grain
(especially the old 126 'Instamatic' type cartridges used in the 70's). I
have used Neatimage to good effect, though a little detail is lost. I am
experimenting with light source diffusing plastic but this has only a small
effect on reducing grain. Is there anything better on the market, either
hardware of software that can reduce grain and preserve detail?

I use Vuescan and even using multiple pass scans up to 16 times has no
effect on improving the grain.

 

[Jim]

I have a canon FS4000US film scanner and some of my film has bad grain
(especially the old 126 'Instamatic' type cartridges used in the 70's). I
have used Neatimage to good effect, though a little detail is lost. I am
experimenting with light source diffusing plastic but this has only a small
effect on reducing grain. Is there anything better on the market, either
hardware of software that can reduce grain and preserve detail?

I use Vuescan and even using multiple pass scans up to 16 times has no
effect on improving the grain.

Which is not too surprising since multiple pass scans should improve noise,
but grain is not noise.
I usually use the GEM option on my Nikon LS-40. Perhaps something similar
is available for your scanner.
Jim

 

[Bart van der Wolf]

I have a canon FS4000US film scanner and some of my film has bad
grain
(especially the old 126 'Instamatic' type cartridges used in the
70's). I
have used Neatimage to good effect, though a little detail is lost.
I am
experimenting with light source diffusing plastic but this has only
a small
effect on reducing grain. Is there anything better on the market,
either
hardware of software that can reduce grain and preserve detail?

I use Vuescan and even using multiple pass scans up to 16 times has
no
effect on improving the grain.

Multiple scan passes will reduce random noise such as from the scanner
electronics, and photon noise. Film graininess will not be reduced by
that, but the diffusing plastic (if structureless) will.
Also make sure you scan at the maximum sampling density of 4000 ppi.

Of the post-processing noise reduction applications, Neat Image and
Noise Ninja are considered the overall best and most configurable by
many users. Maybe the Neat Image settings need to be tuned a bit
better? It is possible to reduce most graininess without visible
reduction of detail, especially if you allow some residual (but still
reduced) graininess to remain. Assuming you made a good noise profile
from the (other) image(s) on the same film, try reducing the default
Luminance noise reduction of 60% to 45-50% although there are more
subtle changes that can be done (as well).

Bart

 

[Robert Feinman]

I have a canon FS4000US film scanner and some of my film has bad grain
(especially the old 126 'Instamatic' type cartridges used in the 70's). I
have used Neatimage to good effect, though a little detail is lost. I am
experimenting with light source diffusing plastic but this has only a small
effect on reducing grain. Is there anything better on the market, either
hardware of software that can reduce grain and preserve detail?

I use Vuescan and even using multiple pass scans up to 16 times has no
effect on improving the grain.

You can get some improvement by doing some selective blurring in your
image editor program after scanning. By selecting various areas of
your image you can apply different amounts to handle each case.
So, for example, a fairly large amount of blurring can be applied
to blue sky with fluffy clouds.
For very dark regions a smaller amount of blur combined with some
desaturation may help.
The commercial products probably attempt to do something similar,
but they have to make assumptions about the image content that
you can alter for yourself on an individual basis.
Older films were much grainer than modern ones, so there is a limit
to what you can expect.

 

[JimSoto430]

I have a canon FS4000US film scanner and some of my film has bad grain
(especially the old 126 'Instamatic' type cartridges used in the 70's). I
have used Neatimage to good effect, though a little detail is lost. I am
experimenting with light source diffusing plastic but this has only a small
effect on reducing grain. Is there anything better on the market, either
hardware of software that can reduce grain and preserve detail?

I use Vuescan and even using multiple pass scans up to 16 times has no
effect on improving the grain.

Is your "light source diffusing plastic" from a site called Scan
Enhancer? On my Minolta 5400, I experimented with both the scanner's
grain diffuser (same as Scan Enhancer) and Neat Image, and found that I
need to use both of them. By comparing two 5400dpi scans (one with GD
and one without) side by side in PS at 400%, I can clearly see the
pixels softened, indicating that the grain structure is diffused. (The
scans must be critically focused to see the grain to begin with.) Then I
apply Neat Image to remove the residual noise, which is not from the
grain.

The 5400 GD is on/off, but Neat Image can be tweaked to trade off the
amount of noise removal and the edge sharpness loss.

Multi-pass or multi-sampling would reduce noise, but would not reduce
grain.

 

[Steve]

Well thanks all for the advice, which I will try next time. I do have
'Scanhancer' which I am testing for the company as it is not specifically
'made' for the Canon but can be fitted with a bit of fiddling and bodging.
It appears to be a bit of semi opaque plastic that goes over the light
source window but it must be a bit more 'technical' than my description!
Thus far it seems to have a slight effect (improvement) but nothing like as
much as Neatimage. However Neatimage does slightly soften the fine detail
(surprisingly not much though).

In a way I am glad multiple pass scanning does not improve matters as this
would indicate a 'noisy' scanner CCD (or whatever). Maybe the Canon is just
ultra sharp on focus and detail (which has to be good). Certainly it picks
out every spec of dust if FARE is not on (and FARE works extremely well on
this scanner). I always scan at 4000 dpi (max res on this scanner) and save
as JPEG as I can't see any difference between that and TIFF files. Neither
does increasing the bits per pixel over 24 make any difference I can see. I
do not use scanner sharpening either as this may accentuate the grain.