Film, anyone?

[stitchedclose]

What happened to film?

I'm probably one of the youngest (and poorest) members of this here congregation, and even I can remember the golden days of film. I feel a little left out with all your D70's and 1Ds MkII's.

Incidentally, anyone looking for a beneficiary in their will? I'd be more than happy to oblige.

[stitchedclose]

Wait a minute, there was a question: film grain in Photoshop.

I have CS2 and I was wondering what options I have for removing the effects of film grain. I don't expect to eliminate entirely, in fact I like it, but for reference, what have I got to work with?

[Duffy Pratt]

Back in the good old days of film, you might have felt left out with other people's Leicas, Contax/Zeiss, or MF Hasselblads and Mamiyas. The difference now, is that the bodies make a much bigger difference to image quality.

I'm not sure about this, but I'm willing to bet that printed pictures now are about the same cost, or cheaper, when you factor in the equipment, film, processing and print cost for film and compare it to the equipment, processing and print cost in digital. At the low end of the market, I'm sure its cheaper now to do digital than film was. At the very high end, I am willing to bet the costs are about the same or cheaper. The people who may feel more of a bite are the enthusiastic amateurs.

[CaptainTom]

The reality is that even if you shoot film today, you are in the digital world.
The film is processed and the negative is then digitized and printed from the digital file.
If you can find a lab that actually prints directly from negative, you will be paying through the nose........

Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is something I haven't decided yet...

[Glen_A]

Film???? Isn't film that stuff that forms on your teeth overnight that you brush off every morning?

[ShutteredEye]

I love film personally. Always will. And there just isn't a "Medium Format Ilford BW Film" action in PS that even comes close to the real thing.

But practicality dictates that when I go shoot I generally grab the sSLR.

Glad you made it over Stitched!

[stitchedclose]

Wait a second, I asked about removal of grain. I use film, it's all I've got, and unfortunately I have to use stuff like (gag) Kodak Max 800. I've gone through very lengthy processes of removing that grain that shows up in the shadows in night shots, or any shot, for that matter, with that speed. I'm wondering about methods that others have used with success to remove the noise from shadows.

[Duffy Pratt]

For most noise removal, but this is with digital, I convert to LAB and use gaussian blur on the A and B channels. If I had CS2, I would do the same thing with smart sharpen, which has better controls. That will work if the scanner picks up shadow grain as color noise, and that will be easy enough to tell by examining the individual channels.

Alot of people swear by Noise Ninja. I haven't tried it, so I can't recommend it, other than to say that the noise reduction I've seen from people who have used it has been impressive.

Duffy

[stitchedclose]

Hmm, interesting. Thanks.

[Affordable Scans]

I use NeatImage (http://www.neatimage.com) on our negative and film scans. I tried NoiseNinja and a bunch of others a while back and kept on coming back to NeatImage. It's the best thing I've found in terms in retaining sharpness and giving consistently good results (i. e. not doing something that looks really bad).

The top picture here was taken with a Nikon SLR (shown at reduced resolution to fit). The middle picture is the parking sign at the bottom at full resolution straight from a Nikon 5000 ED scanner at 2000DPI. The bottom picture has been reprocessed with NeatImage. NeatImage is also nice because it takes advantage of both processors in our dual-core PCs.

I do all of our scanning/editing before converting to JPG as an a final output step. Here's one hidden benefit from the noise removal... when you save in a compressed format the file gets smaller because it doesn't have to store all of that noise. On full size scans we see a reduction in file size of maybe 2:1 or 3:1.

[Andre L]

Originally Posted by Glen_A

Film???? Isn't film that stuff that forms on your teeth overnight that you brush off every morning?

I thought that's what they called artsy-fartsy movies.

As for film grain, I'd also go with NeatImage but you have to be real careful with it. You can't get all crazy with it otherwise your image will become all distorted and useless.