Banding Issues with the Nikon 9000

[parasko]

Hi all,

Does anyone know how to prevent or minimise banding with the Nikon 9000?
The banding appears when I try to lighten dark areas of an image in PS and it is prominent when there is less detail in this dark area of the image (think sky, sea etc).

I am using Vuescan to scan Provia 100f 35mm slides.

Does the (very expensive) Silverfast software deal with this problem better?

[richardman]

Probably not needed, if you use Vuescan, enable fine mode and multi-exposure.

[Greg Miller]

Are you in 16bit mode through the entire workflow? It isn't hard to get banding in 8 bit, especially if you are working with a B&W image.

[Oren Grad]

Set the fine scan mode. I use SilverFast, but I still needed to set the fine mode on my 9000 to squelch occasional banding. Didn't need to set multi-exposure mode on mine.

[benrains]

The banding may also be a limitation of the monitor (or printer) you're using. I mean it's entirely possible that if you're scanning your film at 16-bit/channel that the scanned image files themselves contain the necessary information--but if your display or output device is limited to 8-bit/channel or less then banding can show up there.

[RJC]

Set the fine scan mode. I use SilverFast, but I still needed to set the fine mode on my 9000 to squelch occasional banding. Didn't need to set multi-exposure mode on mine.

+1

I'm using Nikon Scan with a Coolscan 8000 and have never suffered from banding since always using 'fine scan'

[richardman]

Sorry, I should emphasize that multi-exposure if you want to extract max shadow details.

[parasko]

Thanks for your comments. Much appreciated. It looks like Fine Mode does the trick.

I'm trying to extract as much information as possible from my 35mm slides in order to be able to print as large as possible. For those of you familiar with Vuescan, is there a setting I should be using other than the following below?

Input
Scan resolution =4000dpi
Fine Mode
(Still experimenting with Multi Exposure-I cannot see a noticeable difference at this stage)
Number of Samples =1 (Does image quality improve by using a larger number of samples?)

Filter
Infrared Clean =Light

Output
Output = Raw file 48bitRGB (Is there a real world difference between the 48bit and 64bit option?)
What setting should I choose for Printed Size?

[richardman]

For highest quality:
Multiple Samples: this improves the shadow details and dynamic range, so go ahead and set it to 2 or 3.
NO infrared clean - that decreases the resolution slightly. Just clean your neg really well and use photoshop healing brush
Use PropPhotoRGB output space.

[Greg Miller]

This may be hard to see in the real world, but ProPhotoRGB would tend to increase banding. Since ProPhoto RGB and other more limited gamut color spaces. such as sRGB, have the exact same number of total tonal value (in other words, 16 bit is 16 bit regardless of color spaces), and since ProPhoto RGB has a wider color gamut, the discrete total values in ProPhoto RGB are spaced farther from their neighbor tonal values than with a more limited gamut color space. That wider spacing of discrete tonal values will increase banding.

So if one's goal is to reduce banding, one should always choose the smallest gamut color space that still encompasses all the tonal values of the image.

I agree with Ben Rains that the banding may simply be a result of the monitor's ability to display a 16 bit image. The image itself may very well be fine.