Trying to avoid colored grain in my scans

[Ramiro Elena]

This is driving me crazy. Am I doing something wrong or my V700 is just crap?

I wouldn't mind having gray/neutral grain, but this fluorescent green is just awful.
This is a scan of a color negative using Epson Scan. Dos this happen to anyone else?

[Peter Mounier]

I get color noise when I try to extract more shadow detail than my Polaroid 45 scanner is capable of. It might help to enlarge it big enough to click on one green pixel in "select color", then desaturate it. Like you say, it's kind if fluorescent, so it's likely the only color in your image like it.

Peter

[Frank Petronio]

That's more likely to be noise than grain. You don't have as much information in those shadows as you think you do and it's more a case of needing to set better black and white points in your scanning software and adjusting the curves in Photoshop. This is realistically what you have on the film (attachment). I fall into this trap sometimes myself, you think there is detail there but it is just noise. You have plenty of blacks in the scan as it is, but it is really a still darker image the way it is exposed.

Of course if you like the pastel color and faded look of your original then use the Noise Reduction filter in Photoshop (or some specialty app) and only do the 'Reduce Color Noise" slider, leave everything else zeroed out. Then add some fake film grain to break up the now grey-neutral noise pattern.

The other option is to use the color noise creatively in a lo-fi sort of Lomo way. Make it trend in art photography ;-p

[Preston]

This does not appear to be film grain (I could be wrong), but noise created by the attempt to extract shadow detail. You could try to reduce the noise in PhotoShop or with a program such as Noise Ninja or Neat Image.

If the shadow detail is visible in the neg, a drum scan may help. You could also rescan this one and let the shadows go dark. Another option would be to scan the neg twice--one for the high values and one for tha darks and then blend the two images. It would be tricky, but it might work.

From the image above, it appears the brightness range was quite wide. In a situation like this, fill light to bring up the shadows would be helpful.

--P

[Ramiro Elena]

Thanks, I think that's exactly what it is. I'll try scanning with that in mind next time and see what I come up with. It repeats quite often in all my photos so I think it has to do with the scanning and not exposure although the film is heavily outdated.

[Tyler Boley]

SOme of the filters allow you to address specific color channels, which can be good in a situation like this, Noise Ninja does...

[mdm]

Vue Scan can help to reduce scanner noise by multipass scanning, maybe siverfast too.

[timparkin]

I'm presuming this is the edge of the frame. It may be that this is a halo effect. If you mask your neg better it may help.

I had a go at using Imagenomic's Noiseware plugin and a graduated curve to compress the shadows (I hate clipping grain, it makes it a lot worse in my opinion. Better to compress it).

http://static.timparkin.co.uk/static/tmp/grain.jpg

[Larry Gebhardt]

If this is negative film, then this is actually the clear area on the film. This is where the scanner should have the least issues with noise. You may want to try redoing the scan and make sure you aren't clipping any of the channels.

[Brent Long]

Good catch, Larry.

Ramiro, you already have some very good clues here, so I'll just add:

I dug out some old negs to scan on my V700 last week and really struggled. Until last week, I had primarily been scanning transparencies. Anyway, the Epson software is very, very strange in how it deals with negs (well, trannies too, but a little less so, I think). Basically, if you aren't happy with what you are getting with the more automated scanner exposure and color settings, you are going to have to fiddle with them and probably turn them off. The Epson software will do weird stuff, and not all of it can be figured out.

If possible, I suggest scanning it as a positive, with ICM off, or at least setting for output to AdobeRGB, and inverting and adjusting for the orange mask in Photoshop. This can be a pain, but if you learn how to do it, it can many times make a huge difference.

And, although I actually can get good scans using Epson software with trannies, color negs are now going through Vuescan, utilizing multi-sampling. I love Vuescan, but was very surprised to find that I can actually do slides better with Epson Scan.