digital noise in scanned color negatives

miklosphoto

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Any good suggestion how to achieve digital noise free scans from color negatives?
Technical details:
Nikon Coolscan 5000
Vuescan
scanned at max resolution

I spend a lot of time to clean the digital noise from the scans in Photoshop. Is the digital noise unavoidable or it come bu nature?
thanks
Miklos
 

donbga

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Noise Ninja stand alone batch or PS plugin as an action!

Don Bryant
 

Pinholemaster

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Even cheaper than buying Noise Ninja, scan your image as a TIFF. In Photoshop SC3 open the TIFF in Camera RAW. In Camera RAW apply the requisite amount of noise reduction and luminosity smoothing to get rid of the noise. Save as a Photoshop file or jpeg. Done.
 

donbga

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I've not found ACR to be as versatle or as good as NN or Neat Image for noise reduction but it's better than nothing.

Don Bryant
 

keithwms

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Since you're using vuescan why not just do multiscanning. I think that will have the effect of averaging out the detector noise, try it. If not then you can manually average out a few separate scans. For every two scans you average, I guess the signal to noise will improve by sqrt(2) or so.

Noise Ninja will remove noise at the expense of detail, that's all it can do. Multiscanning & averaging can remove detector noise without sacrificing detail.

Of course the other thing you could do is overscan and then downsample. but again this is going to lower detector nosie at the expense of some detail.
 
OP
OP

miklosphoto

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Keith, thanks for the idea, I will try multisampling. I have already tried plug-ins (Nik Software's Dfine 2.0) which does a good job in terms of noise reduction but then I always have to do sharpening. That is the reason I need something which reduces (or better does not create noise) in the scanner.
Miklos
 

pellicle

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depends on the "noise" ... I get most noise from skys because of the density of the film being close to the real d-max of the scanner. I've found I get better results with my Epson when I tailor the scan to suite the available data. This explanation of noise might be a bit long winded, but anyway, if you can adjust your scan to where the data is for R G and B individually (try to keep it linear if you can) then it may help. I believe that the Nikon's allow adjustment for exposure.

lastly, try looking at the individual channels of the image and see if one is noiser than the other.
 

pellicle

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I hate it when I read of nifty things which CS3 does which CS does not (and I can't afford to buy CS3)


sigh!
 

Erik Ehrling

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Don Bryant said:
I've not found ACR to be as versatle or as good as NN or Neat Image for noise reduction but it's better than nothing.

Don Bryant
Click to expand...

Here's another recommendation for NeatImage. It does a very good job of clearing the croma noise of my scans, both from colour negatives and slides.

Regards,
Erik Ehrling (Sweden)
 
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