Hi Pellicle. I enjoyed your articles, and will explore them further once I get past this issue.
glad someone else finds relevance to them
I am sending a crop of the image to give everyone an idea of the grain that is showing up.
looks consistent with everything I see ... its also worth pointing out that grain appearing at that level (viewed at 100% or pixel = pixel) will no doubt be invisible on a 300dpi print (those dots tend to merge a little or something like that as even with my nose 20cm from a 70cm wide print I don't see it the same way I do on the screen).
Let me first say that I am not complaining about excessive grain:
ok ...
My issue is that it appears I lose image quality once I save the image to disk (saving as TIFF).
is any sharpening happening in Nikonscan? I know that it can do that, which will be applied post preview window ... Also do not rely on that window being WHAT YOU WILL GET. in every way and in every sence. For instance it is not colour profile away ...
I though TIFFs were lossless, so I was surprised to see that behavior.
they are ... your saying this suggests to me that you are unclear on this aspect of technology. A tiff is a container, nothing more. You can put into that container exactly what you want.
Eg:
TIFF is a flexible, adaptable file format for handling images and data within a single file, by including the header tags (size, definition, image-data arrangement, applied image compression) defining the image's geometry. For example, a TIFF file can be a container holding compressed JPEG and RLE (run-length encoding) images. A TIFF file also can include a vector-based Clipping path (outlines, croppings, image frames). The ability to store image data in a lossless format makes a TIFF file a useful image archive, because, unlike standard JPEG files, a TIFF file using lossless compression (or none) may be edited and re-saved without losing image quality; other TIFF options are layers and pages.
an image is just like a document. so you can open save reopen save a text file ad infinitum with no changes exactly the bytes in memory will be written back. The same is true with a zip file (compression which can be used in a TIFF or even
upon a BMP (although LHZ is often used as the compression
in a TIFF.
JPG is different ... substantially : because it is compressed in a way
which is and was never intended to be a two way process. JPG compression is meant to be a one way street. When you compress it it is done in such a way as to maximize reducitons even if some loss occurs. The principle is that this loss will be imperceptible to a human viewer (or perhaps not) rather than be mathematically reversible. When you reopen it it is not what you started with. For instance each of the pixels may be the same but chrominance compression may have occured ... or even luminance compression ... maybe both!
I am disappointed when I retrieve it one second later. ("One" second to emphasize that nothing has changed in Nikon Scan.)
perhaps I have addressed this in the point above about the sharpening in Nikon scan ... I believe that it is in the tools pallet under unsharp mask.
Should I save it as NEF? I haven't tried that, but NEF creates issues, as Nikon Capture doesn't take NEF files from Nikon Scan. (right....huh?)
I think at this point you are sounding completely confused by file types and what they do. There is no magic in them, and I understood NEF (my Nikon digital camera saves RAW images as NEF) is only a container of propritary nature. Just like DNG can also be use to store data.
This question came up recently on Photo.net and was answerd well in this post.
There's really no benefit to DNG in this workflow, the files are from a trilinear, true RGB output referred capture device.
Its not Raw data. Yes, you could in theory take a DNG from a scan and a TIFF and apply metadata instructions in LR or ACR to either. But that's already rendered pixel data. The DNG doesn't make it non demosaiced Raw data and in a way, that's good (its not interpolated color, its real RGB color).
The place to do the big tone and color work is in the scanner driver. That's your Raw processor. The container, DNG or TIFF is immaterial. There's nothing a scan in a DNG brings to the party you can't do with a TIFF.
An over dark scan should be corrected at the scan stage.
try the above suggestion (of mine) and see how it goes. FWIW I got a scan back of one of my 6x9 negatives from a friend and it looked like this attachment. I don't think this is any issue as a 4000 dpi scan is (when printed at 300dpi) a x13 enlargment. I think that a meter wide print from my Bessa RF camera is significantly greater than I'll consider doing ;-)