Nikon Coolscan - Fuji ProS 160 portrait film - the grain.

Hi, I have a Nikon Coolscan and a Epson V700. Attached photo underneath. I have gotten a free Photo CD from the semi pro lab, scans via the Fuji Frontier and basically grain free. I am interested to know do do/did portrait photographers deal with colour negative film? I imagine that many photographs were enlarged to 8x12+ for clients.

The scans I get off Kodak Ultra Color 100, haven't tried the Ektar 100 yet and the Kodak E100G is not bad at all with some pepper grain.


Thanks.

Ray

I've read through your post three times and I'm not quite sure what your question is!

I *think* Ray may be running into what I'm trying to figure out. I scan colour C41 film on my Nikon 8000 and there's grain, sometimes heavy. I scan same frames on my Canon flatbed and they're virtually grain free. I think, from what I've been reading it's aliasing - I think. I see some photographers that scan C41 and the images are amazingly sharp and smooth. Why is this and how does Ray (and myself) get there and with what settings do you start with?
Jeff

Just to reply to you ...
With my Coolscan using Vuescan I am using medium for the infra-red setting (Digital ICE) and medium for noise reduction or maybe it's called reduce grain. With Nikon Scan I turn on Digital ICE (Normal) and I set GEM to 1.

Slide film and Ultra Color 100 is a bit of pepper grain but not offensive.

With my Coolscan I find that with C41 I need to use Digital ICE b/c it picks up so much dust spots etc .. even if I turn it off and just use GEM I at times get white speckles on the scan.

I have tried using Neat Image, to me does a similar job with more minor adjustments but when I put it thru auto ... it really really makes my image like a cartoon

My question was how do you guys scan C41 given the amount of noise the Coolscan picks up? Also that more so in the past wedding/portrait professional photographer used these 160 portrait film and clients wanted enlargements. Does anyone know how they made prints? What was the process like - did they enable noise reduction and print it off a Frontier system or have hand prints done? I read about hand prints but not sure what that really is, never used them myself.

Speaking of wedding photographers and Frontier/Noritsu lab scanners, I do drool at the tight colour consistency and creamy grainlessness (with texture nicely retained) that you see from the good labs. As a Coolscan 9000 owner I don't exactly suffer from poor quality scans but nothing seems to do smooth and tight (and inky blacks) like those lab scanners at the hands of a skillful operator.

Sam

To be sure, the Coolscan 9000 scans cleaner than the 5000. The V and the 4000 likely scan similarly to the 5000 but I haven't tried them on the same frame of film.

Please note, I had to strike a compromise between large pixel dimension vs filesize so magnifying past 100% may show JPEG artifacting which is not the same as film grain or scanner noise. You can tell as they are squarish in pattern.

Link to larger version -> Kodak 160VC 5K vs 9K ICE

Link to full res version -> Fuji Press 1600

Link to full res version -> Kodak Portra 400

Link to full res version -> Kodak Ektar 100

Link to full res version -> Fuji RVP