I saw on test on some older film showing the V700 resolving down to the level of film grain, but I suspect that was very large grain. (at least not with fine-grained film, I don't know about larger grained film). Maybe you get the vague perception of some grain, but you aren't actually seeing film grain. I.e., if film grain were like pixels, the V700 would be getting to the level of a 4-pixel square. It seems to scan at a level of detail about an order of magnitude less than that. The Epson V700 is absolutely not scanning down to the level of film grain. In fact, I think that for prints 50x40, the grain you'd see from a 4x5 wouldn't be a big deal - at least not for my E100VS Kodak film. Ok, I would note that I'm not concerned with "grain reduction". Also it is good to use a fathered layer or to paint it on with a soft brush tool. I tend to set the opacity of the layer to medium low so that there is some grain left in the image to make the it look more natural. You can use multiple layers with different settings and use masking to selectively apply some of an extra smooth version on your big low details areas (like blue sky's). It just doesn't need to be empathized as much as it is in a high resolution scan. You can control the percentage of noise reduction in many criteria so you can still have a some grain in the image if you want. Sometimes it can miss a bit of grain here or there and you have to do a little manual retouching or it looks unnatural. I believe it is said to be good for volume orientated workflows no? I'm thinking it would be good for more consumer level slide digitizing in medium to high volumes.įor critical work Noiseware isn't bad about sharpness loss depending on what settings you use. I'd like to try out the Gem tool from kodak. I could not tell you which one is better. In addition to Viewscan you might want to check out SilverFast. I don't have any experience with Epson scanners but the best CCD scanners do have a multiscan type option to improve scanner noise. Rick "who has seen some improvement in highlights when multiscanning overexposed color negatives, but only with film scanners" Denneyįilm grain is an issue will all high resolution scans. Scanning at 6400 and then downsampling is a different strategy for dealing with noise, and works within the mechanical limitations. Therefore, at optical scan resolutions higher than that, I would expect multiscanning to cause blur from movement between samples, when viewed at the pixel level before downsampling. I suspect it is the mechanicals of the Epson that limit it to an effective maximum resolution of about 2000-2400 spi. The greater the resolution, the harder this is to do. The mechanicals have to be precise enough so that all samples are precisely aligned with each other. On consumer flatbeds such as an Epson, the CCD is squirming around between the samples, and you get blur just as you would if you thumped your camera between multiple exposures. The problem with multiscanning is mostly mechanical. Determining what is random color variation caused by noise and what is information requires a fine touch, of course. Noise removal software, on the other hand, looks for random color variations at the pixel level after the image is already scanned, and attempts to smooth those by averaging them with their neighbors by some algorithm or other. It should never affect the detail in the scan (but see below). By sampling it several times and taking an average, that noise is, to some extent, filtered out.īut I would only expect an improvement in highlight areas of negatives or shadow areas of transparencies, where the light reaching the sensor was dim enough to be close to the sensor's noise floor. When the scanned material is thick, the signal is close to the noise floor of the CCD, and so the noise, which is always random in nature, has a greater influence on the resulting pixel. The idea behind multiscanning is that it takes several samples of the same spot. Perhaps the noise the Epson generates is so consistent/non-random Vuescan can't determine what's noise and what's not. I did notice a difference with my Minolta and previous scanner. I haven't noticed any difference with my Epson scanner.
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