Grain ahoy!

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

Well, that's probably going to be my first and last outing into really high speed stock. I think I was probably a little underexposed, which didn't help - must get a meter, the in-camera metering is kind of confusing in a "Hundredth? What's a hundredth? The bright bits? The dark bits?" kind of way.

 

Trepiditious people can download the five-meg JPEG neg scan here.

 

http://www.1159productions.com/test182/Demo/bigscan.jpg

 

Wow, that's a lot of grain. I imagine Mr. Pytlak is now going to tell me that if I'd shot on Kodak film I could have got a far smoother result at that rating!

 

Phil

[Rob_Kraetsch]

Grainier than the beach!

 

How fast of a stock was that? I once pushed a roll of 7289 and don't remember it being nearly that grainy. It's still kind of an interesting look, though. What's she lit with?

 

-Rob Kraetsch

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

Fuji Superia 1600!

 

> What's she lit with

 

Not a lot, which may be the problem. 200W total of fluorescent and a 150W HQI backlight. Exposure was long enough for what the camera was asking for, but I think I need a proper meter - that looks about a stop and a half under at least. Some random day exteriors I took to burn up the remaining exposures are considerably smoother, though they don't look staggeringly denser on the neg.

 

Phil

[John Pytlak RIP]

Maybe you were trying to imitate Georges Seurat's "blue period"? :rolleyes:

 

You really should spool up some 5218 and shoot some stills with it. Try pushing it a stop or two. If you are going for speed, it makes more sense to do it with a tungsten balance film, since most indoor low light situations are tungsten lit.

[Rob Belics]

My opinion is if you'd shot on Kodak film you could have got a far smoother result at that rating.

[Jarin Blaschke]

In stills, I often shoot with Fuji NPZ, actually much cleaner than kodak portra 800. In my experience, there's a big drop in quality between 800 and 1600 speed films, much more so than going from 400 to 800.

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

Yes, I also shot some 800 and I'm going to get that neg scanned today, we'll see what we get.

 

In the end I shot some 400 as well (what was in the camera when I started) and I didn't feel like it was a pain, so maybe in the future I'll avoid getting scared and reaching for the fast stuff.

 

Phil

[Filip Plesha]

Phil

 

Where did you scan the film? On what kind of a scanner?

This looks fishy to me.

 

You can get scans as grainy as that if you underexpose even low speed film

and torture the scanner to pull bright images from it. You should try

pro Photo CD for minimal noise (what people often think is film grain) at

cheap price.

 

You can't judge a film by scanning an unterexposed image. You should

get a good oxposure and print it optically.

 

What you have here is probably a little bit of everything: underexposure, scanner noise, grain aliasing etc etc. each one of them amplified by pusshing the scanner to extract good images from an underexposed film.

 

p.s. Is this a frontier scan? By the look of it i would say it is.

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

This is the output of a Fuji high-street-photo-lab style scanner. Can't remember the numbers on the side, but I could check if anyone's interested. This is the same scanner they use when processing people's holiday snaps, which are effectively digital intermediate at some horribly low resolution then put back out onto photographic paper using some kind of rotating prism thing. This is the "super size CD" option which directs the scanned data to CD rather than the printer, and yeilds slightly over 4K images from the stills frame. All I know technically about the scanner is that it is a line array type because I have had long streaky artifacts from specks of dust on the image sensor.

 

As I say I'm fairly confident that it's underexposed. Must get meter.

 

Phil

[Filip Plesha]

In the mean time i checked the resolution of your file.

And, yes it is a frontier minilab machine. It uses these exact number of pixels for its highest resolution. And as you said, it was fuji, so it can only be a frontier.

This is the older model. The new models dont support this size (file resolution).

I have scanned a lot of my negatives at such a fuji lab (the same scanner as the one in your case) in the same resolution as you requested.

it is about 3K if you think in motion picture way (vistavision).

 

Don't vory about the way your images turned out. This thing has trouble with underexposed film, specially if it is a grainy film by itself. What you got in the image is a lot of noise. Of course it is trigered by grain (it is probably a grainy film, but not like that) These little dots are too sharp to be film grain. This is just scanner noise. You should see the horrors you can get back from this scanner

if you don't expose right. Just don't mind it. Most of these minilab scanners will give you similar results. I have gotten the same kind of results you got even with kodak portra 160NC for some underexposed images.

 

but you should have no problems with fuji frontier if you expose it right.

Specially if you overexpose. It handles overexposed images very good and can even give you grainless images without any noise. Which is not what i can say for other minilab scanners. Kis and AGFA minilab machines give you "grain" (not real film grain, only noise) even at very bright overexposed images.

 

 

There is another issue you would need to deal with when you use frontier services

(and many other minilab scanners), and it's contrast.

They have calibrated the scanner and the software to produce contrasty images that end up a bit smoother when printed. But if you don't want to print, and just keep the files for viewing on a monitor, this is too much contrast. It blows up

highlights (even though they are retrievable) and it just all looks unnatural.

 

My usual way of dealing with a frontier scan is to adjust the tone curve to darken

highlights and lighten shadows. But don't use the usuall contrast control for that because it will give you washed out images. The tone curve can be used without affecting black and white levels (just the "linearity" of the image). The curve should look like a reversed S curve. After that you can just slightly add normal contrast with your contrast control. The results that i get from this procedure always blow my mind off. The original look from the negative is in the file, it is just "twisted" for printing so it looks like a consumer photo. The sicret in professional looking scanns is to spend a lot of time pre-adjusting the parameters.

They don't do that,but you can compensate by adjusting these things in photoshop or whatever program you are using.

 

 

Anyway, superia 1600 should not show so much grain at 3K resolution. Well it should show grain, but not like that. This is just noise.

 

If you want, I can send you some smaller before/after images from my adjustments i mentioned here so you can see what i mean.

 

 

p.s. Fuji frontier actually has a very good photo paper output among these consumer minilabs. It uses red and blue solid state lasers and a red semiconductor laser and almost literally draws the image. It is a holy grail among cheap minilabs. Very good when you bring your own home-made scanns or digital files.

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

I did ask them how they calibrated the scanner, because it seemed to me that there was more information on the neg (just from looking at it on a lightbox) than there was on the scan. Apparently they just calibrate at the beginning of each day and let it run, which is slightly annoying, because I now have clipped information and high contrast accentuating grain and noise.

 

Unfortunately I'm never going to be able to get a busy high-street lab to recalibrate their scanner just to suit me, so I'll have to deal with it - I suspect that I will never be able to afford a better neg scanner than the Fuji machine.

 

Phil

[Filip Plesha]

The solution for good scanning is either to scan it your self with a decent scanner.

The fact that they calibrate it's settings mean nothing to you because, what you need is a carefull adjustment of all the parameters (and i doubt that such a fast commercial scanner has acces to all of these parameters) to suite the negative you are scanning and your own preferences. You can do that at home or you can go to a professional lab, they will do everything "manually" and will work depending on the material you give them and your insturctions. That way you can get such beautifull scans you won't belive it was you who shot them. (even from a simple point and shoot camera). As i said before, you can allso try and find a lab that makes Kodak pro Photo CD's. These are cheaper that most custom pro scanning services, but usually just as good. That way you get true vistavision 4K resolution (6144x4096).

 

But allso, as i said in my previous post, there are ways of correcting colors and contrast at home after you get the scans back. You can recover the original look from the negative after some experimenting with settings, curves and all other primary and secondary color adjusments even if the original scans seems contrasty,hard, cold and with blown out highlights which is how it usually looks.