You may want to explore
Vuescan and it' support for film types. I haven't but did identify that it, and other Vuescan features, are something I need to explore in the future.
The VueScan support for film types (its film profiles) can help minimize the amount of adjustment needed to correct colors and tones, which are reproduced differently by each film stock. But they won’t do anything about reducing film grain.
Also, in recent years I find myself using the VueScan film profiles less, and instead leaving it on Generic with more manual adjustments. I think the reason is that the VueScan profiles are based on film that’s fresh out of the processor, while I am scanning film after 15 to 40 years of the color dye layers fading unevenly. The Restore Fading/Restore Colors options mentioned in the link can help, but how much they help depends on how well they match up with the actual rates of dye fading of each layer in each roll.
Gain in film emulsion is generally NOT addressed well by digital denoise routines, trying to do so will probably take out way too much detail.
Very true. Film grain and digital noise are different things. You can have a scan of grainy high ISO film that is relatively free of digital noise, and you can have a scan of relatively grain-free low ISO film that has a lot of color noise because of how it was scanned and digitally processed.
When scanning color film, what I have arrived at for myself is that in Lightroom, a very small amount of color noise reduction results in a big improvement in perceived image quality. Then I might apply a small amount of Luminance noise reduction just to take down the grain a little bit while leaving it visible. Because it seems to be an important goal to visibly preserve the film grain and not remove it completely. Using noise reduction intended for digital images to completely remove film grain often results in a flat/smeared look that appears over-processed. Film grain is integral to the structure and character of a film image; take care not to over-smooth or over-sharpen grain when post-processing a film scan.
I scanned all the colour slides using Digital Ice (quality setting) - it does not work with B&W film, just creating a mess…Digital Ice works very well with E-6 process films (i.e Ektachrome, Fujichrome, etc. ) but is at time problematic with Kodachrome (the film I used most unfortunately).
Digital ICE is fantastic for removing dust, scratches, and other physical defects from film scans, but is not designed to address grain/noise reduction.
For those who don’t know what the problems are with Digital ICE and B&W/Kodachrome: Digital ICE depends on running an infrared scan to detect height deviations from what should be a flat layer of dye. Dust sticks up above the dye surface, scratches carve out canyons below the dye surface; the Digital ICE infrared scan notices both and creates a mask layer to fill in with software. And that mostly works great. Except that…
Silver black-and-white film has relatively large silver grains, and Kodachrome has relatively thick dye layers. To Digital ICE, those seem to be major height differences compared to typical dye films (C-41 color negative, E-6 positive). Digital ICE then decides to try and erase those major height differences, but for silver B&W and Kodachrome that ends up distorting the image itself since the chunky grains and thick dye layers are not defects to be removed, they form the image.
I’ve been careful to say “silver black-and-white” because you can definitely run Digital ICE on the less common C-41 black-and-white films, because those work like color negative films, lacking the chunky silver grains. Similarly, Digital ICE works on E-6 because its surface is much more consistently flat (like color negative) than Kodachrome.