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35 mm Kodak slide film

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gpfaff43

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lightroom clssic 10
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  1. Windows 10
I am reprocessing my 1980 and 70 slides of China, India and Indonesia interest other person experiences particular denoise
 
Lot's of fun but also very time consuming.

There seem to be two camps. One which uses a scanner (I'm in that) and those that use an adapter with a camera to create a RAW image. Googling and searching this forum will reveal a lot of discussions.

FWIW, here is an accumulation of notes I've made more for myself than sharing but may help.
 

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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.

I don't have a good answer how to handle emulsion grain, just that the obvious is not usually good.
 
I don't have much to add to the detailed answers from above. I scanned on an Epson V850 35mm film stock either slides (mostly Kodachrome 64) or B&W (Panatomic (32ASA) or Plus-X (125ASA)) at a 4800 resolution and the grain is barely noticeable, event at fairly large sizes (12x24"). The grain of the faster films (ie Tri-X or Ektachrome 400) shows more (quite a bit for the latter), but it is inherent to the nature of these films.

One thing that is not addressedin detail is the cleaning of the material. It is amazing how much dust becomes apparent when scanning. Slides can be poroblematic. By their nature, they were left in the open on a projector which created lots of static and air turbulance from the heat of the bulb. Even B&W negatives carefully store in glassine sheets right after they left the enlarger proved to be quite dusty. I found that the cleaning part (either manual or digital is by far the most time consuming aspect of the process.

After trying several methods found on photography discussion boards (most of which don't really work), I finally settled on whiping gently the film with a microfober cloth which seems to do the trick partially. Whatever you do, on slides you will push some, if not most, of the dust against the edge of the frame rather than removing it, usually in the sky where it is most obvious. Slightly damping your cloth with alcool il pick-up lot more, but I was reluctant to use a chemical to do it and I did it only in problematic case (to no apparent ill effect though).

I scanned all the colour slides using Digital Ice (quality setting) - it does not work with B&W film, just creating a mess. Even with it, you will have to complete the cleaning digitally (I use Photoshop), but it reduces considereably the amount of work involved (hours vs minutes). 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). Apparently, the earlier version of Digital Ice did not work at all with it, but the current version bundled with Epson Scan does it (and I presume any other recent implementation). On Kodachrome, it often leaves a dark shadow on the edge of sharply contrasted zones.

I had basically three choices then:
a) Ignore it if not too conspicuous.
b) Remove the shadows digitally in Photoshop (easier said than done, it can be quite time consuming).
c) Rescan without Digital Ice and clean digitally.

I hope this helps.
 
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.
 
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