Grain/Noise Problem

[Axe555]

Hey All,

At the moment I have a pretty crappy scanner and as a result I get alot of graininess overall and a good deal of color noise in the shadows. Its bad enough that on some photos I have a very hard time striking a balance between noise/sharpness. I've tried every trick I can think of, including many I've found here but sometimes they just look bad no matter what I do. I won't be getting a new scanner until after Christmas and I'm about at wits end here. Does anyone have any ideas or advice that may help?

Thanks,

Rich

[Jakaleena]

Is going to a lab and having the images scanned to CD an option for you? I've used that option before and it works out really well for me when it's necessary...

[Axe555]

Yeah, that could be a viable option. I'll have to look into it. Can't wait until after the holidays so I can update my toys...umm...tools, I meant to say tools.

Thanks jak

[Doug Nelson]

This won't help much for color images, but I've found most noise from low-end scanners is located in the blue channel, so I make it a habit of inspecting the channels separately. For most b/w images, I like the red channel best, but it can vary.

For color images, running a noise-removal routine (a recent thread had a link for comparison reviews of many, including free ones) on each separate channel can help (but can also do more damage if the correction is severe).

[jeaniesa]

I'm not sure this will work (don't have an image to try it on at the moment), but have you tried changing to Lab color mode? If the graininess is really in the color, then perhaps it's not as visible in the L channel - and then you can slightly blur the a and b channel to reduce the color noise. Switch back to RGB when done, of course. Should help the noise in the shadows at the very least.

And do check out this thread that Doug mentioned. I've had some great results with Neat Image (one of the products mentioned in that thread).

Jeanie

[Axe555]

Doug:

Both the red and blue channels are pretty bad and the noise is coarser in the blue channel.

jeaniesa:

I tried out your suggestions in Lab mode and it worked fairly well. Thanks for that bit of info.

What really did the job was Neat Image. Even saving as .jpg and bringing it into Photoshop was better than anything I've been able to do scanning straight to Photoshop.

Thanks for the help everyone.

Rich