Reducing grain in detailed landscape

[paulh98829163]

Hi,

I have a fairly high key b/w image on medium format Tmax film. The background is hills with trees--not sky--with a lot of "atmosphere"/haze so any details are nicely faint but there's also grain showing. If I use dfine it seems to make the faint details muddy or blurry. Thoughts.....?

[c.pfaffenbichler]

Please post meaningful screenshots taken at View > 100% or larger. 

[D Fosse]

Grain/noise is detail, so it's a tradeoff.

That said, good noise reduction algorithms work on the specific noise "signature". But actual film grain is quite different from digital noise.

All in all, I think ACR has the best noise reduction, not least because you can fine-tune several parameters.

[Per Berntsen]

The noise reduction in ACR/Lightroom tends to blur image detail too much in my opinion.

Photoshop's Reduce noise filter does a better job of preserving detail, while reducing actual noise.

There are several third party noise removal plugins, I use Topaz DeNoise AI, which does a remarkably good job.

But reducing grain in film scans can sometimes be tricky, as pointed out, grain is different from digital noise.

There are also some variables that can affect grain removal efficiency, like the film/developer combination, development time, the type of scanner used, and settings in the scanning software. Make sure that sharpening is turned off.

When working with noise and sharpening in PS, always work at 100% view, and do noise reduction before any sharpening.