Scanning high iso slides

[davidedric]

I'm slowly scanning my old slides. I have a good dedicated film scanner, a Nikon Coolscan something. Most of the slides were shot with Ektachrome (or similar) 200 or 400 asa. If they were digital images you might say they are noisy, but I am sure what I see is grain.


Question. Would you try and eliminate the grain/noise in pp, or say that is the way it is and concentrate on bringing the best out of the image without worrying about it ?

I can post a couple of images if that is helpful.

Thanks,

Dave

[Mike Buckley]

I outsourced the scanning of about 25 years of travel photos, so I can relate to your issue. I ignored the grain except when I converted some to monochrome. In that situation I often added the emulation of grain. Clearly, that indicates my take on grain, so consider my bias as you think about my response.

[John Morton]

I definitely went with reducing the noise, myself. At the time when I was scanning 35mm film, I used a program called "Grain Surgery 2". Pretty sure that's long gone, but I also think that it was released free-to-use after the photographic world went digital.

I never tried to get rid of all the grain, since that would also remove a certain degree of sharpness; rather, I would "Fade" the effect of the Grain Surgery plug-in using that command under the Photoshop "Edit" menu.

I was happier with the results I obtained when I reduced the film grain, because I was doing a lot of enlargements (11" x 17").

[Black Pearl]

We're assuming there is something bad about grain.

I would leave it alone, I would also be reluctant to overly process the images once scanned for fear they would end up looking like a modern digital image thus losing the appeal of the films original characteristics.