why scanned negatives look so grainy?

[hansvons]

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18 hours ago, charlesphoto99 said:

 

I'm with @250swb The so called 'rules' of photography are just guidelines, and not always correct or good ones at that. 

Absolutely. I use for negative scanning an SL2-S, the Essential Filmholder, and the brilliant Sigma 70mm Macro. I never thought that I would write Brilliant and Sigma in one sentence. It answers all the questions I had about scanning. At f11 this lens is a revelation of corner-to-corner sharpness and resolution. But at f8 it's less sharp and at 5,6 not what I was looking for to scan my negs. And it's cheap. 
The AF is pretty useful for scanning, too finding always the perfect focus.
For a lens aficionado, it's a super-ugly modern interpretation of plastic AF-lens design rendering clinical portraits, but for scanning I love it!

[Warton]

On 8/22/2023 at 2:47 PM, BernardC said:

That's right, and it brings us back to grain aliasing, which was mentioned earlier. The problem is caused by interference between your film's grain pattern and you sensor's pixel grid, and it can be made worse by the optical path, especially the light source. Often, but not always, the grain interference can be minimized by varying your magnification or resolution.

I worked on a 16mm B&W art installation many years ago that ran into this issue. It was originally planned for a traditional optical finish, but by the time it was ready it made more sense to do a DI (digital intermediate) and finish digitally. We tested nearly every telecine (motion picture film scanner) in Toronto, and a few in Montreal, and they all looked completely different. Some had snowball-sized grain and others showed minimal grain. All of these expensive machines looked great with colour negative film, of course, but they had differing grain interference patterns with our specific film stock, gauge, and resolution (2K back then). The artist has since made 4K scans that look a lot better, and it also looked fine in SD. A different project that was shot on 35mm with the same stock looked perfect at 2K resolution.

Long story short: the way to fix this excessive grain issue is to try different equipment and settings. A higher or lower resolution might work, or a different lens, or a different light source. You need gigapixel resolution to accurately scan grain, and that's not an option yet. Short of that, a setup that provides the best theoretical resolution won't necessarily look better, and it could look much worse.

 

This is the most plausible reason I have seen so far. So the grain or electronic noise you would like to call it, is inevitable, and it’s an inherent problem of scanning.

On 8/21/2023 at 11:21 PM, Ko.Fe. said:

This is why I ditched scanning during my bw film years between 2010 and 2020.

If I see grain talk, film was scanned.

I went under enlarger after I saw test of different BW film prints. They all looked the same

Film is for prints, not for scans.

 

I agree, but darkroom wet printing is not an option for me now

[Huss]

On 8/17/2023 at 1:54 PM, Warton said:

Maybe I should trust AF? I just don’t feel comfortable to let AF do the job on negative

Trust the AF in LiveView.  It will focus on the grain much more accurately and way quicker than you can.

Also trust the camera's auto exposure.  Keep this as simple as possible - check your FINAL results and then make changes if needed.

I've scanned my film with d750/d850 now Z7, using 60mm AF on AF, let the camera set exposure.  I scan at F10, ISO set to 64.

Leica M7, Rollei 40 2.8, HP5, Cinestill DF 96 Monobath

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