Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/07/22
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]on 7/22/01 8:30 PM, Austin Franklin at darkroom@ix.netcom.com wrote: > You will never ever be able to %100 digitize every bit of information on the > film. Film grains are random in shape. But, what is important, is you do > not need to. It's an absurd, and irrelevant goal to try to. Show me images > where the precise grain shape is important to the image. Not, just that the > image has grain (that's no problem), but that the very structure of every > film grain is important. not only that, but grain is essentially a sampling artefact what's important is the image that created the grain (of course if you like the grain stick with film!) when you consider the grain as noise, a 35mm (say) APX400 or TX neg has *effectively* about the same amount of image information as a 4 Mp digital image. My 35mm APX negs start to fall apart at magnifications of more than about 10x, and a 4 Mp image enlarged to 11x14 is having the same problems in a different way (it looks a bit soft... but still has that amazing grainless quality of course, whereas the silver film is graining out) 6 Mp gives me an image to play with that is roughly 2000x3000 pixels. But those are grainless pixels. For those of you who are used to scanning film I can't emphasise how much that lack of grain noise changes the equation. Upsampling and interpolation and sharpening all work *far* better in the absence of grain noise. - -- John Brownlow http://www.pinkheadedbug.com ICQ: 109343205