Grain removal?

[BWI Scott]

Hi,
I saw in some other posts on this forum some examples of how post processing can greatly improve an image.The amount of improvement in some of them is simply amazing!

I'm somewhat familiar with the levels and USM functions but I'd like to know what you do to remove grain in your shots.As in the fine examples in Stefano's previous post.FYI i'm using PS7.

Thanks
Scott

[jwenting]

You can never remove grain in photos!
All you can do is reduce the visual impact by sizing down far enough.

Sometimes a filter like despeckle will help a bit, but at the cost of loosing fine detail and some edge sharpness.
There may be other filters with similar functions, but none will magic away all your noise and grain leaving a perfect image as a result, there are always penalties and the more noise you remove the higher they will be.

Best thing is to rescan using some other setting that might cause less noise (as 90% at least of what people call grain in digitised images and ALL that people call grain in digital camera output is actual digital noise produced by the sensor used to capture the image in either the scanner or the camera and not grain at all!).

[AC870]

The only part of the photo where it's possible to completely remove the grain is the sky, you can do that by blurrying it.

[TallDutch]

when you sharpen a picture too much it gets also blur.

[jid]

You have to be careful with your wording here. 'Grain' is used when talking about film photography and is normally more prevalent the higher the ISO film you use as the film becomes more sensitive. 'Noise' is the digital equivalent. They both appear the same and can be dealt with in similar ways in post processing.

Various amounts of blur can hide/disguise the noise. One of the most popular ways of removing noise is with a piece of freeware called NeatImage. If used properly this can improve noisy images dramatically BUT BEWARE don't over do it!

Best of all try and avoid get getting noise/grain in the first place, not an easy thing to do but its the first step :)

Jid.

[philip]

when you sharpen a picture too much it gets also blur.

its new to me that sharpening causes blur ?

[LX-A343]

I guess, he meant "sharpening causes noise" ;-)

Gerardo