Using 7 and now CS with OS10.3.4, scanning at a high though not max res with my Nikon 8000 at superfine settings I still tend to see a disturning lack of smoothnes in flat areas of sky. I would say it looks grainy, even reticulated. I’m working from medium format tmax film which is extremely fine grained and sharpening the skies less than the rest of the picture to try to avoid this problem.
I just did a 20X30 light jet print from a digital file and was disappointed because of this granular appearance of the skies.
Any area that is out of focus is always going to look grainer that in focus areas. Film processing, chemistry and exposure all affect perceived grain. Which medium format – 645, 6X6, 6X7 etc? 645 going to 20X30 would definitely have some visible grain. How old is the emulsion. The newest versions seem to be finer. Lastly, I would have someone who really understands scanning negs on a good drum scanner, scan it for a reference comparison. You might be surprised at what you find.
Newly purchased film shot on a 6X9 Horseman VHR field camera. I doubt that focus is the issue. In working the film I consciously darkened certain areas of sky to bring out some contrast. I did this by adding a layer of grey/softlight and painting black at an opacity of about 7%.
I didm’t mean to say that focus might have been an issue, only that because skies often have very little or nothing in focus, what you do see is grain, not the detail that grain normally resolves. Because parts of the image with detail hide the effect of grain so well, areas like sky often look overly grainy by comparison. Anything you do to add contrast to part of the image will also tend to emphasize the grain.
What developer was used and was the film pushed at all? Is the exposure normal or perhaps a bit on the hot side?
There are grain/noise reduction software solutions out there that might help. I can’t think of them off the top of my head, but a place like luminous-landscape.com will have more information in their forums.
Could resolution be the culprit here? I know that 35mm film can display grain if its scanned at high res close to its theoretical grain limits (ie pulling a 4000×3000 scan from a 35mm)…sharpening only worsens this effect. I also know that some medium formats have a film grain limit close to 35mm but offer a better quality because its a lower ratio compared to the overall image area. I think 2 1/4 is one of these formats, but im not sure about others.
I only discovered this years and years ago, because the client complained about "mildew" on the grass that he had scanned..it turned out that due to the crop he was sucking nearly 8000 pixels out from a 35mm and the "mildew" was in fact the surface grain of the tranny…oh how the conversation about right tools and materials for the right job was fun afterwards.
I didn’t think that scanners scanned in "black and white".
Surely they scan using their R, G, and B-sensitive sensors and then use their own algorithm to determine the luminosity values needed to produce a black and white image?
I would scan in RGB and use Photoshop’s channel mixing to produce the optimum rendering — particularly if you are going to print from an RGB inkjet.
The big reason for scanning in RGB is that the collective noise in each channel is effectively averaged, eliminating much of it. I don’t know about the Nikon, but my Howtek offers Grayscale scanning using any one of the three PMTs. You still need to send RGB to a Lightjet no matter what, so in this case, it’s certainly not going to be a matter of file size.