smoothing over film grain ?

when the film grain is objectionable, are there filters or plug-ins that are really good at smoothing it?
I have looked at the 'remove grain' component of GrainSurgery v.1, and it isn't too good.
It is not a bad scan but the original slide film was too fast/grainy

"fg" wrote in message

when the film grain is objectionable, are there filters or plug-ins that

are

really good at smoothing it?
I have looked at the 'remove grain' component of GrainSurgery v.1, and it isn't too good.
It is not a bad scan but the original slide film was too fast/grainy

Do a search for SGBNR (stands for Selective Gaussian Blur Noise Reduction). Saw it at the Pleiades Astrophoto site. Never had a need for it myself but saved the page just in case I got some spare time to check it out. The links and original address didn't save. It's a non-commercial number that might need some tweaking.

"The advanced implementation of the SGBNR technique makes this program a powerful tool to reduce noise in digital astrophotographic images, including film grain in scanned conventional astrophotos as well as background noise in CCD images. When adequately applied to a variety of astronomical imaging works, we have consistently achieved excellent results with this program..."

Dr.J

Do a Google search for a plug in called Eye Fidelity tools. [EFT] Its awesome at that and many other methods of smoothing grain and cleaning up your pics.

On Sat, 6 Dec 2003 14:07:09 -0500, "fg" wrote:

when the film grain is objectionable, are there filters or plug-ins that are really good at smoothing it?
I have looked at the 'remove grain' component of GrainSurgery v.1, and it isn't too good.
It is not a bad scan but the original slide film was too fast/grainy

Here's a comprehensive review of various softwares/actions. I tried the Noise Ninja demo with good results but everyone has a different eye of course.
http://www.michaelalmond.com/Articles/noise.htm

Try Neat Image. There is a free version and it works very well.

Dennis
"fg" wrote in message

when the film grain is objectionable, are there filters or plug-ins that

are

really good at smoothing it?
I have looked at the 'remove grain' component of GrainSurgery v.1, and it isn't too good.
It is not a bad scan but the original slide film was too fast/grainy

Also try Clear Skin FX and DC Enhancer, both free and both small, both from www.mediachance.com

I did some tests yesterday on CSFX, DCE, and SGBNR. I'd like to tell you that one is better than the other, but not so. They do produce different results, however.

To clean up a really rough photo of a woman's face I used SGBNR (the subject of my tests), then sharpened the resulting TIFF (SGBNR's only output) in Photoshop, then sent the result to PhotoPro 2.0 to remove the major skin imperfections (much easier and more intuitive than Photoshop), and then sent the result to Clean Skin FX to get rid of the remaining larger pores, pits, etc. Final output: a clean, sharp, somewhat plastic-looking JPG.

Fun.
--
Walter Donavan
"Dennis Petito" wrote in message

Try Neat Image. There is a free version and it works very well.
Dennis
"fg" wrote in message

when the film grain is objectionable, are there filters or plug-ins that

are

really good at smoothing it?
I have looked at the 'remove grain' component of GrainSurgery v.1, and

it

isn't too good.
It is not a bad scan but the original slide film was too fast/grainy