Grain

[Southdowns]

I've just got my second roll of 35mm film back, and I'm seeing a lot of grain in most of the shots. It actually enhances some of the images, but I'd like to understand why I'm seeing it none-the-less, even if only as part of the learning curve.

There's an example below; you can see the grain especially on the dark clouds at the top.

My suspicion is that it's down to one or more of the following:

1) Cheap film (Agfa Vista 200 from Poundland).
2) Poor developing (Asda for two quid).
3) Low res/poor scanning (Asda for 99p, resolution 1840 x 1232). Maybe the low res is pixelating and hence enhancing the grain?
4) Just what's to be expected, though I don't see it in other shots on here.
5) Something else I'm doing wrong.

There's also a halo around the silhouetted trees. I'm not sure if that's a processing/scanning problem, or genuine "rim lighting" from the low sun, maybe exaggerated by the low resolution?


20130610-160439-3.jpg by MarkBerry1963, on Flickr

I did ask the photo desk woman at Asda what resolution they scan at before I left my films, and she replied "the same as your film"! I gave up with any further questions at that point!

 

[ChrisR]

Well, others will know much better than me, but I've not had any significant grain problems from Agfa Vista. My guess would be the ASDA scan; it's fine for a test film, but I really wouldn't want to use it for anything I cared about. Perhaps it varies by operator, but they can be over-sharpened, and all sorts of weird artefacts can appear.

I get my 35mm C41 process and scan done by Photo Express, who do a good medium res scan (2000 dpi, or roughly 6mp) for £4 per film for TP members (see the processing thread).

 

[Southdowns]

Cheers Chris. I hadn't thought of over sharpening, but it makes sense.

Ill give Photo Express a try

 

[excalibur2]

I've just got my second roll of 35mm film back, and I'm seeing a lot of grain in most of the shots. It actually enhances some of the images, but I'd like to understand why I'm seeing it none-the-less, even if only as part of the learning curve.

There's an example below; you can see the grain especially on the dark clouds at the top.

My suspicion is that it's down to one or more of the following:

1) Cheap film (Agfa Vista 200 from Poundland).
2) Poor developing (Asda for two quid).
3) Low res/poor scanning (Asda for 99p, resolution 1840 x 1232). Maybe the low res is pixelating and hence enhancing the grain?
4) Just what's to be expected, though I don't see it in other shots on here.
5) Something else I'm doing wrong.

There's also a halo around the silhouetted trees. I'm not sure if that's a processing/scanning problem, or genuine "rim lighting" from the low sun, maybe exaggerated by the low resolution?

Nice shot.....Well I've used Tesco then later Asda for years.
Also if you get the exposure wrong that could increase grain, and I too had a halo around trees against a blue sky once and no one had an answer to why this was so. as below:-
But have seen some minimal grain shots from some 35mm posters using 400asa film , so maybe development has something to do with it esp as I would say the supermarkets don't put fresh dev in the machine every day.
Maybe one day I'll take two films of the same subject and have one dev at Asda and the other at a lab, and scan them at home to see if there is a difference

 

[RaglanSurf]

My suspicion is that it's down to one or more of the following:

1) Cheap film (Agfa Vista 200 from Poundland).
2) Poor developing (Asda for two quid).
3) Low res/poor scanning (Asda for 99p, resolution 1840 x 1232). Maybe the low res is pixelating and hence enhancing the grain?
4) Just what's to be expected, though I don't see it in other shots on here.
5) Something else I'm doing wrong.

I'm sorry if this is not particularly helpful but it's probably a combination of all of the above.
As has been mentioned before I would suggest that if you want to try film then use a decent camera/lens combination, an in date quality film, a recognised processor and get decent scans of your negatives. Sure you can obtain good shots from other sources and some quirky results from plastic lenses and cross processed out of date film but at least start from a known point.

I'm sure a lot of people are disillusioned after their first forays into film photography because they use cheap film and inferior processing, you're not really giving the medium a fair go. It's like having a go at motor racing and choosing a diesel fuelled Lada as a suitable machine, sure you'll get round the track but your experience will be less than edifying and you won't quite understand what all the fuss is about.

 

[excalibur2]

I'm sorry if this is not particularly helpful but it's probably a combination of all of the above.
As has been mentioned before I would suggest that if you want to try film then use a decent camera/lens combination, an in date quality film, a recognised processor and get decent scans of your negatives. Sure you can obtain good shots from other sources and some quirky results from plastic lenses and cross processed out of date film but at least start from a known point.

I'm sure a lot of people are disillusioned after their first forays into film photography because they use cheap film and inferior processing, you're not really giving the medium a fair go. It's like having a go at motor racing and choosing a diesel fuelled Lada as a suitable machine, sure you'll get round the track but your experience will be less than edifying and you won't quite understand what all the fuss is about.

But people after their first forays in 35mm colour film could be put off by the high cost of fresh film, dev and scan by the labs, quickly calculate the costs for a frame for the winners on the roll........ and go back to digital :shrug:

 

[RaglanSurf]

But people after their first forays in 35mm colour film could be put off by the high cost of fresh film, dev and scan by the labs, quickly calculate the costs for a frame for the winners on the roll........ and go back to digital :shrug:

Let's muse on a scenario...

Your friend says, "You have to try film, it's great"

You say "Fantastic, what do I need?"

Your friend says "Get some cheap film from Poundland, and get them dev'd at Asda, it'll only cost you £3"

You say "Brilliant!"

So you spend £3 and end up with a load of **** on your negs and a CD full of hideously coloured and grainy photo's. So £3 for no return.

On the other hand, you buy a roll of decent film, I don't care what but maybe Portra or Velvia and you shoot your roll and send it off to a decent lab.
OK Velvia is a little tricky but when they drop through your letter box and you open up the little plastic box and hold that first slide up to the light you are blown away by the magical little stained glass window you are now holding in your hand.

You may only get one keeper from that box but that one moment of wonder when you first see the colour and the quality of the slide will be enough to keep you coming back time and time again. Whereas 36 badly scanned and muddy coloured shots are enough to put people off for life.
Yes, quality costs but that's partly why people in the past would rather shoot one roll of Kodachrome on their holidays than 5 rolls of Tudorprint *****.

 

[Teflon-Mike]

I dont think that that is 'Grain'.
Grain really is when you enlarge a neg up to the point you can actually see the individual halide chrystals putting a texture onto the image.
In the dark room, used to use a focus lupe, little magnifying glass, cunningly fasioned a bit like a periscope so you put it on the enlarger base board and looked through like a microscope eye-piece, magnified the projected image by about 20x so you could focus on the negative 'grain' rather than what might be an out of focus picture to begin with.

And that's looking at a less than postage stamped area of enlargement, probably already, magified, 16x to get up to even a 6x4" print.

You have to get REALLY high scanning resolutions, to really see real 'grain' in a scan.

Of course, high ASA or push-processed film has big grain, and you can see that grittiness in some prints; but even so.... its not really discernible as 'chrystal grain' at typical scanner resolutions.

Think about it; even a really good scanner is only giving you 9000 dots per inch, that's 350 dots per mm. The halide chrystals are measured in microns. 1000'ths of a mm. So your best scanner, is making one pixel from an area of aprox 3 x 3 microns.... even if you have a big chrystal grain, lets say a squigly shape, 15 microns or so wide and tall, you aren't going to get a particularly wonderful resolution of that detail, in the 25 pixels that are covering it.

Bring the resolution down to ASDA scan level; and you have a 'hi-res' pixel count of 1232x1840, covering a 24x36mm frame... roughly, 51 pixels per mm, or roughly 20 microns per pixel... even a very BIG chrystal is going to be smaller than a single pixel dot.

That was taken on Fuji 1600 ASA print film, and scanned from neg.... and the scanner, better (if not by much) than ASDA machine scan, and you are not really getting the grain in the digi-image, but scanner noise.

That is another, taken on Croatian-Konika-Copy, Jessops Own-Brand 400ASA Slide film... in low light, pushed two-stops in dev, FOR big grain.

Here's another

Black & White, I think that was again, cheap Croatian emulsion, and pushed something stupid in dev to get that hard gritty, high contrast, golf-ball grain, effect to suit the subject.... you get a 'sense' of it in scan... but you dont see 'grain'... its there in that one in prints.... but to get it discernable, I had to enlarge 10x8 or more.

Its not there in the scan, the scanner just doesn't have the resolution to pull out that level of detail in the emulsion matrix.

HOWEVER... as the ASDA prints, if you have them are almost certainly not optical enlargements, but created by second generation optical printing of the digitised scan file.... looking at the prints probably wont show much difference! Even at higher enlargement levels.

To know what's really going on, you would have to get proper, optical enlargements made from the neg, and possibly section enlargements of offending area.

You could try a re-scan with a different scanner, and software, and see what you get in that area... but? A propper print will always be in a different legue.

 

[Teflon-Mike]

But people after their first forays in 35mm colour film could be put off by the high cost of fresh film, dev and scan by the labs, quickly calculate the costs for a frame for the winners on the roll........ and go back to digital :shrug:

So you spend £3 and end up with a load of **** on your negs and a CD full of hideously coloured and grainy photo's. So £3 for no return.

On the other hand, you buy a roll of decent film,....You may only get one keeper from that box but that one moment of wonder when you first see the colour and the quality of the slide will be enough to keep you coming back time and time again. Whereas 36 badly scanned and muddy coloured shots are enough to put people off for life.

All summed up with the axiom A Bad Workman, blames his tools; a good workman gets the best out of his tools.

Both arguments have some merit; but lets have a look at this; my daughter is learning the craft at the mo, using out of date Kodak from Greece and ASDA dev, to give her prints to hold, and a disc of scans to stick on F-B or whatever she does with whatever comes off her i-phone normally.

She got me to take her out last week-end to take some lanscape shots.. She took the Zenit with Helios 44, 58mm & a 135 tele, loaded with OoD Kodak; I took the D3200, and for fun, my Sigma MKa with the 12mm Fish on the front.

She's getting there.... she is starting to remember to focus; and using hand-held Leningrad light meter? She's getting the exposures pretty darn nailed down, most of the time.

And ridiculously.... stopping at ASDA on the way home to pick something up for tea..... she had her prints in her hand and was flicking through them, before we had got home, and I had a chance to clear down the SD card from the Nikon! so much for the near polorid fast to-view time of digital!

Here you are... back-to-back comparison Digital vs 'cheap' Halide.

Daughters picture of a cottage accross a field. Zenit EM, and I think she used the 135 for this one. Metering from Leningrad MK4 hand-held selenium cell. Out-of-Date Kodak Gold 100 print; processed at ASDA on 1hr. Scan from ASDA disc. As supplied, resized for web only.

My shot, taken with Nikon D3200, & kit 18-55; ISO100, aperture priority.

Daughter's shot; automatic exposure adjustment from histogram, in Photo-Shop; no other 'enhancement'

My shot from the Nikon, re-sized, to same 'crop' as Daughters, laid over her frame; mismatch boarder showing contrast/colour difference.

That is not so far adrift in the difference that MANY people would be screaming "Oh No! That's Horrible! chuck it away, What a waste of money!"

In fact; given the instagram craze; more likely my Daughter would stick that shot on her Face-Book page and all her friends will be 'liking' it, and adding comments like "Cool! What filter did you use to get that effect then"

Sad... but true!

Yeah, better film would give better results; I think that that cheap Kodak, is so flat it looks like it was taken through tracing paper almost; but look at shots I posted above, in experiments twenty odd years ago actually looking for grain, the 'expensive' Fuji gave me more of the effect I was looking for, but ironically, it was supposed to be as 'fine' as a normal 400... the cheap and cruddy 400 I push processed, DIDN'T actually give me the down and dirty grain I was hoping for, and was a lot finer than expectations would have suggested.

Like everything in photography, its NOT about the kit; its about how you use it, and knowing what kit ot use to achieve the result you want. SIMPLE.

So some-times cheap is best; some-times expensive is essential, sometimes it doesn't matter.

And here, shots above back-to backing cheap film and digital?

Giving my daughter £1 a roll Out-of-Date Kodak to 'waste':-
- learning to focus a manual focus camera;
- Learning to remember it HAS to be focused every time
- Learning to meter before she shoots
- Learning to translate EV values from a meter to Shutter & Aperture settings
- Learning what different shutter speeds do
- Learning what different apartures do.
- Finding out the hard way where you need 'flash' or faster film

Taking LOTS and LOTS of pictures that are likely to be out of focus, or have shallow depth of field, be under or over exposed; suffering camera shake, suffering motion blur, or just plain BORING.....

Damn site more paletable at £1 a roll than £10 a roll, for an IQ difference that is so infinitely unlikely to be the difference between something you'd put on the wall instead of in the bin, as you HAVE to be effing JOKING surely?

THIS is how we learned, back in the days of yore. Taking photos and effing up. And we didn't blow money on expensive film, we could rarely afford, UNTIL we knew what we were doing with the cheap stuff, and getting at least a decent yeild of half decent shots and the film WAS the thing letting down our shots.... but even THEN... we used it selectively.... especially when we could use know how to get the best out of something cheaper a lot of the time.

And THAT is why my daughter is swinging an old Zenith around, and I'm paying to get films processed for her, not letting her dive in and play with the Nikon.... WHICH could let her play and practice and eff up as much as she likes, with almost absolutely no cost attached, because it's TEACHING her to work within boundries and exploit what kit she has; not look to solve every problem with a credit card, and expect everything to simply be a matter of spending more money to get better results.

Yes, good film is good... knowing WHY its good, and knowing how to get the best from ANY film is even BETTER.

Good Workmen dont blame thier tools; they get the best from thier tools; and they know when they need the best tools, AND when they don't.

Starting out? You don't NEED top grade film.

And as post in reply to OP.... I don't think that, and there's certainly no evidence that, it IS his film that's letting down his pictures; but the transfer of his negs to digital.

 

[Southdowns]

Wow, thanks everyone.

I see the logic of all the arguments re cheap vs. (more) expensive film, but for me, it's not an issue . I'm not about to "waste" expensive film until it's what's genuinely limiting me, know it isn't that yet, and know I'm nowhere near getting the best out of this film so far. I'd pretty much concluded it wasn't he film but the digital transfer anyway.

BUT, these results aren't likely to put me off either, even if they were the best I could get with my gear, because:

A) I don't want to replicate digital; what would be the point of that, as digital IS less hassle, and IS cheaper per digital shot, or at least is if you take the camera out of the equation. I want the visual benefits of film, even though I can't define what they are!

B) I'm doing this to learn. I deliberately wanted an unmetered, entirely manual camera with a limited number of shots available, at a fixed ISO, to force me to slow down and think about each shot.

I get some very very satisfying results from digital, but my attrition rate is appalling, and I'm doing too much rescue work in PP, so want to teach myself to get it right in camera more often.

Plus, the camera I have (Yashica J) isn't too bad. It's no Leica, but it has an OK lens.

I'm going to send the negs off to Photo Express, so I have a direct comparison vs Asda. The total lack of knowledge displayed by the Asda tech ("scan resolution will be the same as your film", indeed!), should be reason enough to send them elsewhere anyway!

Thanks again.

 

[excalibur2]

Well Mike in Photoshop I can get your daughters shot looking a bit better than your digital shot which leads to the question:- Ignoring the usual supermarket spots, is a good Asda dev the same as a lab dev...after all the C41 process should be same anywhere in the world.

As for dev and scanning 35mm film at a high cost in a lab? I would not pay this, for me I would use 120 film and just get the neg dev for about £3.50 and use a home scanner which is good for the 120 format.

 

[wyx087]

All this talk about Asda dev vs good lab dev.

Can anyone recommend a good value alternative?


I'm adventuring with my first roll, and I really want to give film a chance.

 

[excalibur2]

All this talk about Asda dev vs good lab dev.

Can anyone recommend a good value alternative?


I'm adventuring with my first roll, and I really want to give film a chance.

Well peak imaging seems to be popular at the moment (dunno about prices), and if you like using film then try Tesco or Asda, but although Asda has £20,000 machines it depends on the operator so branches can vary for results.

 

[ChrisR]

Medium res scans from Peak are really quite expensive. Process and scan (35mm) cost £7.96 for 1200 dpi (low res), £15.70 for 1800 dpi (for 9*6 prints), £20.90 for 2400 dpi and £25.66 for 3000 dpi. Negative or transparency the same.

I tend to do home scanning for mono and transparency; for C41 I use Photo Express at £4 medium res scan (2000 dpi IIRC) for TP members. It's a big difference! P&P extra in both cases.

EDIT to add: I don't (often) home scan C41 colour as my results have been generally carp in terms of colour casts... YMMV!

 

[excalibur2]

Medium res scans from Peak are really quite expensive. Process and scan (35mm) cost £7.96 for 1200 dpi (low res), £15.70 for 1800 dpi (for 9*6 prints), £20.90 for 2400 dpi and £25.66 for 3000 dpi. Negative or transparency the same.

I tend to do home scanning for mono and transparency; for C41 I use Photo Express at £4 medium res scan (2000 dpi IIRC) for TP members. It's a big difference! P&P extra in both cases.

EDIT to add: I don't (often) home scan C41 colour as my results have been generally carp in terms of colour casts... YMMV!

H'mm peak imaging must do scanning for pros, as the prices would put off most ordinary amateurs. Also they must be getting the work as if not, would lower the scan prices. :shrug:

 

[Southdowns]

.......I use Photo Express at £4 medium res scan (2000 dpi IIRC) for TP members.

£2.50 + P&P for uncut, pre-developed negative scanning, which is what I have, so even better on this occasion

 

[PMN]

The way the noise has been brought out and the light halo over the trees just looks like classic oversharpening to me. The Agfa Vista I've scanned here at home on my V500 has come out looking pretty damned clean so I don't think it's anything to do with the cheap film, it looks much more like poor scanning/processing!

 

[Teflon-Mike]

Well Mike in Photoshop I can get your daughters shot looking a bit better than your digital shot which leads to the question:-

Only the one? I would have thought it lead to many!
The first; define 'better'?
Then after a few decades of debate... OK... so having got Daughters film-shot looking as good as you can in PP, and 'better' than the Digi-Snap.... what can you do with the Digi-Snap?

Between us (me & daughter) we've shot three rolls of that Greek-Kodak now, and each of them are thin on colour; her two films were scanned by ASDA, first one I did, and its also a little grey; set's up on here in Photos from Film; Point & Guess! Thread explains that set was taken with antique Kodak Retinette, scale focus viewfinder.

Digi-comparison, taken by O/H over my shoulder on point & press:

Again; the cheap, and decidedly low response film, is not SUCH a big let down as to render all product fit for the bin; and you could almost argue that the drained colour, is actually adding to the antique-photo-effect, coming out the camera 'pre-faded' like designer distressed denim!

Scanning in the halide-archive; O/H the other day, watching me painstakingly restore the scan of a rather damaged neg, queried "I don't know why you are spending all that time messing with them! People wont be able to tell that it's OLD!"

 

[excalibur2]

The way the noise has been brought out and the light halo over the trees just looks like classic oversharpening to me. The Agfa Vista I've scanned here at home on my V500 has come out looking pretty damned clean so I don't think it's anything to do with the cheap film, it looks much more like poor scanning/processing!

Yes scanning seems to be the main problem and a few years ago tried a de noise program...h'mm quite good as shown below? But thought what's the point in using film when I am going to change the shot so much with a program. :shrug:

Tesco dev, either Reala or Superia 200, Hexanon lens, home scanned.


Crop




denoised

 

[excalibur2]

Only the one? I would have thought it lead to many!
The first; define 'better'?
Then after a few decades of debate... OK... so having got Daughters film-shot looking as good as you can in PP, and 'better' than the Digi-Snap.... what can you do with the Digi-Snap?

Just playing around with a smiley at the end.....it would seem your daughter is having her films scanned by a non caring operator at Asda and the results should be much better (which I proved to myself in Photoshop).