Good morning. I have a lot of old 35mm Kodachrome/Ektachrome slides that I am digitizing using Valoi equipment in high resolution. The Raw and JPG images I get after digitization are very grainy and I am told that this is due to the old slides having emulsion(grain) on the surface which gets interpreted as part of the image by DxO. None of the grain removal tools built into DxO seem to be able to remove these ugly large grains. Is anyone else having this issue and do you have a solution?
I got a bunch of camera scanned 135 and 645 negatives and positives and see grain mostly in the Ektachrome 400 captures, e.g. from the 1970s. The scans look wonderfully authentic and I have NO DESIRE AT ALL to get rid of that grain.
Any of DxO’s modern denoisers is smart enough to let the grain be. Grain is a relevant part of those slides and reproductions thereof.
If you must, try unsharp masking - or denoising in local adjustments.
Denoising is like walking a slackline between shotgun and plastic looks.
Thanks for that reply. Denoising as you mentioned often produces a plastic look, artificial. The other thing I did not mention was that at low magnifications the noise is not bad. But printing from one of those shots makes for a messy looking print.
But replacing the grain is pretty speculative …
Well, once the grain is more or less removed, some digital grain can be re-added. The results will look different, maybe weird, maybe worth a try.
It’s similar to enlarging photos. The transitions have to be generated speculatively. Topaz offers the additional option of enhancing faces. I tried that with a few old, digitized childhood photos, and my grandmother’s immediate reaction was, “That’s not what my daughter looked like.” The photo looked great, but …
I am thinking about Topaz. Do you think Topaz can help?
It’s best to use the trial version. There are so many factors that influence the result you want.
I do believe, however, that all editors handle grain very well in digital photography, but not grain from digitized images.
After using a digital camera to capture Raws of Kodachrome etc slides with Valoi, if that’s what you’re doing, I did not get good results processing them with DxO, either, and quickly stopped doing that. DxO’s great with noisy digital images, but not so much in my experience with digital captures of older film images. Neither is Luminar, though they claim to do this well.
Topaz Photo is better at it, but definitely do an extensive free trial before buying to see if it meets your needs. Like DxO, Topaz needs some good, recent hardware including a very good video card to be able to use it with any reasonable per-image turnaround time. For those who don’t have that hardware firepower, Topaz lets you send an image up the cloud to their servers to do the processing, but the upload and download times, last time I tried, were not acceptable, so I only use it locally. You have to experiment with how much you want to sharpen and enhance faces, because, yes, the results can be comical. The default settings can be 50% too high. As a longtime licensee, I have a grandfathered subscription price on Topaz Photo that is reasonable for the way I use it with DxO and Adobe. But for new subscribers, the price may be hard to justify. Adobe is buying out Topaz. We don’t know yet how that will play out in terms of pricing and ongoing app availability, but quite possibly: not good. Adobe subscribers can use Topaz within Photoshop with Adobe credits, but it does not do a good job, as you have limited to no ability to control sliders compared to within the Topaz Photo app itself.
Another good way to go can be Google’s Nano Banana 2 or 3 models. For those you pay a per-image fee, but there are ways to drive that down to pennies, and it’s pretty quick and pretty darned good at bringing back detail on old film images. Look for YouTube videos on this.
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The grain is not on the film surface. At the top is the protective geltin layer and at the bottom is the film base. In between are the color sensitive layers.
Try negative micro-contrast.
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Thanks for that detailed review, most valuable! I have tried Nano Banana free, but was not satisfied. I will give Topaz a try. I was disappointed to know Topaz is being bought by Adobe which is what I am trying to get away from after many years of paying subscription.
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Thanks to everyone for great suggestions. I will try some of them and let you know. Topaz seems to be the best option so far, unless DxO comes up with something
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I have found that Topaz Photo works very well at removing Film grain. While some posting here like film grain because it’s “authentic” I do not.
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I have tried Nano Banana free, but was not satisfied. I will give Topaz a try. I was disappointed to know Topaz is being bought by Adobe which is what I am trying to get away from after many years of paying subscription.
I understand. Unfortunately Topaz Photo changed to an all-subscription model a year ago, too, and as I say, it’s pricey for new users, at least unless there’s a sale promotion.
I hadn’t experimented with restoration of slides for a few months, so I tried again yesterday for you. In my post above, I said “Nano Banana 3.” There’s no such app. I was thinking of Nano Banana Pro, and actually, I couldn’t get Pro to do a good job restoring circa 1960 family slides yesterday. It altered our faces to the point where we were unrecognizable. Also not Nano Banana 2 Lite (which I haven’t tried, but doesn’t look as good unless you need batch speed and don’t need 4K).
The AI model that worked for me jaw-droppingly well, fast, and cheap, if you do it right, is Nano Banana 2. (You said you tried Nano Banana, but you didn’t say you tried Nano Banana 2. Maybe you did. But more on how to make NB2 work below.) And there are (legal) ways to use NB2 for pennies an image. You would have to be processing thousands of images for a Topaz Photo subscription to be cheaper than NB2.
There are a couple of caveats. Just like with any new photo software, there’s a learning curve, and the setup may seem daunting. You have to figure out your workflow and take notes so when you go back to it after not using it for a while, you can get up to speed again quickly. If you do Raw captures of slides with Valoi, you also have to first convert your camera Raw captures to PNG, TIF, or JPG. (You can instead just set your digital camera to copy the slide in JPG; I haven’t tried that, but it seems better to me to shoot Raw.) But once you have a converted image file, on my setup, it’s 30 seconds for NB2 to restore and upscale the image to 4K. Unless I want to remove an element from the image, I usually don’t want to do any more editing! It’s that good. If I use Topaz Photo or any other app, I always need to do more editing, and the process might take 5 minutes per image, or more.
The other caveat with NB2 is that it needs a very detailed prompt to get good results. You don’t want to just say “restore and upscale my image.” The prompt I was using yesterday–somebody else wrote this, and I’m not typing this; I’m Copying and Pasting it into the prompt window–- was: “restore this slightly faded photo to look as if it were taken today with a high-resolution modern digital camera, preserving all original details, colors, and natural skin tones, sharp focus, clean and crisp edges, minimal noise, realistic grain removal, balanced contrast and exposure, subtle color correction while maintaining authenticity, no artificial beautification or style changes, true-to-life restoration.” That level of detail in your prompt will get you much better results with NB2. If you’re restoring an old damaged photo, you want to add detail about repairing the damage as well.
Here’s one website among many that can help get you started:
There’s a ton of more info on the web, and also check out YouTube videos demonstrating it. Make sure you’re looking at photo restoration, not fantasy image or video creation, which NB2 can also do, and which more users are looking for.
Very helpful and from someone who has actually done it. I will give it a try again, I am not sure if I tried the same version of NanoBanana that you were using. Also I did not convert my images to any other format than Raw.