Hello all, My name is Bill Beath and I am a landscape fine art photographer living in Geelong, Australia (for those familiar with Australian tourist attractions I live near the Great Ocean Road an area that is famous around the world for its surf beaches and rainforest areas, that stretches for 200+ kilometres along the Victorian coastline). Most of my work is done in colour on 4x5in, 6x17cm and 6x9cm and 6x7cm formats on film, and my digital work is done with a Canon 1ds. As I also have some 30+ years in digital imaging and software development I also run a small consultancy helping photographers with worklflows and colour management. Looking forward to interaction with other group members.
Thomas and Alan wrote: >alan mcfetridge wrote: >> Thousands of tiny black spots..... quite simply. Visable at 200% and noticable >> at 100%. If i apply any global USM they become very apparent. I have seen it >> with RVP, in particular, and only with colour positive film. I should add that >> on every occasion the film has come directly from the lab. >Any chance of scanning a film coming from another lab? I've seen this before >and it was the result of incomplete washing and non clean drying at the lab. >Film from another lab scanned without these blemishes... >I doubt USM is the problem, USM is probably just what shows you the >symptoms. Thomas and Alan can I refer you to the following URL's http://www.nickrains.com/articles/peppergrain.html and http://luminous-landscape.com/reviews/film/fuji-pepper.shtml for a very good description of what causes the problem. The second article is a reprint of the first with comments from other investigators around the world. In short, Fuji appear to have acknowledged a problem with the filmbase of the products which they have started correcting. Fuji Velvia 100 medium format in my experience does not show the black specs until extreme sharpening is undertaken. Fuji Provia 100F medium format appears to be the worst offender from my experience. I, and the people I have scanned for, have used all the top professional E6 labs in Australia, and the problem has occurred on film returned from all of them, and as I can't believe that they all develop film badly, I don't think processing is the problem. I do all my scanning on Imacon scanners (beautiful scanners) and have noticed the following; On my original Imacon Flextight Photo using Colorflex 1.9.x the black specs were not noticable, however when I upgraded to Flexcolor 3.2.x on my Flextight Photo the black specs appeared. On my Flextight 848 which uses only Flexcolor 3.2.x the black specs have appeared from the day I purchased the scanner. I believe that one of the changes in the software was to the USM routines or the USM defaults have been set differently. Unfortunately I cannot verify this as I no longer have the Flextight Photo. I must stress I don't think the Imacon software is causing the problem, but rather that the changes between the two versions of the software are highlighting an existing problem with the Fuji films. I have tried various software solutions to get rid of the proble. Digital GEM photoshop plugin removes the specs but for my work has unacceptable subtle and sometimes not so subtle, hue changes and in some cases posterisation. Neat Image 2.6 which only works under windows seems to work very well, although I have not been able to come up with a profile to suit any one particular film, but unfortunately I am a mac only shop and running under a windows simulator is just too slow (to process one image can take up to a day un my 500MHz G4). I now scan on my Flextight 848 with all sharpening off (but sometimes using Flextouch with values of 10 or less depending upon image detail), and use various levels of the dust and scratches filter with masking, and various sharpening methods in Photoshop to give the desired result. I would certainly be interested in any solutions you may come up with to overcome the problems. Kind regards, Bill Beath Electric Light Photography
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