Sean Mayo
02-06-2008, 10:20 AM
I am just starting out with post-production work in photoshop, and being that my best digital camera is only a 7.1MP point and shoot, I shot some photos with my Canon AE-1 (circa 1983). I really like how the image is composed, but in photoshop I have noticed a crazy amount of grain on the image (scanned in from the negatives with a Nikon Coolscan 4). I am fixing any scratches i find, but the grain is getting really annoying, because it makes most of the other tools not work very well. Are there any filters that will blend all the little grains together into a more conventional shade. It shouldn't be as grainy as it is, but with my making the mistake of letting a friend play with my camera, he set the ASA to 100 when I was shooting 400 speed B&W (can't develop color at my school's darkroom, the chemicals supposedly can give you cancer or something), so even though everything looked good on the camera, it was crazily overexposed. I know, i'd love to be able to just use a DSLR, but I can't afford to buy one, and I'd feel like I'm just wasting my AE-1 setup.
I was thinking I'd try to do some blending to manually try to get the grain smooth, and I have been playing around with different filters for a while, trying to get the grain blurred/blended but maintaining sharp edges. I know how to not make that mistake again when shooting, but I still want to save this photo, because I like it.
Anyhow, any help would be appreciated, but as I cannot attach files, you will have to ask me to email them to you if you want to see them. I have actually thought about saving it as a slightly compressed jpeg to get the blending done.
I was thinking I'd try to do some blending to manually try to get the grain smooth, and I have been playing around with different filters for a while, trying to get the grain blurred/blended but maintaining sharp edges. I know how to not make that mistake again when shooting, but I still want to save this photo, because I like it.
Anyhow, any help would be appreciated, but as I cannot attach files, you will have to ask me to email them to you if you want to see them. I have actually thought about saving it as a slightly compressed jpeg to get the blending done.