Re: Dust removal

Would be very careful of the dust removal feature in scanners. They accomplish this with a technique that makes the image less sharp. The software feature is named ICE and it can cause more problems than it solves. You would be better to turn it off and remove the dust spots with the healing brushes in Photoshop.

Explaining grain in color film gets complicated as it has to do with the way color film is construced. Essentially color film starts off as three layers of B&W film. The silver halides are not equally senstive to colors, so the blue layer has to be made more sensitive and therefore more grainy. In the processing of color film, the silver is replaced with cyan, magenta, and yellow dyes but they retain the grain structure of the silver halides. There is a lot more to it than this, but this is about as simple as I can explain.

As photographic paper is made the same way, when you make a print, you get the grain from the original film as well as the grain in the paper. Paper is less grainy than film, but still has some.

People will argue this, but I can take a 10.1 megapixel digital shot and make a 13x19 inch print that is much better than a 13x19 print made from a 35mm Kodachrome ASA 25 slide.

I just wish I would have had digital back in the 60s and 70s.

Jerry Day
Longmont, CO