Film to digital and noise

[Rob MacKillop]

I exchanged my Leica Q for the Leica M-A, and now I am entirely happy with my cameras - first time ever, I think.

The M-A arrived today, so I quickly ran through a whole role of XP2 and took it to Boots for a 1-hour service, just to ensure the camera was working as it should. It is. The prints, despite being cheap prints, are excellent, and I'm looking forward to future rolls being developed, processed and scanned properly.

I was disappointed when I opened the scans from Boots, as they looked nothing like the prints.

The print looks something like this:




...but the scan looks even worse than this: click on it for a bigger size.



Actually that didn't come out as bad as it does in Lightroom. The entire image is covered in tiny white dots, which I'm assuming come from being badly scanned. What else could it be? The prints are perfect.

 

[Rob MacKillop]

I'm adding another scan here, as I want to see what it looks like on this site. It looks awful in LR, again with tiny white dots, millions of them, all over the image. Boots call it their High Res scan. I've deliberately made this image much smaller than the original, as the dots disappear when the size is reduced.

 

[Pete Askew]

Something isn't right. It's almost as if they have turned up noise reduction too high on the scans. What do the negatives look like?

 

[Rob MacKillop]

The scans look very clean, Pete, so I think you are right. Well, I intend to have Harman do my developing in the future, as they have done for me for quite a while, but this was a case of testing the camera quickly, so I had no option. Pity, as I quite like this shot, the geometry of it. But I can easily scan this shot with my Epson 550 - far from the highest quality, but I can surely do better than Boots.

 

[Rob MacKillop]

Here's a big reduction of my humungous scan. Much better.

 

[John Holland]

They may have done a high-res scan of the prints (instead of the negative), and you are seeing the paper texture (or the scan light reflections off the paper texture).

 

[Rob MacKillop]

Ah, you could be right, John.