| Author |
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Hans-Georg Michna
Guest
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 Posted:
Wed Nov 09, 2005 3:55 pm Post subject:
Re: What is better Nikon Super Coolscan 4000 or Coolscan V E |
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On Tue, 08 Nov 2005 13:38:50 +0100, Don wrote:
| Quote: | That you would misinterpret such a widely known *neutral* fact as
"anti-Vuescan" and immediately lash out in a personal attack says it
all, both in terms of knowledge and temperament.
|
Don,
that reply of yours was not actually needed. I guess that many
readers like me, even those who know neither you nor Fred, took
his reply as a confirmation that your message was correct. (:-)
Hans-Georg
--
No mail, please. |
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Hans-Georg Michna
Guest
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| Posted:
Wed Nov 09, 2005 3:55 pm Post subject:
Re: What is better Nikon Super Coolscan 4000 or Coolscan V E |
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Kennedy,
just a remark on the sidelines.
Actually, the fact that two successive scans are misaligned
could be used by clever software not only to yield less noise,
but even to yield a higher resolution.
Ver time-consuming, but a very interesting way out for those who
cannot afford a scanner with a really high resolution.
I don't know the mathematics, but I guess that a doubling of
linear resolution is probably doable with a reasonable number of
scans.
If multiple scans were perfectly aligned, increasing resolution
would not be possible at all.
Is there any software that can do this?
Hans-Georg
--
No mail, please. |
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Kennedy McEwen
Guest
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| Posted:
Wed Nov 09, 2005 7:42 pm Post subject:
Re: What is better Nikon Super Coolscan 4000 or Coolscan V E |
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In article <g3e3n154je1ahk8ak14hjlb0lh9i0cm2ji@4ax.com>, Hans-Georg
Michna <hans-georgNoEmailPlease@michna.com> writes
| Quote: | Kennedy,
just a remark on the sidelines.
Actually, the fact that two successive scans are misaligned
could be used by clever software not only to yield less noise,
but even to yield a higher resolution.
Ver time-consuming, but a very interesting way out for those who
cannot afford a scanner with a really high resolution.
I don't know the mathematics, but I guess that a doubling of
linear resolution is probably doable with a reasonable number of
scans.
If multiple scans were perfectly aligned, increasing resolution
would not be possible at all.
Is there any software that can do this?
Yes, it is possible - it is a technique I have used myself in imaging |
systems, albeit with a deliberate and systematic misalignment between
successive frames.
The practical increase in resolution is limited by the system MTF though
(most often through the optics, but also by the spatial response of the
CCD), and is generally somewhat less than double that of the original
device.
I don't know of any software that permits the automatic alignment of
frames within fractional pixel pitches for interleaving or the decision
on which frames are aligned well enough with any others in the set to be
integrated with each other.
--
Kennedy
Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he's pissed.
Python Philosophers (replace 'nospam' with 'kennedym' when replying) |
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Lorenzo J. Lucchini
Guest
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| Posted:
Wed Nov 09, 2005 8:15 pm Post subject:
Re: What is better Nikon Super Coolscan 4000 or Coolscan V E |
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Hans-Georg Michna wrote:
| Quote: | Kennedy,
just a remark on the sidelines.
Actually, the fact that two successive scans are misaligned
could be used by clever software not only to yield less noise,
but even to yield a higher resolution.
|
I'm not sure the two can be obtained *together*, though. I think there's a
bit of Heisenberg involved ;-)
| Quote: | Ver time-consuming, but a very interesting way out for those who
cannot afford a scanner with a really high resolution.
I don't know the mathematics, but I guess that a doubling of
linear resolution is probably doable with a reasonable number of
scans.
If multiple scans were perfectly aligned, increasing resolution
would not be possible at all.
|
Yes, two perfectly aligned scans won't do it. But it's dubious to me whether
you can actually achieve higher resolution even with misaligned scans: come
to think of it, scans are not just *misaligned* in your everyday scanner,
but they're misaligned in ways that vary *in* the image.
The top may have some amount of average misalignment, the bottom may have
some other amount, *and each row or column might have a different and
random amount of misalignment* due to errors in the motor steps
(vertically) and loose movement of the CCD array (horizontally).
How would software find out about all this?
No, I think multi-scanning, in practice, will be much more useful for noise
reduction, with scanners.
| Quote: | Is there any software that can do this?
|
Yes, ALE, at http://auricle.dyndns.org/ALE/ .
It's wonderful software, though slow as hell.
by LjL
ljlbox@tiscali.it |
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Lorenzo J. Lucchini
Guest
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| Posted:
Wed Nov 09, 2005 8:20 pm Post subject:
Re: What is better Nikon Super Coolscan 4000 or Coolscan V E |
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Kennedy McEwen wrote:
| Quote: | In article <g3e3n154je1ahk8ak14hjlb0lh9i0cm2ji@4ax.com>, Hans-Georg
Michna <hans-georgNoEmailPlease@michna.com> writes
Kennedy,
[snip]
Yes, it is possible - it is a technique I have used myself in imaging
systems, albeit with a deliberate and systematic misalignment between
successive frames.
[snip]
I don't know of any software that permits the automatic alignment of
frames within fractional pixel pitches for interleaving or the decision
on which frames are aligned well enough with any others in the set to be
integrated with each other.
|
ALE can do all that, as well as perform more geometrical transformations
than just translation in order to get images aligned.
Trivial as it may sound, though, I can't find in the manual where it
describes a way to *manually* input the amount of misalignment between two
given images.
by LjL
ljlbox@tiscali.it |
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Don
Guest
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| Posted:
Wed Nov 09, 2005 11:17 pm Post subject:
Re: What is better Nikon Super Coolscan 4000 or Coolscan V E |
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On Wed, 09 Nov 2005 10:55:01 +0100, Hans-Georg Michna
<hans-georgNoEmailPlease@michna.com> wrote:
| Quote: | On Tue, 08 Nov 2005 13:38:50 +0100, Don wrote:
That you would misinterpret such a widely known *neutral* fact as
"anti-Vuescan" and immediately lash out in a personal attack says it
all, both in terms of knowledge and temperament.
Don,
that reply of yours was not actually needed. I guess that many
readers like me, even those who know neither you nor Fred, took
his reply as a confirmation that your message was correct. (:-)
|
Then, I'm afraid, you misunderstood his response, Hans-Georg. He quite
clearly does not agree and is offensive. Please read it again!
I wrote a very calm and factual message explaining everything in
detail and even offered two improved alternatives (Gaussian Blur and
manual alignment). Everyone else understood it as such (calm and
factual) but Fred was the only one to see it as "anti-Vuescan"!
So, calling my detailed and *neutral* reply "anti-Vuescan" and lashing
out about "whether YOU want to call what Vuescan does as multipass" is
clearly an overreaction and a personal attack of a very angry person.
Therefore, my response you quoted above is both factually correct as
well as appropriate.
Don. |
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Don
Guest
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| Posted:
Wed Nov 09, 2005 11:17 pm Post subject:
Re: What is better Nikon Super Coolscan 4000 or Coolscan V E |
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On Wed, 09 Nov 2005 10:55:01 +0100, Hans-Georg Michna
<hans-georgNoEmailPlease@michna.com> wrote:
| Quote: | Actually, the fact that two successive scans are misaligned
could be used by clever software not only to yield less noise,
but even to yield a higher resolution.
Very time-consuming, but a very interesting way out for those who
cannot afford a scanner with a really high resolution.
|
That's a very nice lateral thought but as Lorenzo mentioned, the main
problem is that the misalignment is not uniform. It would still be
possible to align them but it requires a lot of very time consuming
processing. And such alignment (due to the way it works i.e.
interpolation) will probably minimize the "useful misalignment" for
increased resolution (interpolation tends to blur the image slightly).
But even if all that worked it would probably not be worth it because
any resolution improvement would be very minor - if any! Namely, in
case of LS-50 and other 4000 dpi scanners, in practical terms, they
already extract the maximum resolution from average film.
A very few shots (using a tripod, high resolution film and perfect
exposure) may have more than 4000 dpi usable data but most shots are
more than adequately covered by 4000 dpi.
BTW, I read here a very long time ago that (since film grain is not
uniform) to literally get even the smallest grain one would need about
10,000 dpi resolution. However, the problem is grain is not two
dimensional but three dimensional ("grain clouds") i.e. film has depth
as well. Therefore, one could only focus on a particular "slice" of
the grain cloud making such extra high resolution of limited use.
Don. |
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Don
Guest
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| Posted:
Wed Nov 09, 2005 11:17 pm Post subject:
Re: What is better Nikon Super Coolscan 4000 or Coolscan V E |
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On 8 Nov 2005 08:44:53 -0800, "DenverDad" <the_applegates@comcast.net>
wrote:
There's also HDRShop which is free:
http://www.debevec.org/HDRShop/
However, it only works with 8-bit input. It will read 16-bit files but
it converts them to 8-bit before processing.
| Quote: | For reference, here are the other methods I've tried for difficult
slides:
1) Use the "long exposure pass" feature with this scanner: this did a
seemingly good job - until I started pixel peeking, that is. What I
found was that it generates some strange artifacts. These are probably
related to mis-alignment between the two scans.
|
Indeed! That's all I'm saying! If one doesn't pixel-peek it all
appears "great". But if you look carefully everything changes.
| Quote: | 2) Multipass approach. This seems to work as it is supposed to. But
the number of scans required in order to see a significant improvement
makes the scanning time just too long (especially with the rather slow
FS4000). I never really convinced myself i was seeing the
mis-alignment induced blurring that people worry about, however.
|
Need to peek at those pixels again! ;o)
The above "long exposure pass" is also multipass but limited to two
scans only. To see the multipass blurring compare to a single scan at
an appropriate resolution. Or perform multiple scans and merge them in
an editor manually. Then compare this merge to any component scan.
Don. |
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Roger S.
Guest
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| Posted:
Thu Nov 10, 2005 4:08 am Post subject:
Re: What is better Nikon Super Coolscan 4000 or Coolscan V E |
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Don wrote:
">that reply of yours was not actually needed. I guess that many
| Quote: | readers like me, even those who know neither you nor Fred, took
his reply as a confirmation that your message was correct. (:-)
|
Then, I'm afraid, you misunderstood his response, Hans-Georg. He quite
clearly does not agree and is offensive. Please read it again! "
Actually, Don, I think you misunderstood what Hans-Georg was saying. I
believe he was saying that when Fred responed with an ad-hominem
attack, and not a substantive reply, that it was clear that it was
because you were right. That is why you didn't need to reply- any
third party would clearly see this dynamic. Subtext is key.
You're right about the limitations of Vuescan multipass scanning and
it's too bad this isn't documented in the official user-manual and only
strewn about newsgroups. Where would I be without this group to
explain how VS really works? |
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Don
Guest
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| Posted:
Thu Nov 10, 2005 11:35 pm Post subject:
Re: What is better Nikon Super Coolscan 4000 or Coolscan V E |
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On 9 Nov 2005 14:08:19 -0800, "Roger S." <rsmith02@gmail.com> wrote:
| Quote: | that reply of yours was not actually needed. I guess that many
readers like me, even those who know neither you nor Fred, took
his reply as a confirmation that your message was correct. (:-)
Then, I'm afraid, you misunderstood his response, Hans-Georg. He quite
clearly does not agree and is offensive. Please read it again!
Actually, Don, I think you misunderstood what Hans-Georg was saying. I
believe he was saying that when Fred responed with an ad-hominem
attack, and not a substantive reply, that it was clear that it was
because you were right. That is why you didn't need to reply- any
third party would clearly see this dynamic. Subtext is key.
|
I understood Hans-Georg's subtext to mean that even though I was
right, I went too far with my reply to Fred. Specifically, it was
H-G's phrase "that reply of yours was not actually needed". You know,
as in "that was way over the top" or "easy now, no need for that".
But you're absolutely right, that phrase could be interpreted in two
different ways: 1. My reply is redundant, or 2. My reply goes too far.
| Quote: | You're right about the limitations of Vuescan multipass scanning and
it's too bad this isn't documented in the official user-manual and only
strewn about newsgroups.
|
I suppose to document it would mean admitting its, shall we say,
"limited usefulness". Unfortunately (to put it mildly) the VS author
is not exactly known for being up front about the program's
shortcomings. How's that for understatement? ;o)
| Quote: | Where would I be without this group to explain how VS really works?
|
Not only VS but everything else regarding scanning! This group is a
veritable treasure chest!
Don. |
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Roger S.
Guest
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| Posted:
Fri Nov 11, 2005 6:08 am Post subject:
Re: What is better Nikon Super Coolscan 4000 or Coolscan V E |
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"Unfortunately (to put it mildly) the VS author is not exactly known
for being up front about the program's shortcomings. How's that for
understatement?"
Very subtle and yet very clear ; )
"Not only VS but everything else regarding scanning! This group is a
veritable treasure chest! "
And on that we can completely agree! I've learned a lot here. |
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Noons
Guest
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| Posted:
Fri Nov 11, 2005 8:25 am Post subject:
Re: What is better Nikon Super Coolscan 4000 or Coolscan V E |
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Roger S. wrote:
| Quote: | You're right about the limitations of Vuescan multipass scanning and
it's too bad this isn't documented in the official user-manual and only
strewn about newsgroups.
|
Well, I quote form the VS user's guide, section on
"Maximizing Image Quality":
<quote>
The second technique is multi-pass multi-scanning, which most scanners
are capable of (however, some can't accurately reposition each scan
pass,
so this sometimes doesn't work well).
</quote>
Still think it is not documented?
(BTW, it works a treat on the Epson 4990.)
| Quote: | Where would I be without this group to
explain how VS really works?
|
To a certain extent, yes. But sometimes I wish folks here
got on with reading the users guide in its latest incarnations.
VS goes through new releases almost every week and the manual
is upgraded often as well. Perhaps reading the latest before
making a sweeping statement might be more appropriate?
After all I can say a lot of bad things about Windows 3.1 as
well as Linux kernel 2.2. But that hardly matters nowadays,
does it? |
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Kennedy McEwen
Guest
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| Posted:
Fri Nov 11, 2005 3:22 pm Post subject:
Re: What is better Nikon Super Coolscan 4000 or Coolscan V E |
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In article <1131574099.169422.71230@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com>, Roger
S. <rsmith02@gmail.com> writes
| Quote: |
You're right about the limitations of Vuescan multipass scanning and
it's too bad this isn't documented in the official user-manual and only
strewn about newsgroups. Where would I be without this group to
explain how VS really works?
Are you sure that's right? It's been a while since I used Vuescan or |
had any reason to read the documentation, but I distinctly remember
something in the documentation mentioning the problem of multipass and
actually naming a scanner that functioned particularly poorly in this
regard.
--
Kennedy
Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he's pissed.
Python Philosophers (replace 'nospam' with 'kennedym' when replying) |
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Don
Guest
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| Posted:
Fri Nov 11, 2005 8:37 pm Post subject:
Re: What is better Nikon Super Coolscan 4000 or Coolscan V E |
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On 10 Nov 2005 20:11:19 -0800, "Noons" <wizofoz2k@yahoo.com.au> wrote:
| Quote: | VS goes through new releases almost every week and the manual
is upgraded often as well. Perhaps reading the latest before
making a sweeping statement might be more appropriate?
|
One of the problems with VS is that it trips over itself frantically
trying (but usually not succeeding) to "correct the corrections" in a
recursive feedback loop. Judging by many users' complaints that often
only makes matters worse requiring even more rash "corrections".
Staying on top of all that is not an easy task for the user when even
the author himself can't keep up - as he repeatedly demonstrates.
Therefore, blaming the user for such a sorry state of affairs is not
exactly fair. In such a case the blame lies squarely with the author.
| Quote: | After all I can say a lot of bad things about Windows 3.1 as
well as Linux kernel 2.2. But that hardly matters nowadays,
does it?
|
Not really the same thing because complaints are about current VS
versions and the dynamic is totally different.
You'll be hard pressed to find a Linux user looking for old kernel
versions (which are freely available, BTW) because the new version is
worse. That happens with VS all the time. To add insult to injury the
VS author quickly deletes old versions in an attempt to try and hide
embarrassing bugs.
When a Linux fix is released it's only after comprehensive testing and
quality control. Because of that, as a rule, the bug stays fixed.
When a VS "fix" is rushed out, at best it only hides the bug(s) for a
release or two, at worst it also breaks half a dozen other things
requiring even more panicked "fixes".
Therefore, the flood of VS "releases" is not because the author is
responsive (as is the case with Linux) but because he's desperately
trying to put out fires only to end up starting more. That's why VS is
a house of cards while Linux is a rock, by comparison.
Don. |
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Roger S.
Guest
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| Posted:
Sat Nov 12, 2005 12:41 am Post subject:
Re: What is better Nikon Super Coolscan 4000 or Coolscan V E |
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Here's the text from the VS user-guide:
"There are several ways of getting multiple image samples. The first of
these is single-pass multi-scanning. Some scanners are capable of
reading each pixel position multiple times before advancing the scan
head to a new position. The film scanners that can do single-pass
multi-scanning are the Minolta QuickScan 35, Scan Dual, Scan Dual III,
Scan Multi, Scan Multi Pro, Scan Speed, Scan Elite, Scan Elite II and
Nikon LS-2000/LS-4000/LS-8000. The second technique is multi-pass
multi-scanning, which most scanners are capable of (however, some can't
accurately reposition each scan pass, so this sometimes doesn't work
well)."
I really don't think this is adequate documentation as it doesn't tell
someone new to scanning what to look for to know if it isn't working
well. I eventually figured it out by doing tests- change one variable
at a time and compare 4000dpi scans in Photoshop, but this is very
time-consuming. Ditto for not explaining the limitaions of the
"long-exposure pass" which has the alignment and other problems.
How about the limitations to its IT8 profiling, specifically issues
Vuescan has with non-Vuescan created profiles? (try assigning the same
non-VS created profile to a raw scan in VS and Photoshop and convert to
AdobeRGB- I got quite different results)
I'm thinking about putting together a real world guide to image quality
with Vuescan compiling some of what I've learned over the last year and
a half. |
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