Scanhancer any good? Canon FS4000US

Anyone used scanhancer and is it any good? I have a Canon FS4000US but when
enlarging my scans of negs and slides they always look grainy (at 4000dpi).
I also wondered about the merits of using Vuescan or Silverfast instead of
Filmget. Any advice or tips appreciated. I want to get the most detail from
my film with minimum grain effect.

You are probably aware of all this: if an image is grainy then scanning at
4000dpi will yield an excellent scan of the grain pattern. Unless you have a
specific need for a scan that large you may want to consider limiting scan
size to 2400 dpi. There are a number of photshop plug-ins that will reduce
the apparent graininess of an image, and their are techniques to do it
manually. One reason for being wary about large scan sizes, and even using
48 bit color, is that eventually most of the data will have to be stripped
out anyway for image manipulation and this will be done in an arbitrary
fashion by a program, like your printer driver, over which you really have
no control anyway. Even 48 bit color has its caveats: the color gamut can be
so much wider than the printer's that you introduce an unintended artifact
when the image is converted for 8 bit/300 dpi printing.

In article vMRBc.17$785.16@newsfe3-gui, John
writes
Anyone used scanhancer and is it any good? I have a Canon FS4000US but when
enlarging my scans of negs and slides they always look grainy (at 4000dpi).
I also wondered about the merits of using Vuescan or Silverfast instead of
Filmget. Any advice or tips appreciated. I want to get the most detail from
my film with minimum grain effect.

Scanhancer works, so well in fact that Minolta have adopted it as an
integral feature in their flagship scanner. However, it does increase
the scan time significantly because it scatters a lot of the light.
--
Kennedy
Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he's ****ed.
Python Philosophers (replace 'nospam' with 'kennedym' when replying)

In article , bmoag
writes
You are probably aware of all this: if an image is grainy then scanning at
4000dpi will yield an excellent scan of the grain pattern. Unless you have a
specific need for a scan that large you may want to consider limiting scan
size to 2400 dpi.

NO! Scanning at a lower resolution will usually make the grain aliasing
worse, depending on the algorithm used by the scan driver. See the
discussion on this topic recently in comp.periphs.scanners under the
thread "Elitechrome 100 Slide Scanning with Coolscan V ED" for an
explanation of why this makes the situation worse.

The *correct* way to do this is to scan at the full optical resolution
(4000ppi in the case of the FS-4000) and then downsample in one of the
better implementations such as Photoshop using bicubic interpolation.
Alternatively, filter the image with an appropriate blur radius (half
the ratio of original and final resolutions) and then downsample in a
non-filtering application.
--
Kennedy
Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he's ****ed.
Python Philosophers (replace 'nospam' with 'kennedym' when replying)