A decade in a frame

This week marks the 10th anniversary of my engagement to my wife, and to mark the occasion I surprised her with a framed print of my proposal atop Angel's Landing in Zion National Park. This post isn't entirely self-indulgent--the process of making the print taught me some things about scanning film negatives and reducing noise, and left me with a new appreciation for digital sensors, memory cards, and shooting RAW format.

(The pictures, by the way, were shot with my old Fuji film camera by an Australian tourist who just happened to be at the peak at the same time we were. Both he and my future wife were surprised when I dropped to my knee with the ring, though thankfully only one of them starting yelling, "Crikey! Oh, wow! Crikey!" If your engagement wasn't accompanied by a passable impersonation of The Crocodile Hunter, I'm afraid you missed out.)

The first step in getting the prints was to scan the negatives at 1200dpi, which created enormous files that looked as though they had been washed alongside a new pair of jeans. (Step 1 below.) Some quick adjustments in Lightroom brought me to the image in step 2, with Photoshop getting me the rest of the way to image 3, which I eventually sent to the printer.

Of course the devil is always in the details. The scan was incredibly noisy, and not the consistent high-ISO noise I'm used to from my D300. I experimented with a few noise-reducing Photoshop plugins before settling on NoiseWare (which I bought before finding this discount code, darn it) which did a commendable job, as you can see in a 100% crop below.

Unfortunately, you can also see that the old axiom "garbage in, garbage out" remains undefeated. Even after NoiseWare did its trick, if this level of sharpness had come from my camera today I'd clean my lens and try again. But given the amount of detail that was in the original scan I'm actually pretty happy with the result, because from a normal viewing distance the print looks terrific. And even more importantly, it earned me a kiss from the woman who answered, "Of course I will!" ten years ago.

Here are the three images I scanned; as usual, you can click for a bigger version.