Film grain effect for black and white

[thebigsky]

Hi,

Does anyone know of a good method for producing film like grain for a black and white digital conversion?

Charlie

[BinaryFx]

Hi,

Does anyone know of a good method for producing film like grain for a black and white digital conversion?

Charlie, this may be of some help (other filters or filter combinations such as film grain, mezzotint/dots, texture/grain could be used instead of add noise):

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/howto_smartnoise.html

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/links.html#G


Regards,

Stephen Marsh.
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/

[thebigsky]

Thanks Stephen,

I'll take a look.

Charlie

[claudermilk]

Check this thread at FM: http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic2/229683/

I recall that & tried it out. Basically you grab the PNG they link (it's still there)--it's a scan of an actual Tri-X frame grain--and blend it with your shot. The now-broken links were to examples & they looked amazing.

[S. Horton]

Check out products such as Alien Skin's Exposure.

I'm extremely happy with it.

[mwgrice]

Two other approaches are to shoot at high ISO and underexpose a bit, or to copy scanned-in grain.

For the first, I shoot at 1600 ISO and underexpose a wee bit. The act of correcting the exposure in camera raw adds noise. Depending on the camera you may not even need to underexpose to get the noise.

For the second (i.e., not enough noise), see this page (http://www.prime-junta.net/pont/How_to/n_Digital_BW/a_Digital_Black_and_White.html?page=5). He also has a link to a grain scan that you could download. Basically, I copy a grain scan layer on top of the image, set the blending mode to Overlay, and adjust the opacity as desired. If you keep a copy of a grain scan around, it's very quick, too.

[thebigsky]

Thanks for all this help everyone, I'm trying out the various methods mentioned to decide which I prefer.

Charlie

[Halliday]

Another vote for Alien Skin Exposure. I loved it while my trial lasted.

[S. Horton]

Almost OT, but the other one to look over is Nik Color EFex -- Pretty nice.

They both provide you with some very useful color handling as well. The cross-processed film effects can come in mighty handy.

http://www.niksoftware.com

[LAB.rat]

RealGrain (http://www.dgrin.com/www.imagenomic.com/rg.aspx)

Just mentioning it. No "real" experience with it...

[pathfinder]

Your linkie is not working Lab Rat:dunno

[jdryan3]

Your linkie is not working Lab Rat:dunno

I think he means this (http://www.imagenomic.com/rg.aspx) :wink