Digital Light & Color

There is a thread that ran on DPReview with the suggestion that adding some noise makes a digital photo look 'less digital'.

The thread soon runs out of steam, as oft happens at DPR, but the first page of messages gets the point across. It is:-
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/readf ... e=32800945

Does anyone around here use PWP to make their digital photos look more like old fashioned film?

Tony

Not me.

I only ever try to remove it, and even then I'm not quite as obsesseive about it as I used to be. But then I'm a long way from being a pro shooter. And I'm more of technician than an artist.

Mike.

For me, photo-realistic images will have 2 to 3% luminuos/chromatic noise. Otherwise, they will appear too 'plastic'.

I will add RGB noise to a color landscape image's nearly clipped cloud highlights to make the near clipping less obvious.

For black/white images... added noise can be an artistic benefit. See: http://www.ncplus.net/~birchbay/tutorials/bw/bw01.htm

When doing color portrait skin smoothing, adding RGB noise can again relieve the tendency for skin to look un-natural. See: http://www.dl-c.com/cgi-bin/discus/show ... #POST13798 and the posting immediately above.

To prevent/de-emphasize banding when making contrast/color adjustments to a color landscape image's 'near night time' skies, RGB noise can be used.

Den,

At first I read your post with horror! Add noise! Whatever next! But then as I thought about it, and followed the links I recalled that I have had occasions where the skin looked 'plasticky' so, once again thanks for the tip.
I also noted the idea to use the spec removal tool for shiny noses. I'd never have though of doing that in a million years - how do you come up with these ideas?

Mike.

Mike,

You said "I recalled that I have had occasions where the skin looked 'plasticky' so, once again thanks for the tip."

I'm surprised that so few PWP users have responded to this thread (but then I would say that wouldn't I!!).

Ever since I started with digital I have been aware of the debate about losing 'that film look'. And maybe it is the lack of grain that is much to do with this.

I have looked at Den's two URL's and extracted what I thought were the key points about how he adds noise. I have to admit that the first route does sound pretty time consuming and not something you'd want to add to a batch of prints. The second, if you are around Den, would be easier to use but what in your book is a 'large soft radius' ?

1. "Grain [noise] can also be added to monochrome images to provide vintage realism. Use the Noise transform [HSV,V] with amounts around 3% or preference. A good film grain texture, 'grain-tm400.png' [warning: 3119x4679 pixels, 11.8MB], can be downloaded or a 200x300 pixel, BW, 'full range', png tile of this grain is here [50KB]. The large file is centered around 50% gray, so expand to 'full range' in the Levels and Color transform. To use it as a texture, convert it to an 8-bit BW tiff. This allows it to be used as its own mask as the Overlay image in the Composite-Blend transform so that you can easily adjust amounts with the mask black/white sliders."

2. "In severe applications, the applied image area tends to loose contrast and posterize... this sometimes can be compensated with the 'ADD Noise' tool, set with a large soft radius and 99% transparency..."

Maybe noise does not recreate the feel of film? Any ideas then, folk, what might?

Tony

Tony...

Point 1:
Most photo-realistic images will have the 2->3% noise (grain) naturally occuring in the RAW conversion or camera jpg image [assuming proper exposure and near full dynamic range]... so perhaps adding noise should be considered as a 'restorative' step when post-processing edits remove the noise. Also, noise restoration may be image area specific and not needed for the entire image.

Scaling should also be considered. 2x3 pixel noise for a 2000x3000 pixels image would be 'gross' for a web size image: 533x800 pixels.

Point 2:
PWP's Brushes... I will initially use varying radii with a 90% transparency and a 90% softness. Stamping [multiple left mouse clicks with slight relocations] rather than Painting [left mouse click-hold-drag], letting the 'stamping' effect accumulate to a preference. For a stronger incremental stamping effect...decrease the transparency.

Tony/Den,

I've now tried the speck removal/add noise technique on a more severely blown skin tone image that your (Den's) example and was very impressed with ease of use compared to the clone tool. I was surprised that it worked so well, though having re-read 'Help' on the Speck Removal tool I understand why it works.
I noted that the transparency setting of the Add Noise tool has to be selected with care.

Overall I'm delighted to have learnt a technique to address an issue that I've struggled with up to now.

Keep those tips coming!

Mike.

Mike, Den,

Would you ever consider applying the effect to the whole image?

If you Google 'Making digital photographs look like film' it finds 40 million entries. A quick browse through the first page seems to find, mainly, people flogging off Photoshop add-ons - or rather cumbersome Photoshop work flows.

I have five A3 enlargements next to this PC. Three are digital and two film. I can see a difference, but don't know what it is. I am sure it is not simply snobbery that makes some photographers stay with film - and hence my quest to see if anyone around here has worked out what the difference is and how to achieve it with PWP.

Tony

Could it be that the film prints where produced/developed by a commercial film service and the digital prints produced with medium quality consumer available inkjet printers/papers and computer system?

Yes, Den, that is certainly why.

What fascinates me is 'what is the difference?'.

Less sharpness? Grain in the shadows? Longer tonal range? Shorter tonal range?

In other words, how do I take a digital file and use PWP so that it fools the film enthusiasts into thinking it was shot on film?

Tony