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Author Topic: Black and White grain with 50D  (Read 2994 times)

ckurmann

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Black and White grain with 50D
« on: March 06, 2009, 05:46:37 am »

Hi All,

Thanks to an article on http://theonlinephotographer.com/the_onlin...blog_index.html
I came to know and love the work of Vanessa Winship. http://www.vanessawinship.com/gallery.php?ProjectID=157#

Now I want to try coping not her style but at least the look of the Pictures she takes. These are Black and White with high contrast and lots of gorgeous grain.

I've had a look around on the Internet for creating grain with Photoshop, but my own experiments have so far not been satisfactory.

Now I own a very noisy 50D (Don't want to discuss that though, I've got a 5D and 40D as well and the 50D is noisy for ME!)
So I'm thinking why not use the 50D as if it where a highspeed Film with lots of grain.

I still will need post processing however I am interested in Feedback on this Idea, especially if someone has managed to get a nice grainy look with digital.

Thanks
(I'll try posting my results here too in future)
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jeffreywilson

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Black and White grain with 50D
« Reply #1 on: March 06, 2009, 06:01:08 am »

By using my 400D at 1600ISO and printing in B&W to no bigger than A4, I've achieved results that I consider to be similar to pushed FP4 Plus (to 400ISO and processed in Microphen) or HP5 Plus (to 1600 ISO and processed in Microphen). PP is done in DPP and Photoshop CS2 from RAW files with no NR applied. Not much use for detailed work, but it gives a kind of nice, gritty feel. It looks like old (all of 20 years ago) photo-journalistic work. I imagine my 5D might give a similar look at 6400ISO, but I've never tried it.

Jeff
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Guillermo Luijk

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Black and White grain with 50D
« Reply #2 on: March 06, 2009, 06:09:18 am »

If you like Vanessa's grain and find it completely different from the digital noise present in your 50D's images, it's most likely that she is using some plugin or in any case _adding_ pleasant noise in some way to her final images.

Digital noise, leaving aside particular effects like noise banding or special issues with colour casts or whatever, doesn't differ from any camera. Thay can all be well approximated by a gaussinan noise (exactly the same as the Photoshop's tool provides), but added to each individual RGGB channel _before_ demosaicing. So noise in its origin will have no spatial structure (shape) at all. Each pixel's level of noise in the RAW file will be independent from noise level found in adjacent pixels.

In the final appearance of noise it will be determinant the demosaicing strategy used by your RAW developer and the amount of gaussian noise your camera produced (which solely depends on RAW exposure and ISO), but not the kind of camera. And this 'digital grain' (colour blotches and small straight labyrinths) will usually be far from the pleasant grain found on film.

So two digital cameras with a similar amount of noise in their RAW files will provide a similar noise appearance in the final image, no matter which cameras they were. Possibly what you are looking for is best achieved with a low noise camera where beautiful noise is added afterwards.

BR
« Last Edit: March 06, 2009, 06:21:48 am by GLuijk »
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DarkPenguin

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Black and White grain with 50D
« Reply #3 on: March 06, 2009, 10:37:08 am »

Look at page 5 of this ...

http://www.prime-junta.net/pont/How_to/n_D..._and_White.html

I've found that works very well.
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rovanpera

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Black and White grain with 50D
« Reply #4 on: March 26, 2009, 01:32:41 am »

Here's my high contrast b&w/color secret grain technique, This workflow mimics making traditional prints from a film negative. This is quite different from just adding some grain on top of a photo afterwards.

convert the raw file to a very flat file, no contrast enchangement or added saturation in the raw conversion.

bring the converted file to photoshop.

add a new empty layer on top of the original, fill the empty layer with 50% gray. Add noise (3%, gaussian, monochomatic), and change layer blend mode to linear light.

add the big contrast/levels adjustment layers on top of the noise layer. You can make quite strong contrast moves, because the noise layer will smooth any banding of value in the original file.

adjust the amount of grain with changing the opacity of the noise layer. maybe add a small gaussian blur (0.2 or 0.3) to the noise layer if the grain feels too sharp.


I'm using a more refined version of this technique, to control the grain better, but the idea is the same...
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