I've been playing with some of of my images and converting a few to B&W. Back in the day, I remember we often embraced the grain in B&W images. Now, when I look at my digital conversions, which I personally like, I worry that what I interpret as the look of "grain" is just noise. If that is indeed the case, is there a time when digital noise can actually be aesthetically appealing in an image versus a technical flaw? I've attached a sample of one of the images I am working on. I'd like to know what you folks think. "Digital grain" or just noise?
Karen
Click to view attachment

Tricky ain't it ?

First of all I never took many pictures pre digital ( and none in the water ).

But I confess a love for B&W images.

FWIW ( and trust me that is not a whole hell of a lot ) the look of digital noise is no where near as nice as film, somehow it is sharper and tends to be more aggressive somehow.

I have used and loved Silver Fx Pro from Nik Software - while _all_ of the available effects can be emulated in Photoshop it is a hell of a lot easier with some of the custom tools, and the ability to compare side by side images is great.

For me - I found I like the look of Tri-X 400 which I have never used in the film version at all.

If you like B&W then it may be worth trying some of your images in the trial version of some of these tools for yourself.

Paul C

BTW - I like your image but reckon that it could use being pushed a bit harder in the hilights and shadow areas and adding of some grain.

Paul

Thanks for the recommendations. I will download the trials and play around. The thought of a Tri-X 400 filter makes me swoon. I used to love that film!

Karen

Digital noise is ugly. I hate it.

Grain in an image can be a feature.

Noise and Grain have different appearances. There are plugins that add the look of grain. There are plugins to remove noise. I've never used the "add noise" command to make an image look better.

I like your conversion very much.

Karen,

I visited your website and I like very much your raggies shots. Where is spot?

Damien

Raggies??? I'm just going to venture a guess that you are referring to the Sand Tiger Sharks. Did I guess right? Those were all taken in North Carolina which has some of the most incredible diving on the planet. Great wreck diving with lot's of Sharks, huge schools of baitfish, big Amberjacks, schooling barracuda...well, that's what we call them on THIS side of the ditch!

Okay, so you say noise looks very different than a "grainy" look. I still don't know how to tell if I've overprocessed it. Could it be that the noise in the background water may be apparent in the color version but look okay in black and white?

Oh yea - you can push B&W a lot further than colour before you end up with banding or posterization issues.

Colour noise can also often be smoothed out a lot in say LAB mode - by smoothing the A and B channels (this works well for both B&W and colour images).

Noise in the L (luminance) channel is a bit more tricky to shift.

In the wreck image - was it taken at high ISO ? or is the 'noise' just crud in the water ?

Often hi ISO images have dominant noise in only one of the colour channels (most often the blue ) which is why the LAB smoothing stunt works.

Difficult for me to see without the raw image.

Paul C

I'm pretty convinced that noise and grain are very different and agree with all the above. I think noise does much more than give a grainy look to the image it also degrades the image with loss of tonal gradation particularly in the shadows. This is why I am not an adherent to the proposal that one can overcome the apparent noise by simply increasing MP. Unlike grain which tends to display more evenly across the tonal range, noise is disproportionately more evident in darker and underexposed areas. Grain pattern, when used appropriately, I think can enhance the atmosphere of an image. I agree with Paul, play with Silver FX and see which way the image looks best to you.

Maybe someone has an old (shot on film) black and white underwater image that they consider to have attractive grain?

It may just bet that tastes have changed?

I think you have a point Alex. I do think noise is really more degrading and less attractive to the image. I used to intentionally create highly grainy images, studio portraits etc pushing Tri-x to 1600ASA or more and using some of the specialty high speed films at 6400ASA. I think the best way to describe it is that grain created a more even textured appearance of the photograph which was sometimes the intention. Even today, if I wanted to create that appearance I would do it with one of the filters using a low noise image, rather than creating a high noise image. Another aspect is electronic media. Grain in an an image on a monitor, does not impart the same textured appearance one gets in a print. I'm not sure either how grain transfers from an inkjet printer vs the old darkroom approach, I really have not compared, never having scanned negatives and printed them on my inkjet.

ISO was 400. I think what I'm seeing is crud in the water. Some of that got better when I converted it but when I bumped up the contrast it sort of reinvented itself in the water areas. I think making a good print will definately help me decide.

Thanks everyone!

One thing you may also want to look at in your black and white conversion is your channels. See which is the cleanest and use channel mixer accordingly to get the cleanest B&W conversion. When using Silver Effex, one of the sliders that can increase the appearance of noise or crud in the water is the Structure slider and one may need to back off on this, but then lose local contrast. And a last approach I can think of if you want to work at it is to selectively reduce noise or even use Gaussian blur in areas like open water, by using masks in Photoshop.

400 ASA with a D300 should not give you noise - unless you under expose and then try and reclaim the situation by pushing the exposure during the RAW conversion.

So it is likely crud in the water and the way forward is as Loftus suggests.

Would like to see some posts of BW film with grain as per Alex suggestion.

In fact I may start another thread and see if anyone has some images.

Paul C

TMax 400 pushed to 1600 (ex HMAS Hobart)


TMax 100 pushed to 400 (Harasti inside the J4 sub)


Coolpix 5000 at 800 (May have done some noise reduction)

This is not quite what the doctor ordered, as it's a monochrome conversion of a 1600 ASA Kodak negative shot with a Nik V:

Click to view attachment

Tim

And this is a digital mono shot under similar conditions this year, about 2 miles away from the previous image:

Click to view attachment

I've left the files on the large side to try and avoid adding compression artefacts to the inherent noise (you can call me pedantic, if you like, but grain is noise, although it has different spatial and luminance properties to digital noise).

Tim

I'm just going to embrace the noise...oh! I meant Grain

Hey Karen,
If you have some time download the new beta version of Lightroom 3. (free) They have added a grain slider in the develop module which mimics the look of film grain. You can add "grain" as you like and play with different effects. The new tool lets you control the amount of grain and the size and roughness. (LR Terms) To my eye grain and noise are very different things, though I hate to disagree with Tim . If you'd like to see a good explanation of the grain slider in the new version of Lightroom there is a nice video here. It's in the first video at the 17:00 min mark.

Have fun,
Steve

I am not so sure that Noise and Grain are different .. i think they are just two different term one for film and one for digital.

I think the trouble has arisen from digital images being noisey at the start to the point of being bad quality with nothing the user could do to change the outcome.
With film as we can see from examples and anyone that shot it .. the photographer chose to push the film to create an effect (or just to get AN image). When digital came along noise started from the sensors not being able to pick up all the information (is how I always perceived it) and the photographer often had little control over the noise.

I think that has changed as the tech has advanced and now we can push our images (sometimes it's a bit harder to do so, as i have experienced with my 5d2). If the tech keeps improving the only way to get grain or noise will be in post processing !

(mostly just brain farting out loud there but i did have a penchant for bw film when i started and always loved pushing it to get a desired look)

Grain has to do with the size of the silver crystals in film and how they clump within the emulsion layer, whereas noise is an electronic phenomenon whereby the desired signal is destroyed by electronic noise. Grain tends to be more uniform across an image (at least into the midtones) as is evident in the first image of Tim's whereas noise tends to manifest more in the shadows and in underexposed parts of an image. Film will exhibit characteristic grain pattern for that film irrespective of under or over exposure. Grain patterns vary according to the emulsion and developing process, which is why in the film days photographers may have preferred the look of one film over another. As far as I am aware noise patterns do not vary in appearance, say from sensor to sensor, except in the degree of noise, and pixel size.
Sure grain was not always desirable, but at times it was actually desired to impart a certain textured look to the image, noise is rarely desired in the same way. That is why filters still exist that impart the look of one film or another to digital images. Underwater photography probably has fewer situations where the textured look of grain is desirable, except possibly wreck photography. Topside I would frequently choose to impart a grainy appearance to images in both landscape and portraiture situations.
There are certainly similarities in that both may detract from the image, and both impart a granular appearance, but the textures they impart certainly look different to me.

Hey Steve, thanks for the link. I can't wait to check that out!


Loftus: That was a GREAT explanation and to quote Justice Potter Stewart, "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description...; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.."

Karen

You are right... Raggies is the name given to Sand Tiger Sharks in South Africa.
Where is DA spot in North Carolina. I have seen couple of pictures with wrecks and sharks, but I am not able to pu a name on the place. It seems like a avery interesteting spot to dive. What is the best season to visit North carolina for clear water and sharks?


Thank you

Damien

OK, OK I was being provocative in equating grain and noise: the distribution and appearance of grain in the midtones is often much more aesthetically acceptable than digital noise in the lower tones, and its spatial characteristics are almost always less obtrusive than digital noise. Both are, however, the intrusion of random or pseudorandom data onto the optical information that reaches the detector.

Tim

I agree Tim. I'm just trying to beat a point to death that grain was, and still is (simulated) used as an artistic textured effect for some images; whereas the nature and appearance of noise generally makes it much less useful for this purpose.

When I scan film to high levels of magnification the grain can look quite appealing. However, noise never does. Just one point as a pedant: When colour film is processed the silver is entirely removed by the bleach leaving the colour-coupled dyes - so the grain in colour film is slightly more complex. Kodachrome being non-substantive had the colour-couplers added during processing, which accounts for its perceived additional sharpness.

This gets my prize for this month's Pseuds Corner!

All of the digital B&W look to smooth and flat, no contrast. In fact, they look somewhat Panatomic without the lovely silver that made Pan films so beautiful. Thus they look flat and listless.

What do you expect when I have to struggle under the handicap of three degrees?

Just don't mention quantum mechanics...

Tim

Is that inherent to the digital medium, or an artefact of poor processing? My Nikon D200 produces quite pleasing, contrasty images in monochrome mode (jpeg), which require a strong, steep curves adjustment along with pulling in the ends of the levels adjustment in Photoshop to reproduce on a RAW file after monochrome conversion.

Tim

Here's an old shot of mine taken in Yap with a Nikonos V, 12mm lens and very fast Fuji B&W film (1600 Neopan). It shows off the grain effect of this type of fast film. I liked it in B&W, not colour. Literally the last film shot I ever took. Click to view attachment

..and here's shot I did on fast colour film (probably Fuji 400) with an enlarged section. I don't know if you can see the grain at 72dpi but it actually gives a nice 'David Roberts' feel.

what are the plug ins that add grain? is there one for aperture?

I've just added this pic to by blog 'The worst whale pic you'll ever see', so I thought I'd add it to this growing collection also, as the grain is very obvious. from most points of view its a terrible picture. I hadn't left shore intending to shoot anything larger than a nudibranch so was totally unprepared. I found some old b&w 400 ASA in the bottom of my bag (I had planned on shooting with velvia 50). It was shot with an old Nik III, no lightmeter, and an old plastic Subawider supplementary lens for those of you old enough to remember them. The negs were then developed and duplicated on to slide film through filters to give a bluey green tint. The end product was then scanned. So massively over-processed from a very dodgy original. But two decades on I still like it. Its not going to win any awards but I like the grainy look. Far as I know the ones I shot then are still the only photographs of a humpback underwater in British coastal waters (unless anyone knows different?)



I've put a bit more detail in my blog and will be uploading a few more from this series soon. For those intersted you can get there from here . If anyone knows of other whale pics from UK waters I would be interested to hear about it.

Colin