How's this for "grain"?

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OK, let me see what you think here. Just for the hell of it, I bought my Sigma DP1 to a friend's party last night, and shot in B&W jpeg mode. The DP1 is not known for its awesome jpg output, but I wanted to see if I could just pretend it was an RF with TriX in it, and see what I came up with.

I took this shot in low light at ISO400. It was underexposed, so I pushed it a couple stops and brought out some serious luminance noise. I increased the contrast and clarity in Lightroom. Then I sharpened the crap out of it, dimed the detail slider, turned off masking, and set the radius slider to 1.5. The first image below is the result; the second is the before and after in Lightroom.

party.jpg


partycloseup.jpg


OK, so, obviously, this does not look like film grain. But I have to admit, I really like it. It is definitely digital, and it is definitely noise, but it has a certain character. Like film grain, it's a natural artifact of the technology that created the image, and as such, I can't find a lot to hate. Even the jaggies on the wineglass don't bother me so much.

Am I nuts? Perhaps it's that I'm a child of the digital age, but I'm finding that digital noise, right out in the open, is no big deal. (I'm talking luminance here, not chroma, which I still think looks awful.) This has kind of been an evolving process for me, coming to like luminance noise in digital B&W photos. I've made a little preset for this, in fact, called "DP1 B&W jpeg," as a starting point for these quick-n-dirty snaps.

So what do you think? Am I a total philistine for liking this almost as much as film grain, or am I on to something?
 
You're right... it's definitely digital. I would like to see some more before totally making up my mind.
 
That looks like B&W HDR. I like it, made several with this effect myself, but take care not to use it all the time. It's going to be boring.
 

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In this particular photo, I did indeed use a lot of fill light before adjusting the contrast--so there is a bit of HDR action going on. The rest of the set doesn't have that particular adjustment, though. Give me half an hour, I'll toss up a couple more.
 
mabelsound said:
Like film grain, it's a natural artifact of the technology that created the image
Click to expand...

Film grain actually makes up the image, while noise is a by-product of the image. I don't like the noise here. It doesn't look anywhere as pleasing as grain. But that is just me.
 
Anupam Basu said:
Film grain actually makes up the image, while noise is a by-product of the image. I don't like the noise here. It doesn't look anywhere as pleasing as grain. But that is just me.
Click to expand...

I think that's a legitimate distinction. And ultimately, I DO find film grain more pleasing, which is why I still shoot the stuff. That said, I like the way this looks, in the end.

Here are a couple more. They were correctly exposed to begin with, so the effect is less pronounced. Again, it doesn't look like film. But it does have, to my eye, more of the qualities that I like in film than the original images do.

I don't pretend these are good pictures, by the way. ;-)

party2.jpg


party2closeup.jpg


party3.jpg


party3closeup2.jpg
party3closeup.jpg


The thing that got me thinking about this is the Pentax K20D. All the way up through ISO1600, this camera does not apply any noise reduction by default. I really like the way the RAW files look, and found myself wishing that other digital cameras left the noise in. It looks "natural" to me--that is, not analog at all, but organic to the digital process. It's gotten me starting to see luminance noise, in manageable amount, as being like the useful effects of digital music recording, as opposed to the very different useful effects of analog tape.
 
frankly it just looks like its oversharpened. Still it makes for very clean web images. Now if only it wasn't that expensive. I've come to realize that the main point of taking pictures is to share it with people who matter and for me, most of them now view them online and not in print. Such is the way of the 21st century. My wide repetoire of compacts are almost solely for web use these days and this has different standards to what i'd expect for prints I really like the clean look at 600x400px of your shots but i can't afford this cam just yet.
 
I like the images - in comparison to the original jpegs. I shot with the DP-1 for a weekend and found the jpegs really soft and lacking detail - they look like a veil is covering the whole image. You seem to have found a good way to remove that veil.
Yes film looks better, but that's not the point. You've taken some bland (exposure-wise not subject!) images and made them look better. Nice job!
 
mabelsound said:
OK, so, obviously, this does not look like film grain. But I have to admit, I really like it. It is definitely digital, and it is definitely noise, but it has a certain character. Like film grain, it's a natural artifact of the technology that created the image, and as such, I can't find a lot to hate. Even the jaggies on the wineglass don't bother me so much.

Am I nuts? Perhaps it's that I'm a child of the digital age, but I'm finding that digital noise, right out in the open, is no big deal. (I'm talking luminance here, not chroma, which I still think looks awful.) This has kind of been an evolving process for me, coming to like luminance noise in digital B&W photos. I've made a little preset for this, in fact, called "DP1 B&W jpeg," as a starting point for these quick-n-dirty snaps.

So what do you think? Am I a total philistine for liking this almost as much as film grain, or am I on to something?
Click to expand...

Perhaps - I've done something very similar with my Pentax *ist DL and was pleasantly surprised with what I got. The noise in this one is emphasized by a combination of sharpening and pulling the blue and aqua channels right down to simulate a red filter:



On the other hand, here's a T-Max 400 shot for comparison. However much I may like the digital one, this just looks better to me:



One thing that I think is important is that while film grain is random and granular (duh) at any magnification, the digital noise gets progressively uglier (at least to my eyes) the more I enlarge the image. The two shots above look satisfactory to me at small web sizes but I'm not sure how the digital image would stand up to a 12x8 print as the processing I've applied has created some interesting effects at the pixel level.

In fact what I'm talking about may not be strictly relevant to your thread as the digital shot here wasn't noisy at all until I started fiddling with it, but when I started typing this post it felt like I had a point to make.🙄

Matthew
 
Actually, I like both of those pictures, at least at those small sizes. I do agree that the digital noise would probably seem much weaker when printed in a large format, but I have yet to try it.

Thanks for the compliment, Dave! I still can't decide if the DP1 is "worth it"...it was a reckless impulse buy...but there is a lot to like about it, despite its shortcomings.
 
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