Canon S90 pics with 'HCB Tri-X' mode ;)

Those are cool, very nice! It's interesting to watch the film only folks get more and more insecure are time goes by and digital technology advances. I don't think the OP ever said that this was better than B&W film yet several people have gone out of their way to say how much better film is. Hmm....


Agreed. The tone of many of the posts has been pretty snobby, which I would expect here but even still. haha.
 
The problem with digital film emulation is:

1-It emulates the look of scanned film, not darkroom printed. And scanned film has no grain, it has aliasing due to the scanning device; this aliasing can be quite different to a wet print and, unfortunately, prints don't scan well.

2-There is NO and absolutely NO such thing as Tri-X "grain", silver fx and all are missing the boat. There is Tri-X in Rodinal, and Tri-x in D76, Tri-x in D76 1+1 at 20o or at 24o, with a lot of agitation or not, and on and on and on.

3-In color, it gets even more complicated as computers have a very very very limited color gamut. Shoot red dominant subjects with slide film, then with digital... you will see the difference. Again, the problem is that if you scan slides you end up with pretty much the same limitations as shooting directly in digital.

Digital is good at what it does best, and it is surely not look like film.

Take digital for what it is, it has a lot of qualities, but those are surely quite different.

K
 
Agreed. The tone of many of the posts has been pretty snobby, which I would expect here but even still. haha.

Sure, if you don't like the pictures, you must be a snob.

Anyway, I'm not even film only, I just think digital and film have different uses. Trying to emulate film with digital just seems kinda stupid, because if you want that look: JUST SHOOT FILM!
 
It just looks like digital noise to me. The "grain" is just not consistent enough or tight enough throughout the image. It's just blotchy-ness. If the manufacturer wants to emulate film grain, they would be better off capturing the cleanest image and applying some PS-type filter.

Maybe adding some sharpening to the image would help the effect (?).

Btw, I don't think my dislike of this effect is snobbery, so much as it's just my experience with both film and digital rearing up. It doesn't look like film grain, and it's an undesirable digital artifact. So for me it's a double whammy that offends (for lack of a better word) both my film and digital senses. :)

I think you did pick some good subjects to show the effect (particularly the front of the car which is very Gibson-like--as someone noted earlier).

/
 
Personally, I wish there was a way to turn off/on the grain effect at will. The tonality that mode gives works quite well for me in a lot of settings, but the grain can sometimes be a bit overpowering - regardless of it's relative "authenticity".
 
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