Smoothing Grain in Photoshop

[nightfly]

I usually shoot street with Tri-X and develop in Rodinal 1:25. I like the grittiness it gives me generally. However sometimes I'll throw in a shot of my wife or friends and gritty Tri-X is not too friendly to skin. Is there a way to counteract the graininess in Photoshop and make these shots more flattering?

 

[dmr]

Two words: Neat Image 🙂 Well worth it!

If you're getting coarser grain than you think you should be for the film, however, be sure you're not getting grain aliasing, which can magnify the apparent grain. If you're scanning the negatives, try scanning at a higher resolution and sizing down. You may find that the apparent grain decreases.

 

[RF-Addict]

There is a difference between noise and grain. Neat Image, noise Ninja, etc. do all a very good job in the noise department, but for film grain they are pretty much useless - in fact, they might make the grain even worse. One thing that might help, is to check the three channels of your picture and pick the one with the least grain/noise.

 

[nightfly]

The grain is definitely film grain. I generally like it and try to get it nice and grainy (hence warm rodinal at 1:25) but it doesn't suit every photo. To access the channels I guess I need to switch the mode from greyscale to RGB (usually scan in greyscale).

 

[pphuang]

There is a difference between noise and grain. Neat Image, noise Ninja, etc. do all a very good job in the noise department, but for film grain they are pretty much useless - in fact, they might make the grain even worse. One thing that might help, is to check the three channels of your picture and pick the one with the least grain/noise.

Really? I personally have not found that to be the case, although the effect can be somewhat different with film versus digital files...

 

[dmr]

but for film grain they are pretty much useless - in fact, they might make the grain even worse.

OOOoohhh, au contraire! Neat Image is very good for film grain, B&W and color. Here's a quickie I just did as an example using a Fuji 1600 scan, blown up to show the grain:

This is a full-res 3200dpi scan.

Here's the same crop with Neat Image, 40 on all three sliders:

You can get a more dramatic reduction if you play with the profiling and the sliders. This was just a quickie auto-profile.