Hi Juan ... I'm not sure if I'm a "purist" but I don't care for anything fake. For years we've worked with grain in film, trying to reduce or eliminate it as much as possible, or, at times, trying to enhance it, all for creative reasons. Now we have digital, which has it's own type of "grain", and the argument is made so often that digital is its own medium, and film is its own, but sometimes the digi guys want their digi pics to look like film. So, after years of struggling and after new technology to reduce or eliminate film grain, here we are trying to add it back. It all seems rather bizarre to me.
That said, if someone wants to add grain to their digi pic, that's OK with me. Can "good results" be had by adding noise and gaussian blur? I don't know. Having played with it myself, and seen your recently posted example, I'd say acceptable results can be had, results good enough for some people in some circumstances, but thus far I don't like what I've seen. Maybe the purist in me is looking too hard to find fault, but, at least at this point, I want my digi prints to look digital, my Tri-X to shout Tri-X, my 35mm work to look like 35mm work, and the photos made with the 6x6 to look like medium format. My comment to Rob saying that I missed the film grain wasn't a criticism or even a desire to have film grain in digi prints or photographs so much as it was the idea that, to my eye and sensibility, film grain adds something to certain images, especially B&W images. Some of those images don't, imo, cut it when converted from color, or when shot on chromogenic B&W. In many instances they can look pretty good, especially on web pages, which seems to be the way many (most?) people are displaying much of their work these days. Yet when printed with an inkjet or a laser printer, on paper other than silver, they are clearly different images exhibiting a totally different look and feel. Mind now, I'm not saying worse, just different. What I don't like about Rob's image (that particular one and his earlier "Shuz"), some other digital images, and the three that you recently posted, especially yours (because of the subject matter and the situation) is that they look too "clean," lacking a certain grittiness that I've come to associate with conventional B&W photography that, imo, enhances certain images, and helps convey a certain feel or perhaps even a message, contributing to the story or the impact of the photograph. Since we saw Salgado's exhibit together, let me ask you this: do you feel his photographs would have been improved, and by that I mean would they have conveyed greater impact and more passion, had they been shot with "grainless" digital techniques, or do you think the grain may have contributed to the intensity of the photos, giving them more impact? To me, the grain added a certain raw dimension that helped give the photos their great power. I don't know if a grainless print would have had the same impact for me. Shel > From: Juan Buhler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Shel Belinkoff wrote: > > Fine work, Rob. Good to see what can be done with B&W conversions and the > > RAW format. Between you and Juan, I may be moving closer to a DSLR all the > > faster. I do miss the grain though ... > > The other day I started playing in Photoshop with some grain. I was > thinking about shooting a frame of Tri-X of a flat grey card, scanning > that and extracting the grain, to use on digital images. Then I > realized that good results can be obtained with some noise and > gaussian blur. > > What do the purists in the list think about these idea of fake grain?
