I dont really know what category this question would fall under so im putting it in processing.
Im wondering if there were/are some techniques used on the analog days used to reduce grain.
I love grain, but i would still like to know of such possibilities.
My main analog camera is 35mm half frame and when i look at movies i sometimes feel they get way less grain than me, and since, half frame is basically the Biggest aspect ratio movies have (obv theres imax, but thats an oddity), and mostly going lower with 3 perfs, 2 perfs and even using 16mm I have to wonder.
Sometimes i think they get less grain than even when i shoot full frame
is hard to provide examples coz my computer cant play 4k video and in 1080 you cant really zoom in to grain + the compression and such.
But i reckon, if there were such techniques people will know. So i still ask.
I know that there are certain developers that make the grain less prominent, but does that exist for color tho?
But maybe there werent, and its on digitazation that they remove it, and for projection the projector itself did a softening effect.
I really cant know and lack a lot of information.
Sometime movies will do a “freeze-frame”, where a single frame is shown for a few seconds. Then you will see the grain.
Different film stocks had different grain characteristics. Faster (higher ISO) films had more grain. Anyone else loved/hated GAF 500? Ilford Delta films had less grain than the similar speed FP4, HP5 etc.
Another technique to reduce grain was to shoot at a lower ISO than the film’s intended ISO. Of course, another method was to use a low-grain film that was originally low in sensitivity.
so there are no clever techniques in post? nothing they did in the multistep process? thats a bit disappointing
knowing that you can do unsharp masks in the darkroom and such i would imagine they would have had more tricks up their sleeves
this makes sense
doer such a thing exist for color/E6?
wanted to ask if t-grain film were available for color, but already wikipedia says " Tabular-grain film is a type of photographic film that includes nearly all color films"
so thats nice to know
i have pulled film a couple times, but it was always to adapt using 400ISO to more light. was pulling in cinema common?
seems like the most common ISO for movie stock is 200 and 500, i would have expected lower than that, something like 50; which is why i made this thread lol
I forgot to mention another factor: film size. I loved Ilford Delta in 5x4 size. Smooth as butter.
Unsharp masking was (and still is, in digital form) a way to increase local contrast, and that increased the visual appearance of grain. Some photographers I knew liked to slightly de-focus the enlarger to soften or eliminate grain. Of course, this also blurred fine detail, and I hated the results. When I had grain, I wanted it to be sharp.
There was no post shooting techniques available for film stock that I was aware of. In black and white some developing chemicals affected grain size but I am not aware of anything that worked the same for color stock.
As a film photographer we used low ISO film for fine grain. We also used medium format or view cameras for larger film to reduce the grain in enlargements. Digital is such a great step forward in my view because we can shoot relatively small sensors or relatively high ISO and have minimal noise issues.
If scanning film stock to digital it is possible to reduce grain using techniques that were not applicable to the analog days. The techniques are similar to denoising an image. The grain will be softened, but the trick is preserving the edge details so the image still looks sharp. Darktable has numerous modules that can help with this. A playraw of a scan from you might provide the opportunity for people to show various techniques in various programs to tackle grain from film scans.
i would have imagined that the dye clouds would have the shape of the grain they were attached to. i dont even know if the dye is “attached” to the grain at any point lol
so this would actually be a post processing analog technique to reduce grain! (together with the choice of developer) although i concur (without actually having tried it out myself) that i would probably not like the results either
Now that this has been mentioned i guess another one would be using a diffused light rather than condensed. it also softens the image and the grain.
Also, if i were to want to try and reduce grain in post, at least for color, i would try as such: separate into 3 strips, BW of each color with very fine grain film, and then recombine still very fine grain.
I have absolutely no idea if this would work. Most likely not if it wasnt being done.
It all depends on the assumption that if separating the film color components into 3 strips the grain would have a less noticeable component in each seperate color.
Which is, again, Most likely, not true.
But if i had to try something this would be the first thing i would try and a very naive approach