Grainy black and white portraits

Software darktable
1

Update: had to delete the examples, so please disregard this topic for the time being.

Hello everyone! How would you achieve the effect of grainy, high-contrast skin, like on the photos attached. I was trying to play with “diffuse or sharpen”, but just can’t seem to find the magical combination.

(Examples deleted.)

Also attaching a RAW with my portrait as a playground for convenience. But really, I just need some good ideas!

DSCF7073.RAF (29.1 MB) CC BY-NC 4.0

Thank you!

2

Usually: hard light accentuating the wrinkles in the skin, and providing some contrast.
Then:

  • “normal” development to get a good base image, perhaps a bit more contrast than usual;
  • careful conversion to B&W (color calibration module, play with the three channels and normalization on or off);
  • “local contrast”;
  • perhaps add “grain” (with optionally another “local contrast” moved above “grain” to accentuate the grain).

Then adjust to taste.

DorS is too subtle for this work, and if you go to far, it can accentuate noise in the image in a (for me) very unpleasant way. (Digital noise is rather different from film grain). It also can become painfully slow…

Also, you’ll notice in all the examples that the eyes have catchlights. Those are missing in the example you provided, making it harder to keep the eyes “alive”.

As you did not provide a licence with your image, I can’t show what I came up with.

1 Like
3

What is worse, the examples of the desired result are not the OP’s work, and not even an attribution is provided. @isagalaev, please delete those images and provide links to pages that contain then instead. Pixls could get sued for such content.

4

My bad… Those were just examples I accumulated on my disk, and I’m not going to be able to find them again. I’ll repost when I find something similar.

5

Also, is there a default preferred license, and how do I provide it?

6

See the pinned post in Play Raw.
BTW, some can be found one these pages:
Imgur

(Would not load from me, but is linked from KlukovkinPhotography favorite photos on 500px)
Renard. B\W by Tonqer V

https://drscdn.500px.org/photo/48885064/m%3D900_k%3D1_a%3D1/v2?sig=cd8bd2d60ec2dfb2c6fb24a8f9f29decbc9e9ebcb50dee2fb93c86ef4ab75a03

7

Thanks for the explanation, added the license in the original post. And thanks for finding those links, the one to Pinterest actually gives an excellent range of examples!

But back to the topic, looks like I should start with the “use hard light” advice before I try to do anything with DT :slight_smile:

8

You said you wanted grainy. I used a preset in the DorS module and I used a preset in the local contrast module to get ‘grain’ like look.

DSCF7073.RAF.xmp (10.5 KB)

DSCF7073
DSCF7073863×1080 525 KB

9

Haven’t seen your original examples, but this looks grainy to me.

DSCF7073
DSCF70731906×2859 3.4 MB

DSCF7073.RAF.xmp (10.2 KB)