In my quest to try and make more film-like edits I’ve stumbled into countless tutorials on how to create film grain, I can definitely see the appeal, but what I’m curious about is how come people don’t like ISO noise too? The stark rgb nature of it is definitely less versitile for sure but I think theres a lot of really interesting moods and effects you can get by underexposing and brightening an image to get some ISO noise in it.
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It comes from a time when you got a lot of noise at 400 iso.
And digital had to be better than analog.
So like the cream that floats in a bottle of milk, someone decided it was a defect and it have a better commercial appeal if we say that this is fixed.
I think it is less smooth looking compared to film noise.
And many nostalgic bits of media used film, so subconsciously it looks more nostalgic.
Also, ISO noise is a limitation of our current technology, and those sorts of limitations are usually never considered a welcome effect.
From my understanding film grain is also a technical limitation and used to be undesired. Maybe as people get more nostalgic for digital media ISO noise will also get more desired?
I uses to hate it… but now i don’t care to mush. it gives it some what of a real look in the days of Computational Photography and Ai.
Grain on the other hand is some how more ascetically pleasing. (to me)
But i try not to overdo it.
I think the cause for ISO noise hate is the chroma part of noise. Not gonna pretend I’m an expert, but film grain doesn’t really have it because of the nature of film capture, while in digital it’s from amplifying the digital signal.
I don’t mind grain as long as it doesn’t cause significant detail loss. I used to be quite heavy handed on denoising with Darktable’s non-local mode. Now, I use wavelets to get rid of chroma noise and luma noise … if it’s there, it’s there
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The old film grain and modern digital noise look quite different…
Sometimes a manually added film-grain look add’s a bit to the perception of sharpness…
I like the effect sometimes in b&w converted digital pictures.
I think it’s fun to experiment a lot with both noise and grain and see when it helps you getting a desired look.
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I have no proof for this but it sounds plausible to me: film grain is a variety of sizes to compromise between sharpness and sensitivity. Digital noise is all one frequency (at least it looks like that to me) and looks harsher because of that.
Grain on color film has also chroma issue.
But at least what I looked for, it’s not the bright scattered rainbow particles kind of noise
Having grown up and worked with film my take is that grain can have an artistic quality, but when it came to photography I was paid for such as commercial shoots, portraits and weddings it was every bit as undesirable digital noise.
I personally don’t get over fussed about some noise in my images. I shoot a lot of high ISO shots including 32,000 ISO on my Canon R7 and ambience is more important to me than everything be totally smooth.