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?
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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.
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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.
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Grain on color film has also chroma issue.
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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.
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I suspect that people today are nostalgic for film grain. But I remember disliking grain when I shot film - especially with my first camera (Minolta Autopack 460T using 110 film). To my taste even 400 ASA film was too grainy due to magnification for printing.
When I graduated to a film SLR in the late 80’s I generally used 100 ASA film, and even then I wasn’t crazy about film grain.
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Regarding the argument that it’s mainly just nostalgia: I have not grown up with film and did not really understand any of the mechanics around film noise in 2017, but I recall that when I watched Dunkirk in 2017, I found the film noise in that movie to be very pretty.
I can’t find the artists name atm, but I remember watching a talk with a photographer who will put 10-20 stop ND filters on so that he can crank his ISO and still underexpose…just to increase the amount of “noise” he can get in his image. He was pretty explicit that he thinks digital noise is just as interesting and beautiful as film grain.
They are out there, they just are likely to be in the art world as opposed to influencers and instagrammers.
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Rikard Landberg said he underexposes and pushes to get noise.
Might be an OK idea if you really like the look of noise and you know that you will never ever upscale your images for printing.
Upscaling noise looks shite and this is the main reason I think it should be removed before adding simulated grain again post-upscale (to mask interpolation artifacts).
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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
Definitely. For example, this noise, when suppressed only partially with AI (NIND denoise) or without, can be used to create texture that fills the defocused background and makes it less empty. On the other hand, after the AI treatment, this looks quite different from pure ISO noise.
Well, scratch that 
- it started as a rescue edit when I forgot to switch from camera settings appropriate for birds to those appropriate for flowers, but then found that I cannot remove noise without losing the identity of the image.
RAW: DSCN0097.NRW (25.2 MB)
First-stage ART edit: DSCN0097.NRW.arp (12.1 KB) - just some exposure and non-AI denoise - serves as the input to NIND
Denoised file + AI mask made with SMART (pointlessly, as a parametric mask would have also worked) + ART sidecar in a zip: DSCN0097-denoised.zip (67.4 MB) - a really basic edit that just boosts saturation of the flowers
All files are licensed as CC0.
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I feel like this works because the noise mirrors the fine colour variations in the petals. Gives the whole image a fragile look and feel to me.
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Grain also helps to hide technical limitations of the digital media.
Low Resolution or up scaled images can get a Subjectively more pleasing look.
If the Picture gets a strange texture or blurriness from DeNoising. Or all sorts of artifacts. Color bending or some compression blocks don’t look as bad (to me) with some grain.
I even have the Grain effect in VLC turned on by default.
There’s a difference between film grain and digital noise:
Digital noise is additive to the image, a corruption of the image. The higher the ISO, the more variant the noise. It is applied to each pixel independently.
Film grain is the image. The analog image is made of grains. The higher the ISO, the bigger the grains. (Each grain is a silver halide crystal).
Thus, the grain looks contrasty. With higher ISO, the building blocks of the image get coarser, but the contrast remains stable (ish). Resolution suffers, but contrast (mostly) doesn’t. In fact, adding artificial grain increases the perception of contrast, even if the image is naturally soft.
Noise, on the other hand, looks smudgy. It obscures detail, and contrast suffers.
In signal processing terms, the two are more or less equivalent. But the way the image looks, grain is preferable. A good workflow is to denoise a digital image, which makes it soft, then add artificial grain, which restores a perception of contrast.
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I would say: grain adds a perception of texture.
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