Content-Aware Grain

Tom Schum wrote:

Sal Baker wrote:

Truman Prevatt wrote:

For me the Nik collection provides the optimal tool for film simulations in among other things its ability to simulate realistic grain based on the film selected. I find Silver Efex to be by far the best S/W for emulating classic and the newer B&W emulsions with a very realistic grain structure with the flexibility to tweak the grain structure to taste. Granted I am partial to B&W but the few times I have used Analog Efex - it provides a comparable capability for color as Silver Efex does for B&W.

I agree. Silver Efex Pro is one of my favorite image editors. The grain sliders (Grain per pixel slider, Grain soft to hard slider and the many film type/tonality adjustments are wonderful for grain that looks like it's part of the image, not grain sitting on top. And the control point technology allows for quick subtle localized edits that would be harder to do otherwise.

I've had no reason to try other B&W software so I can't give a comparison. I'm sure there's other nice solutions out there.

Sal

Looks like Silver Efex Pro is also $149. Can you post a screenshot of the grain tool controls?

Silver Efex Pro is part of a collection, Nik Collection. The entire collection is $149.

Most of the collection is quite useful. If you like classic color film simulations - Analog Efex is to color what Silver Efex is to B&W. Color Efex is a very useful set of filters for editing and retouching color. Viveza is a highly precise color editor. Dfine is a very capable noise mitigation package that allows noise reduction without out softening the image. The sharpening image is quite capable and allows final sharpening for either electronic display of various sizes and resolution, and also printing with the printing sharping based on paper type, printer type and in inkjet, DPI, etc.

It's 149 for the package not just Silver Efex. It's a one time license.

https://nikcollection.dxo.com/25th-anniversary/

You can download a month trail.

https://nikcollection.dxo.com/download/

Truman Prevatt wrote:

Silver Efex Pro is part of a collection, Nik Collection. The entire collection is $149.

Most of the collection is quite useful. If you like classic color film simulations - Analog Efex is to color what Silver Efex is to B&W. Color Efex is a very useful set of filters for editing and retouching color. Viveza is a highly precise color editor. Dfine is a very capable noise mitigation package that allows noise reduction without out softening the image. The sharpening image is quite capable and allows final sharpening for either electronic display of various sizes and resolution, and also printing with the printing sharping based on paper type, printer type and in inkjet, DPI, etc.

It's 149 for the package not just Silver Efex. It's a one time license.

https://nikcollection.dxo.com/25th-anniversary/

You can download a month trail.

https://nikcollection.dxo.com/download/

I downloaded the free trial (489mb), opened Silver Efex Pro 2.

Content-aware, but far different controls than the ones in Exposure X6.

I don't find the grain controls particularly friendly. In this example it looks like there is a lot of grain in the shadows and hardly any grain in the highlights, but the amount of grain does vary depending on the local luminance, so I think it actually is content-aware.

Tom Schum wrote:

Truman Prevatt wrote:

Silver Efex Pro is part of a collection, Nik Collection. The entire collection is $149.

Most of the collection is quite useful. If you like classic color film simulations - Analog Efex is to color what Silver Efex is to B&W. Color Efex is a very useful set of filters for editing and retouching color. Viveza is a highly precise color editor. Dfine is a very capable noise mitigation package that allows noise reduction without out softening the image. The sharpening image is quite capable and allows final sharpening for either electronic display of various sizes and resolution, and also printing with the printing sharping based on paper type, printer type and in inkjet, DPI, etc.

It's 149 for the package not just Silver Efex. It's a one time license.

https://nikcollection.dxo.com/25th-anniversary/

You can download a month trail.

https://nikcollection.dxo.com/download/

I downloaded the free trial (489mb), opened Silver Efex Pro 2.

Content-aware, but far different controls than the ones in Exposure X6.

I don't find the grain controls particularly friendly. In this example it looks like there is a lot of grain in the shadows and hardly any grain in the highlights, but the amount of grain does vary depending on the local luminance, so I think it actually is content-aware.

Here is a near approximation in Exposure X6:

Rodinal emulation

Here are the grain presets I can select:

Grain tool presets.  You can make your own, of course.

I've spent a good amount of time playing around with this in PS and it's certainly possible to do, at least to my own satisfaction. Here's my process:

1. Create a 50% solid gray layer on top of your image

2. Filter > Add Noise > Check Monochromatic and Guassian, amount is up to you. (try 10-15%)

3. I like to add some blur to the noise to soften it. Filter > Blur > Guassian Blur > (something around 0.5-1.0)

4. Set this layer to "Linear Light" (yes, it looks bad, hang on)

5. Double-click the layer outside of the text area to bring up the Layer Style menu

6. At the bottom in the "blend if" section, find the white triangle on the right of the "underlying layer" gradient tool. Option-click and drag it to pull just the left half of the triangle down. This will smoothly decrease the strength of the grain on the highlights. How far down to take it is up to you. Somewhere between 1/2 and 1/4 down is where I like it.

7. Finally, set the opacity of this grain layer to taste.

Top is original image, bottom is with grain added as described here. This is at 100% opacity to demonstrate the effect, but I'd suggest turning it down.

Once you find the settings you like, make an action of this and even run it as a batch on your images.

There's lots of ways to build on this as well if you're into it. You can also create a few grain layers with varying size grains and blend them together. I sometimes like the look of scanned grain, and you can get that by first up-resing your image, then applying grain, flattening, and down-resing back to the original size. Doing this process separately on each layer of a color image is also pretty fun. I'm sure that Exposure and the like have some subtleties that aren't captured here, but I've always been able to scratch whatever itch I had with techniques like this. Hope this helps someone!

redisred wrote:

I've spent a good amount of time playing around with this in PS and it's certainly possible to do, at least to my own satisfaction. Here's my process:

1. Create a 50% solid gray layer on top of your image

2. Filter > Add Noise > Check Monochromatic and Guassian, amount is up to you. (try 10-15%)

3. I like to add some blur to the noise to soften it. Filter > Blur > Guassian Blur > (something around 0.5-1.0)

4. Set this layer to "Linear Light" (yes, it looks bad, hang on)

5. Double-click the layer outside of the text area to bring up the Layer Style menu

6. At the bottom in the "blend if" section, find the white triangle on the right of the "underlying layer" gradient tool. Option-click and drag it to pull just the left half of the triangle down. This will smoothly decrease the strength of the grain on the highlights. How far down to take it is up to you. Somewhere between 1/2 and 1/4 down is where I like it.

7. Finally, set the opacity of this grain layer to taste.

Top is original image, bottom is with grain added as described here. This is at 100% opacity to demonstrate the effect, but I'd suggest turning it down.

Once you find the settings you like, make an action of this and even run it as a batch on your images.

There's lots of ways to build on this as well if you're into it. You can also create a few grain layers with varying size grains and blend them together. I sometimes like the look of scanned grain, and you can get that by first up-resing your image, then applying grain, flattening, and down-resing back to the original size. Doing this process separately on each layer of a color image is also pretty fun. I'm sure that Exposure and the like have some subtleties that aren't captured here, but I've always been able to scratch whatever itch I had with techniques like this. Hope this helps someone!

I need to take some time and find out if I can do this in Photoshop Elements 2020.  It might save me some serious money.  Thanks for the instructions!

redisred wrote:

I've spent a good amount of time playing around with this in PS and it's certainly possible to do, at least to my own satisfaction. Here's my process:

1. Create a 50% solid gray layer on top of your image

2. Filter > Add Noise > Check Monochromatic and Guassian, amount is up to you. (try 10-15%)

3. I like to add some blur to the noise to soften it. Filter > Blur > Guassian Blur > (something around 0.5-1.0)

4. Set this layer to "Linear Light" (yes, it looks bad, hang on)

5. Double-click the layer outside of the text area to bring up the Layer Style menu

6. At the bottom in the "blend if" section, find the white triangle on the right of the "underlying layer" gradient tool. Option-click and drag it to pull just the left half of the triangle down. This will smoothly decrease the strength of the grain on the highlights. How far down to take it is up to you. Somewhere between 1/2 and 1/4 down is where I like it.

7. Finally, set the opacity of this grain layer to taste.

Once you find the settings you like, make an action of this and even run it as a batch on your images.

I assume you are using Photoshop.  Is this correct?

I am using Photoshop Elements 2020 and I am not finding layer blend functionality:

I see that I can make a noise layer and then merge it, but I think without the blend capability I cannot make the noise look like film grain.

Any ideas here?

I'm not sure what selection options elements has, but perhaps you could select the highlights through something like the color range selection tool and then use that as a mas on the grain layer?

redisred wrote:

I'm not sure what selection options elements has, but perhaps you could select the highlights through something like the color range selection tool and then use that as a mas on the grain layer?

I can see that if I spent lots of time getting very good at layers in Photoshop Elements 2020 I could get a good approximation to content-aware grain in my images.

But I'm just a dabbler, not all that interested in learning about layers.  It would be great to be able to buy a plug-in that would do the work for me!

Truman Prevatt wrote:

Assuming one is trying to simulate film grain the S/W needs to account for some basic facts of where film grain arises and the fact that different film produces different grain profiles. In B&W the developer also has an impact on the grain. For example classic D76 contains "silver solvents" which smooth off the sharp edges of the grain while Rodinal has no silver solvents and the grain edges are sharp. The reason why film developed in Rodinal appears to have more grain than D76.

Grain arises through the development process where in the exposed areas, the silver halides in the emulsion is converted to silver. The higher the exposure the more silver (denser negative). In the shadows there is little silver and the fixer removes the unexposed silver halide leaving only the transformed silver. In the shadows there is little grain in film and in the highlights is where the grain appears. Grain depend on the emulation type. Thick emulsion films like TriX will have contain bigger clumps of grain in a mix of sizes. Think emulsion films (classic show films like Ilford Pan F) contains much smaller crystals in the emulsion so much smaller grain with no large clumps. The Tabular grain films, Kodak T-max, Ilford Delta and Fuji Neopan, the silver halides are flatter and tabular. They tend to be finer grained but have less exposure and development latitude than the traditional grain films.

Film grain is just the opposite of digital noise since digital noise is higher in the shadows than the highlights.

For me the Nik collection provides the optimal tool for film simulations in among other things its ability to simulate realistic grain based on the film selected. I find Silver Efex to be by far the best S/W for emulating classic and the newer B&W emulsions with a very realistic grain structure with the flexibility to tweak the grain structure to taste. Granted I am partial to B&W but the few times I have used Analog Efex - it provides a comparable capability for color as Silver Efex does for B&W.

I've been reading this more carefully.

Previously I had forgotten that most film is negative film, and only slide film develops to a positive image.

So Tri-X film has a negative image that is most silver-dense in the highlights and least dense in the shadows, since the amount of silver is related to the exposure.

You said, "In the shadows there is little grain in film and in the highlights is where the grain appears."

Does this statement apply to the film itself, or to the positive image on the paper?

Just a quick update:  I bought Exposure X6 today, and I bought it only for the grain tool.  It is a luxury for me, to be able to afford this frivolity.

As time goes on, I'll be adding grain to my posts in the Fuji X weekly photos threads, but most likely nobody will notice.