Today’s Post by Joe Farace
Goethe once compiled a list of what you needed in order to compliment the sense of the beautiful that God had implanted in the human soul, and to a list that included hearing a little music, reading a little poetry and seeing a fine picture everyday of your life…—Philip Kerr
Photographers love to tinker with their images. If there’s too much digital noise or grain in a photograph, we use all kinds of digital methods to eliminate it. If there’s no grain in our digital images, we want to add some. Note: In the smaller-sized JPEG files you see in this post, the grain may be too subtle to appreciate. The best way is to see how the grain really looks is try some of these techniques yourself and apply as much or as little grain as you like. There’s more on grain in my post Making Noise and Grain Work for You, which features one of my favorite photographs of Mary.
If you already have Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, you can use it’s built-in Grain filter. That method may be too easy for some pixologists, who like to find more difficult ways to create effects. Trick: Use Photoshop’s or Elements’ Diffuse Glow filter. This method produces a more subtle grain effect and doesn’t produce the mutilated pixels that the Grain filter does. Thanks, M.P.
If you’re in a hurry, you gotta use power tools. When working in the digital darkroom, I have a “20-minute rule.” If you can’t achieve the effect you want in twenty minutes, you probably never will.
How I Made this Photo: I made the original image (above right) at the Colorado Railroad Museum. It was captured using Kodak Color Negative film and shot with my Canon EOS 1N and while the lens was unrecorded, I’ll bet it was the EF 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 II USM lens,
Color Efex’s Old Photo plug-in is a fast way to add grain and convert the image to monochrome while producing a grainy “old newspaper” look. Tip: Yank them sliders: Using Old Photo is simple. Just move the sliders that control the various effects, including grain, and look at the results in the Preview Window and let your aesthetic sense be your guide.
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Joe is the author of Creative Digital Monochrome Effects with new copies selling for $4.96 used copies available from Amazon for a little more than four bucks. No Kindle versions available at this time.