adding noise

[goch@unb.ca]

Experimenting with a Minolta Xt and an Olympus 5050z at EI 400, I am not pleased with any sort of noise reduction that I have tried or seen.

As a long-time film photographer, I am perfectly happy with noise in the form of film grain. Indeed, grain is often an essential part of the image. I would like to do a partial reduction of the digital noise and then add film-grain noise (something like T-Max 100).

Is it feasible to extend NI to add noise in the form of grain sampled from scanned film? GrainSurgery2 does this, but I'd rather not spend the $150 for that feature alone. If NI uses enough of the subroutines that adding noise would use, such an extension would certainly be welcome. I imagine that people combining images would find such a feature helpful as well.

Adding grain isn't, of course, just a matter of overlaying a pattern. Real grain varies not only according to film, developer, temperature and agitation, but also according to the density of the image at any point on the negative. GrainSurgery2 seems fairly flexible without be unduly complex (at least in conception).

[NITeam]

Thank you for the suggestion. In the future, we will probably implement this feature of adding grain. At the moment the easiest way of adding grain seems to use a layering techique where an image and a grain (removed from a blank sample image) are combined in adjustable proportion.

Vlad