Digital BW, The Print

On Friday, May 10, 2002, at 07:37 AM, marktuckerdotcom wrote:

> It is weird that you'd write this. Just yesterday, as I was
> obsessing over this Canon D60 b/w file, thinking it looked too
> clean and clinical and something else I couldn't quite put my
> finger on, I added Noise (Monochromatic) to the image, and,
> WALLAH!, it immediately turned into an romantic image that had
> been shot with a 1955 Leica!  . . . So, play around with Noise, and 
> compare it to Grain, and then
> compare it to Film Grain. Each approach gives a slightly different

If you aren't already familiar with them, you might find the Photoshop 
b&w filters produced by SilverOxide.com interesting. They are intended 
to convert digital photographs or scanned color images into black and 
white images with the tonal characteristics of a variety of specific b&w 
films. The SilverOxide website--www.silveroxide.com--is a little on the 
crude side, but it's clear enough about how the filters function. I 
think that all the illustrations they provide are based on their Tri-X 
filter. The filters don't address the grain issue (only the way that , 
say, Tri-X, HP5, Delta 400, T400CN, and APX400 respond differently to 
the same colors), but I thought they might be relevant to a discussion 
of the "unfilmlike" look of unadjusted digital b&w images.

Dan Bowdoin