Digital BW, The Print

Hi Steve, Allesandro

Reading all these postings over the last few days on methods of 
grading that do or don't avoid grain has been fascinating and quite a 
learning experience for me. I wish I'd known about this forum a long 
time ago - I could have saved myself a lot of aggravation. Education 
is enlightenment :).

Eccentric in the extreme as it is to use dodge and burn right the way 
through to create the majority of my contrast to minimise grain, I've 
done it recently when I was starting over on the images I've already 
graded - images that were overly grainy through my dumb over-use of 
levels layers. So I knew exactly how I wanted them to look going in. 

It's meant - using largely dodge and burn, and minimal use of Curves 
on selected parts of the image - that I've regraded an image from 
original scan to completion in less than two hours, often just an 
hour. On the rare occasion I've overdone it in one area of the image, 
I just layer in that part from the original and work on it again, so 
the use of dodge and burn has not had a terrible finality for me.

Also, having started as a painter years ago, I love the feel of using 
my Wacom pen and tablet with dodge and burn - I feel like I'm
painting again! (I could never use the mouse - no fun at all).

However, for future new photos, I'm going to use Curves layers with 
the History brush much more. Having said that, however, after 
experimenting with all the different methods discussed over the last 
couple of days, I still found that the grain was minimised the most 
when doing it my eccentric way, avoiding cranking up contrast through 
Levels/Curves altogether. However, I do acknowledge that it's kind of 
impractical - to say the least - to be painting the contrast into 
every bloody blade of grass!

Nick


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