Grainless Film
Hello everyone,
today I would like to show you my latest experiment.
How would celluloid film look if it was without grain?
This post is about that, to see the “look” of film without its distinctive feature: grain.
The process
In order to remove grain from film, I didn’t use some sort of software “grain reduction” nor “noise reduction” filter or tool.
Instead, I used the technique of frame averaging in photoshop.
To do so, I took from 5 to 10 frames of the same scene one after another.
Once I got the film developed and scanned, I loaded all the frames in photoshop as layers, aligned them and the merged them as a smart object with blending method “mean”.
Doing so will average the “signal”, the subject of the photo which is constant, while reducing the film’s grain which in contrast, is random.
Film stocks tested are: Portra 160, Portra 400, Silbersaltz Vision 3 50D, Ferrania P30 and ORTO.
The results
Silbersaltz Kodak Vision 3 50D:
Left/right - No grain/grain
Kodak Portra 160:
Left, no grain. Right side, Grain.
Portra 160 in dark areas. Top part, grain. Lower part, grainless.
Kodak Portra 400
Ferrania P30 (ISO 80)
Ferrania ORTO (ISO 50)
Ferrania P33:
Before and after with Ferrania P33 Grainless test.
Below, the full image photo gallery:
