B&W Film Grain

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About B&W Film Grain

The grain in black and white film can differ greatly, depending on many factors from the film itself and its ISO value to the developer and developing techniques used.

The grain's looks range from that fine sexy black and white touch to coarse blobs. I am trying to figure out which types of film and developer combinations give which kind of grain, to avoid ending up with grain I don't like.

Photos in this group should have the grain visible. Either by adding a crop of a high resolution scan or by adding a larger image where the global character of the grain can be seen. Personally I prefer the former type, but don't hesitate if you know of other ways of showing off the grain!

Please provide information about the film used and - if possible - also about the developing technique. Also try to state at which kind of size/crop we are looking.

So far I made a site with crops of 4000dpi scans of some of my own films already, trying to illustrate the grain. Now I'm curious to see the grain given by other films and developing methods.

My strategy so far has been to make a 512x512 pixel crop from an image and save it as a PNG file. That way no loss of quality will happen and possibly alter the image (JPEG seems to be particularly destructive to grain detail) and because of the small size, flickr will display the image at its original size right away.

http://ssp.earthlingsoft.net/grain/