Adding grain to B&W portraits

[tomczak]

I found myself out of my depth again: I was asked to restore a really old B&W photo. On top of being damaged, the photo has an ugly texture. I did what I could: repaired the scratches, removed the texture, sharpened facial features, improved contrast, smoothed the background - all the while trying not to overdo it. Yet, the picture looks plasticky at the end (I probably contributed to it, but at lease partially this is a result of the original being somewhat plasticky already).

So I decided to add grain, all withing PWP. Here is what I've done:

1. made new image, the same size, 50% gray, then addedd Gaussian noise to it
2. median-blurred the noise (the idea was to produce more lumpy grain structure)
3. sharpened the result
4. Composite using soft light with the orignal, but using brightness mask [0,0], [70,100], [100,0], going easy on Amount - the idea being that the film grain is mostly visible in upper midtones.

The result seems ok, at least to my eye - somewhat more pleasant and less artificial. I wish the grain that I added had even more coarser structure... or that I could do it a bit more interactively, trying different grain settings and seeing the result.

The grain issue has been discussed here previously, but I wonder if others have some better (if not simpler) ideas on how to accomplish this.

Cheers.

[Charles2]

You might look at this essay, which gets to a discussion of your situation:
http://www.prime-junta.net/pont/How_to/ ... _films.pdf
It includes images of grain that you can capture and use. You could upsize for coarser grain.