Turn Fuji Grain Off?
I love Fujifilm Sim Recipes, but I have felt a common problem among the recipes. The grain settings look fine for general web use, but for those that wanting to inspect the images a little closer can see a pretty poor result. I personally think the grain settings in camera could be doing more harm than good, so I did a little testing and exploring with this.
I dunno about you but I spent $2k on my XT4 and I want the most pleasing Jpgs possible. However, I do understand that many are content with their images at a 'surface glance' and not something to be fussed over under magnifying glass, so please do not take any of this as gospel.
The Test
Just a quick grab of my daughter this week using the 'Eterna' filmsim recipe (found here; https://fujixweekly.com/2019/04/12/my-fujifilm-x-t30-eterna-film-simulation-recipe/)
The recipe specifies for strong grain (but does not specify weak or large), so I provide both variations, please check the description carefully of each image to understand what you're seeing.
1) There is a shot without any Grain.
2) There is a shot with Strong/Large Grain.
3) There is a shot with Strong/Small Grain.
4) There is a shot with my own Grain.
5) There is a shot with my own Grain applied via a Luminosity Mask (this makes things a bit more realistic, with grain showing up more in the shadow/dark areas and less in the bright/highlight areas).
Now, some might say applying your own grain defeats the purpose of filmsims, in that you're not providing SOOCs and now back in from the of the computer editing images once again. My answer to this is that any image I tend to care about (Jpg or RAW) typically ends up in a digital asset manager like LR anyway (for cataloguing purposes). I often spend 10-20secs lightly polishing the Jpg anyway and it's very easy to set up LR to apply a grain on import or create a preset action for this.
Anyway, what do you think?
My joy with the filmsims comes more from the colours, the choice of processing for the shot beforehand (rather than scouring through heaps of presets/LUTs or colour grading yourself). I also like to have a certain amount of pride in the rendering and IQ when someone likes to lean in a little more to inspect the photo.
And here’s the full sized (final ‘edited’) image (so you can get an idea of how close an inspection the previous shots were having).
