Chris Marquardt has inspired me to document a process he outlined in show 19 of his great podcast “Tips from the Top Floor”. In show 19 he described how to add grain to your black and white images. This can add punch to your images and can make them look like they were shot on high ASA black and white film. I rememberwhen I first started in photography, buying and shooting a 33 meter bulk roll of Ilford HP5 film that gave this great grainy look. It was great fun to shoot in low light, high contrast situations and get very grain shots. Here’s how to reproduce that effect via post processing.

Here’s how Chris described it and I’ll show you using GIMP 2.2 .

1. Here is the original image. It is a close-up of a rusted farm
implement. The picture contains interesting patterns, shapes and colors.

2. Here I have desaturated the image. I used the Mode –> Grey Scale
found in the image menu. There are a variety of ways in which to convert
a color image to black and white and some of them are quite complicated
and allow tremendous control. That is a lesson for another day.

3. I added a new layer and set it to “Multiply”. Later I’ll try
different modes.

4. On this new layer I apply a grainy filter. In this particular
instance I used the “Random Hurl” filter and you can see the setting I
used. You defiantly could us other “Noise” filters or create a grainy
filer of your own. There is too much graininess in this image for my
taste so now I will tone it down. You might like this really grainy
effect.

5. Now I just move the “Opacity” slider to adjust this effect to my
liking. Because the grain is on a separate layer, I don’t have to worry
about mistakes. If I don’t like what I see I can delete the layer and
start again. Here I found 20.1% opacity to be about right.

6. Chris recommends experimenting with different filters and also
different modes. Here I have used a “Soft Focus” mode and I with a
different amount of opacity. I like this better. Try it out and see if
you can add this tip from the top floor to your arsenal of post processing skills.

If you like this, go to Chris’s “Tips from the Top Floor” and sign up for his podcast. There is a great conversation going on there.

These tutorials show step-by-step techniques for accomplishing a variety of photographic "digital darkroom" tasks using the GIMP image editor. Even if you use another image editing program such as Photoshop you will find that tutorials apply to that program with only slight modifications...