For a very long time I've been looking for a way to create realistic looking film grain on digital photos. As much as I love digital photography I've always missed the magnificent atmospheric film grain you get when shooting on Kodak Tri-X 400 film. I've looked into several plugins but didn't find anything that's really worth the money. Today I was fiddling with some pictures I took on a photoshoot with a band and all of a sudden I found a way to do it! The result is exactly what I've always wanted as a digital film grain effect. No expensive plugins necessary, just a few simple Photoshop operations. I figured I'd share my technique with you in a small tutorial. I hope it will be useful for some of you!

Let's take a look at the following picture after converting it to black and white. The picture is 'finished' but I thought it's missing some good old Tri-X 400 grain. The image was shot at ISO 200 with a Nikon D70 and contains no noise or whatsoever.

The original image (shrinked, because the full size image is 3008 pixels wide)

Let's give this image a bit more of an 'analog' feel!

Last week this blog hit the Digg.com homepage for the second time since I started publishing my articles on it. The first time I got hit by the staggering amounts of visitors this results in was when I posted an article on creating themes for Typo. I was humbled and honoured and I felt proud because this was an article I spent a serious amount of time on.

This time around however things were different. I was astonished to see my visit count go through the roof by all kinds of places linking to this tiny entry in which I merely reposted an image I found on several other sites on the web. The post made it to del.icio.us/popular, the reddit.com frontpage and lots of other places of interest on the net. This all turned out to be only the beginning because the power of digg had yet to be released on me.

The post that caused all this has no original content, no effort from my side, nothing. In fact I even failed to mention that I think reverting to a table based layout just because it's sometimes hard to get my CSS to behave in all browsers is a sign of weakness I'd never agree with. To make a long story short: It was a 'quicky' I posted in less than a minute. Without completely thinking it through even. What makes the whole thing even more remarkable is the fact that the entry isn't at all recent. I posted it over a year ago. I couldn't believe what was happening!

I'm currently residing in Brighton at BarCamp Brighton and it's absolutely fabulous. Yesterday I attended dconstruct where I enjoyed some extremely interesting talks by people such as Jared Spool, Cameron Moll, my collegue Tom Coates and several other excellent speakers.dconstruct was an excellent event!

The nice thing about it was the fact that it was not very development-centric. This year's edition was all about the user experience and everything related to designing it.

After a fairly beer-induced afterparty I moved on for the next Brighton based event: BarCamp Brighton from where I'm writing this very blog post. Interesting talks, nice new people to meet and an overall very nice event to attend. For those who have no idea what a barcamp is: check out the barcamp website and you'll get the idea. It's called an 'unconference' where a whole lot of geeks come together. The aim of the event is that everyone has to do a talk on a subject he/she knows a lot about it. Having written a lot about client-side performance optimisation lately I decided to distill a presentation out of this post. For those who are interested in my sheets, they can be downloaded here. I was quite honoured to have Tantek Çelik in my audience!

That's it for now. Back to BarCamp!