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Comment by ISL | Hacker News Reader

If adding grain seems like a strange thing to do, consider it as a way to signal to the eye, "This is the smallest scale on which there is any information, you'll have to infer anything smaller." I rarely add grain to images, but when I do, it can sometimes give a more-organic and hence perceptually-real feeling.

There are image-software companies whose specialties include careful emulation of grain. I don't use them, but plugins like https://nikcollection.dxo.com/silver-efex-pro/ are intended for that very purpose.

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I suppose this is part of the reasons that "Dune Was Shot on ALEXA LF, Transferred to 35mm Film, Then Scanned Back to Digital"

https://ymcinema.com/2021/12/03/dune-was-shot-on-alexa-lf-tr...

That part is also known as "we had a very large post-production budget to consume so we decided to create a hell-ton of work out of nowhere". I've worked on a few digital-to-film-to-digital jobs back in the day and all of them were done not for the actual "look" properties of it but for transacting more money through the workflow.

If the above is true, it is sad and OK at the same time. Sad because it is wasted work and wasted human potential (imagine same money applied to voluntary work, social contributions, etc). At the same time, it generate jobs, which is not bad considering the levels of unemployment. Either way, I would prefer more people employed competing for digital plugins that are indistinguishable from this process.

This.

Is this the same reason some people prefer phonographs to digital recordings?

I think for this and for photos it’s more the idea of imperfection. That patina, wabi-sabi or other entropic term gives an emotional response I don’t find in digital. I’m not looking for lossless digital I can’t really discern, which DAC basket to put my eggs in, or if the latest digital remaster just demolishes the loudness delta. I have, but these days I want a more tactile experience. I’m looking for the experience which surrounds the music or photo. And when I didn’t take that picture or record that music, it feels more ‘real’ when I can vicariously feel the experience involved.

Anecdotally, I went on a trip with some friends recently and everyone took their phones while one person took a manual camera. Everyone uploaded to a shared album at the end, and the pictures which paint the picture of the weekend to me are the ones shot by the amateur which are often a bit out of focus compared to the hyper accurate self-stabilizing self-focusing technology.

Perhaps it’s the romantic in all of us.

Film makes you think about your shots in a way that you just don't have to to with digital. This is not to disparage digital cameras at all; they are amazing, and I love mine. But they are also different, and despite digital's many advantages, film offers something unique to the medium.

it feels more ‘real’ when I can vicariously feel the experience involved.

That implies the opposite of what you enjoy. The original experience had no grain, had no hiss. It was pure and clear.

Perhaps we’re looking for the feeling of memory or dream. I believe that’s why 24 fps persists in film, for example — because it’s less real in the immediate, analytical sense, but more real in that it feels closer in some undefinable way to the way we imagine or remember — or even perhaps in our non-analytical moments directly perceive — things to be

Tactile experience. Yeah, that's how I got into analog stuff.

I'd say the reasoning is adjacent but not the same. There will always inherently be some harmonic distortion when playing a record, and that sounds pleasing to the ears in a lot of cases.

But the main reason records usually sound better is simply dynamic range.

I'm a huge fan of 80s club music (Paradise Garage type stuff). I've spent a lot of time and money over the years ripping those original records, because unfortunately the digital releases of a lot of those songs were brickwall limited, which ruins the dynamics and punchiness of the drums and other elements of the music. I'm sure the same applies to other genres.

CDs can support 90+dB of dynamic range, which is pretty great, with much less distortion and noise. A good classical recording can show this off pretty well.

On the other hand, 80s club music was presumably mixed and mastered with vinyl-style distortion (and other features such as rumble, crackle, hiss, etc.) in mind. (Modern producers often try to replicate the pleasant saturation of analog equipment – and sometimes add vinyl-sounding artifacts, for better or for worse.)

A well-mastered digital recording should (and does!) sound great, but I think the problem is that many CDs aren't well mastered and many were overly compressed, sometimes with terrible clipping, in service of the dreadful "loudness wars."

In 2022 most dance music is produced digitally to begin with, and DJed digitally as well; presumably mastering engineers and DJs have figured out how to make it sound good when it's played in a club.

Old albums were also recorded, mixed, and mastered on tape, which naturally saturates and compresses a bit in a way many listeners find pleasing to the ear.

Loudness war had many, many victims and the sound murders still happen to this day.

I wish replay gain was standarized to a level where every player could just add few DBs in analog way for those songs that use more of the dynamic range, instead of mastering engineers having to choose between "loud" and "correct"

Among many reasons people might prefer vinyl, one that really stands out to me as a plausibly objective factor: mixing for the media limits overall/constant “loudness” and imposes some higher degree of dynamic range than you’ll generally find in digital releases over recent decades. My understanding (which I’m sure will be corrected or have nuance added if I get this wrong) is that the “loudness”, often called “brick wall”, found in digital releases doesn't work well on the physical surface of a record because it can cause the stylus to skip more easily, so mixes tend to have more dynamic range to accommodate that… and people who prefer the media may generally prefer the dynamic range it forces.

> and people who prefer the media may generally prefer the dynamic range it forces.

I mean a recording with a larger dynamic range is an objectively better recording. You can always crank up the volume if you want the loudest part to actually be loud.

That’s the paradoxical situation. You have an inferior medium with a better mastering.

Perhaps. But for me it's more that the LP is a great format for popular music. I don't really care how the recording was acquired as long as it sounds good.

You can still download an old version of Nik Collection from when it was a free-to-use Google project. I'd be interested to know what people think of the grain emulation in that old version.

https://archive.org/details/nikcollection-full-1.2.11

That is a very interesting explanation. I prefer looking at images with grain. I wonder if that is why.

Where have you found the explanation? Is it something you have inferred yourself or has it been studied?

The reason to prefer grain would also be a good question. The recent return to analog photos we are observing recently might be caused by a shared preference for grain and other aspects of the film process. I was going to suggest this preference would likely be correlated to age, but most film enthusiast blogs/instagram I've seen are from people in their 20s.

So my current theory is that photo/cinema enthusiasts are overly exposed to this visual look, since they get inspired by masters of the past, and the sample of acclaimed photo/cinema artists have to be still larger on the film media. And, direction, post production and stakeholders in Hollywood would also have this bias and welcome like to continue producing material with this looks.

Texture is a visual ingredient just like color or form – and if you see it this way it's nothing strange adding it in post. Basically any analog method of visual reproduction adds some form of texture as a byproduct, but not digital screens. Yet think of a paper, it's the texture in the paper that makes it real, that it appears as something you can touch.

I agree and have no qualms about adding it either in post or by deliberately shooting high ISO to enhance the grain.

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