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Adding realistic grain to digital photos is a deeper rabbit hole than you think

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For months now I’ve been obsessed with emulating the film look into my digital photos. It all started with me exploring the panoramic aspect ratio of 65×24 and other wide aspect ratios and trying to understand what makes a photo cinematic. As part of this journey I’ve also started to research grain, how is it formed, and how it looks on different film stocks and, truth be told, I was not ready for how deep this rabbit hole is.

In order to recreate grain well in our digital photos we first have to understand what grain is. On film, the images are composed of grain. Be it silver halides or dye granules, they are organic shapes that are distributed unevenly in an emulsion and when exposed to light they create the image you finally see.

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Comparing Real film grain to Adobe Lightroom film grain

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In my never ending search for that “special” photographic look that sets me apart from the competition, I recently discovered that overexposing film increases the grain and adds a vintage pictorial look to my images. So I wanted to explore that look further. To that end, I wanted to find out if this film grain can be copied in the digital world using Adobe Lightroom. So I went out and shot a few rolls of film and shot the same images with my digital camera. I used the same lens and F stop for each image. (Well, almost the same F stop. I made a few mistakes but it was close enough for my purposes)

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