When Nikon showed us its two new DX lenses, it also let us try the Grain Effect processing that’s about to arrive on the Nikon Zf.
The option should arrive in a forthcoming firmware update for the camera. It allows you to add grain to stills or video, with a choice of grain size and intensity. The grain differs with each photo, and changes frame-to-frame in video mode to give a realistic temporal effect.
Grain Effect gives you a choice of six intensity levels and three sizes of grain. It can be combined with any of the camera’s Picture Style color modes but, at least in the camera we used, couldn’t be added after the fact using the in-camera Raw converter. This means you can shoot with grain and then re-process if you decide you don’t want it, but not the other way ’round.
Nikon was tight-lipped about when the feature will be available, but we’ll bring you the news as soon as it is.
In the meantime, here are some examples we shot. They were shot using a camera running non-final firmware, so we’ve not been allowed to provide full-sized images. However, these samples have been cropped, rather than resized, so that the size, shape and character of the grain isn’t changed.
Pre-production Grain Effect images from the Nikon Zf
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Note: All images are out-of-camera JPEGs cropped and re-saved.
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