I have been playing with Nik Software's Silver Effects Pro plug in for Photoshop and Lightroom over the past few weeks. One of the features of the plug in is a "grain engine" which "accurately recreates your digital photographs to look like a traditional black and white image...mimicking the traditional silver halide process." This post is not a review of the grain engine. Also, I have not used all of these film emulsions so I cannot say if they are accurate or not but I wanted to show a few samples generated by the software.

Apart from the adding the grain, no other tweaking was done either in Lightroom or Silver Efex Pro.

The original photo was taken using Kodak Ektar 100 which is a pretty fine grain film. What follows is a "neutral" B&W conversion with no grain added and then five samples which mimic Kodak ISO 32 Panatomic-X, Agfa APX 100, Ilford FP4, Kodak Tri-X 400, Fuji Neopan 1600 and Kodak TMax 3200. (There are twelve other film types that I am not showing here).

Let me know what you think.