Over the top

[Paul Dumm]

Thanks Jeff, Thats how we learn by tossing it out there and asking for one's opintion.

[Jay Beckman]

Jeff can correct me if I'm on the wrong path here but...

As I understand it, "Grain" is, by and large, a known element in shooting film.  A shooter often chooses a specific film in order to take advantage of the relative strength of its grain structure.

"Noise" is a byproduct of an electronic signal (hence the term Signal/Noise Ratio.)

Introducing texture in an effort to replicate grain is a personal, artistic decision.  Accepting noise because you had to "salvage" an image is an exercise in frustration.

There certainly is an astounding amount of latitude available in raw, but I still believe in trying to get the best possible image at the point of capture.  You can always distress or "dumb down" a perfect shot but it's much harder to create a gem from a file that, in truth, was a miss.

Just my $0.02...

[Joe Copalman]

^LIKE BUTTON.

I think added noise has its time and its place, but with this shot, the effect is slightly too extreme for my tastes.  Love the effect it has on the jelly-air though.

[BillOz]

I like it Paul. 
But, I too am distracted a little by the graininess/noise to the left of the verticals above the wing.

I think if you did some noise reduction in those 2 areas it would eliminate the distraction and the whole image would have a better feel.
From what I see in the rest of the image, I'm wondering if the noise is due to a processing action, like a filter or the conversion to Greyscale itself.

Grain and noise are quite related.
Grain in film was due to high speed film needing to be more sensitive to light, and so the actual crystals were larger.  To some extent the same happens with digital, though since the pixels can not be enlarged, the electronic signal from each pixel has electronic gain added to it, and with a boost in gain comes a boost in noise, as the electronics can't determine as well what is legitimate signal and what is error.   The better the system signal to noise ratio, the better it is at handling the signal from the pixels to discern what is real and what is noise.

[Joe Copalman]

This was a conversion I did a while back, and as you can see, I laid it on pretty thick with the vignetting, which I enhanced further with the burn tool.  While I liked the effect, the vignetting introduced some pretty significant banding into the image, and the burn tool only amplified it.  I had read a while back that one way to get rid of banding was to introduce noise to an image.  Struggling as much as I do with noise from the 50D (to a lesser extent now that I have embraced exposing to the right), this never seemed like an acceptable solution, but if there was an image for me to try this out on, this was it.  I gave it a try and it worked.  I was surprised by how much I liked it - it gave the image a gritty, dirty look to it that, to my eyes, just makes the Warthog look meaner.  It's actually one of my favorite images.  Really glad I gave added noise a chance on this one.

[Scott Youmans]

Super shot!  Not all that noisy.

[Joe Copalman]

Thanks Scott!  That's what I liked about it.  It wasn't all that noisy to begin with, but the editing I did introduced some pretty obvious banding, and adding noise helped solve that problem.  You can still see the banding if you scrunch your face up all Welker-like when you're looking at it, but it's definitely nowhere near as obvious as it was before.

[Scott Youmans]

Joe, Did you add niose in Photoshop or something else? Also, were you still editing the RAW file or had you converted it to a tiff or something. Thanks.

[Joe Copalman]

Scott, these edits were done to a tiff.  Noise was added in Photoshop Elements 6.