Photography

A photograph carries evidence that light was actually counted. Film grain is the visible structure of silver halide crystals; sensor noise is the statistical spread in photon arrival. Both are technically imperfections, and both are part of why a real image reads as real.

Generated pictures and heavily processed photographs lack that evidence. They arrive unnaturally smooth, evenly lit, and free of the artefacts any capture pipeline introduces — which is why they can look subtly wrong even when every individual detail is rendered correctly. The eye registers the absence of an expected imperfection.

These articles cover where that texture comes from, how film grain and digital noise actually differ, and which visual tells give a generated image away — in the order your eye checks them.