I wonder something Neverar : do you think that “dye cloud algorithm” will preserve the color timing of the image, even with a very high range ? Because the density and the inequal repartition of the silver particle are taken in consideration for the printing process to obtain a printed image faithful to the captured image. If you build an averaged image with the maximum of dye clouds, it will be very, very dark, no ?
This is one of the questions I have as well. Since the grains are necessarily what darken the image, if you were to use only the grains, the image would probably be quite dark. I expect there would need to be a luminosity adjustment based on the average luminosity of the frame before this process is done. But after the adjustment, there shouldn’t be a problem with brightness.
As for color timing, since the process would need to be done to each of the 3 color layers individually, the above process of adjusting the luminosity could be applied to each of the layers separately. In this way, even if one layer were to become quite a bit darker than the others with this process, the adjustment could correct for this. I expect this is where averaging whole frames (rather than separate pixels) would be very useful for preserving the original color grading.