Black Level (and Noise and other fun stuff)

[handbanana]

I read the manual, but what exactly is black level doing? To me it seems like it's raising the black level while adding purple (or making it dark and green and gross), which, a very quick and lazy test showed that when raising that black level, "black" objects had less noise than when just shot w/ black level at 0. Why? I was using flaat10p.

Also, let's say you were going for a color grade that had purple shadows and yellow highlights and that vintage, hipster, faded look complete with lifted blacks. Would just shooting using + black level and a warm white balance be better than shooting normal and color grading in post? If that is applied to raw data, "color grading in camera" would look better as far as noise and artifacting and banding, no?

[a1ex]

It does exactly the same thing as "dcraw -k". It's an offset applied to raw sensor data before white balance.

My 5D Mark II has a strong green cast in shadows, so I have to set it at around 15 or 20 to cancel it.

[handbanana]

Hmm... honestly I don't know what "dcraw -k" does, but I did notice that increasing it does raise the black point/shadows (while adding magenta) (histogram confirmed this). That said, why would the raised shadows look cleaner in terms of noise than darker ones?