Film Grain Overlay
Add a film grain overlay to photos and video: seeded noise that re-seats 24 times a second like real film, in color or mono. Same grain on every export.
What is film grain?
Film grain is the random texture of processed photographic film. It comes from tiny particles of metallic silver (or clouds of dye, in color film), developed from the silver halide crystals that caught enough light.
Bigger crystals make faster, more sensitive film, and it's also visibly grainier. Digital images don't have grain, so editors add it, often as a grain overlay, to give clean footage the texture of film.
How to add grain to a photo or video
Amount controls how strong the grain is. Since the grain is random noise drawn for each pixel, this page also works when you just want to add noise to an image. RGB gives each color channel its own grain for colored speckle. Turn it off for mono grain, like black and white stock.
Blend mode decides where the grain shows up. Additive lays it evenly over shadows and highlights, while Softlight and Multiply keep it more in the midtones and shadows.
Fine and Heavy change the strength. Mono and Dusty drop the color, and Soft light uses that blend at a higher amount.
Settings for a digital portrait, a black-and-white street photo, a banded sky and a dirty print
For a digital portrait, use Fine (Amount 0.12) with RGB off and Blend mode Softlight. Soft light leaves pure black and pure white alone, so no speckle lands in the deepest shadows or the clipped highlights, where it'd look like dust. For a black-and-white street photo, go with Mono at Amount 0.4 in Additive. That's the even gray grain of fast film pushed in development.
For a banded sky, try Amount 0.06, RGB on, Additive. Grain that's too faint to read as texture still breaks up the straight edges of the bands, the same trick dithering uses. For a dirty print, use Dusty, which multiplies. Multiply darkens on average, by about 8 percent at its Amount of 0.4, so brighten the photo first if that bothers you.
For an old-photo look, add Vignette Effect after the grain, with a PNG saved in between.
Can I save a grain overlay for another editor?
Yes, as a still. Load a plain mid-gray picture (#808080), leave Blend mode on Additive and save a PNG. Then in your editor, lay it over the photo in Overlay or Soft light mode. The gray drops out and only the grain shows.
You could export video for moving grain, but the free page adds a small ClickForArt mark to video, and that mark would show through the overlay as well.
Why does the grain look finer in a still than in the video?
Each grain is one pixel of the output, so its size depends on the export. A 2048-pixel still has finer grain than a 720p clip of the same picture. Super 8 Film Effect has a Grain size control measured against a 1080p frame, which keeps its grain the same scale at any resolution.
On video the pattern changes 24 times a second, the frame rate of cinema film, and there's no blending between patterns, so it boils the way real grain does. In a 60 fps export each pattern holds for three frames, then two, alternating. That's the 3:2 rhythm of film shown on 60 Hz television. The same settings give the same grain on every export, and a new Seed gives you a different pattern with the same look.
Saving grain without losing it
Grain is random detail, and random detail is the first thing compression throws out. JPG, saved here at 92 percent quality, keeps most of it but softens the finest specks. PNG keeps every grain, at the cost of a much bigger file.
For video, raise the Quality setting, because at a low bitrate an encoder smooths grain into flat, swimming patches. Streaming codecs such as AV1 can even strip grain out before encoding and add a synthetic copy back during playback, since sending the real thing costs so many bits.