Free Film Grain Effect

How it works

1. 1Drop a photo onto the box above, paste one with Ctrl+V, or choose a file.
2. 2Pick a stock. Fine is a hint of texture, Classic is the everyday 400-speed look, Pushed is fast film in bad light, and Color negative grains each channel separately.
3. 3Set the amount and the size, or turn the gray-only switch off to let the color channels move independently.
4. 4If the pattern falls badly on a face or a flat sky, press Different grain for another roll of the same settings.
5. 5Choose a format, name the file and download it at full resolution.

Common use cases

• Giving a clean digital photo the texture it was shot without, which is the usual reason anyone wants this.
• Hiding banding in a gradient, such as a sunset sky that has gone to visible steps after heavy compression.
• Matching a set where some frames came from film and some from a phone, so they sit together in one gallery.
• Roughening up a stock photo enough that it stops looking like a stock photo in a layout.
• Adding grain to a black and white conversion, where it does the most visible work because there is no color competing with the texture.

Frequently asked questions

Why does added grain usually look fake?

Two reasons, and both are about where the noise goes. The first is tone. Most tools add the same amount of noise everywhere, which puts the most visible speckle in the shadows, and a shadow is the one place real film is quiet. The second is scale. Noise generated one value per pixel is a fine sizzle, and film does not do that either. Grain here is weighted so it peaks in the midtones and fades to nothing in deep shadow and blown highlight, and it is generated coarser than a pixel and smoothed, so it clumps.

Why does real film grain sit in the midtones?

Because grain is not a pattern printed over the picture, it is the picture. Film is a layer of silver halide crystals, and light decides which of them develop into metallic silver. In a deep shadow almost none developed, so there is very little there to vary. In a blown highlight nearly all of them did, so it is uniform and dense. The visible graininess is highest where roughly half developed, which is the middle of the tonal range. That is why grain in a white sky is the tell that gives a digital imitation away.

Which preset matches Portra, HP5 or Tri-X?

None of them, and any tool claiming otherwise is guessing. Grain structure depends on the emulsion, the developer, how it was agitated, whether the frame was exposed correctly, whether it was pushed, and how it was scanned, and the same stock through two labs does not match itself. Arithmetic does not reproduce an emulsion. What is honest is the relationship between speed and grain: faster film has coarser and heavier grain, and three of the presets follow that ladder, from Fine through Classic to Pushed. The fourth, Color negative, sits off it: it grains each channel separately the way three emulsion layers do, which is a different property rather than a faster film.

What does the gray-only switch do?

It decides whether the three color channels move together. On, every channel shifts by the same amount, so the grain is achromatic. That is what black and white film does, and it is what most people mean by grain. Off, each channel gets its own noise, which is closer to color negative, where three separate emulsion layers each carry their own grain. Leave it on for most photos. Colored speckle on a digital picture reads as a failing sensor rather than as film.

Does adding grain make the file bigger?

Yes, and often by a lot. Compression works by predicting a pixel from its neighbors and storing only the difference, and grain is precisely the part of a picture that cannot be predicted, so the encoder has to spend real bytes describing it. A heavily grained JPG can be several times the size of the clean version at the same quality setting. If that matters, compress afterwards rather than before, and watch what falling quality does to the texture: the compressor smooths grain first, because it is the most expensive thing in the frame.

Will the download look exactly like the preview?

The character will, the exact speckle will not, and the difference is worth understanding. Grain comes from a fixed seed rather than from chance, so the same settings always produce the same result and nothing drifts between one look and the next. The preview, though, is a smaller copy of your photo with the grain scaled down to match, so the individual clumps do not land in the same places they will at full size. That is a real limit and not an oversight: full-resolution grain shown on a quarter-size preview would be finer than a screen pixel, and you would not be able to see it at all. Strength and coarseness carry across and are what the preview is for. A particular speck sitting on a particular eyelash does not.

Are my photos uploaded to a server?

No. The grain is generated and applied in your own browser using the Canvas API. The file never leaves your device and nothing is stored.

Related tools

• Grayscale ImageTurn photos black and white, and control which colors go light or dark.
• Image FiltersBlack and white, sepia, faded or vivid, applied to a whole batch at once.
• Sepia FilterWarm brown tone, like a print that has aged well.

Understand what this does

Plain explanations of what is happening to your file, and what it costs you.

• Grayscale vs black and white: what is the difference?Grayscale keeps hundreds of shades of gray. Black and white, taken strictly, keeps two and nothing in between. Almost everyone means the first, and the times they mean the second are the times it matters.