How to simulate real film grain

Everybody loves a digital cameras but sometime you are missing for more organic or traditional look of your photos. This tutorial is about creating an effect in Photoshop which simulate a film grain. Of course some purists will argue you can not simulate real look and feel of film and digital has no soul or whatever. That is a long story and loads of pro and cons.
Here we will concentrate on playing around in Photoshop with pure digital photos.

Ill explain everything step by step so does not matter if you are experienced or beginner.
So let’s start!

Open your image in Photoshop. I recommend use full resolution image so you can achieve very similar effect like myself in this example. My image has dimensions 2336 x 3506 pixels. If you using smaller image just use smaller amount of noise and blur than I suggest.

Create a new layer, click on the New Layer icon in the layers pallet or click Layer – New Layer.
Give that layer a name grain instead of Layer 1, just double click on the layer name in the layers pallet and type new layer name.

Now we are going to set neutral gray colour. You are free to experiment with different grey settings – lighter or darker shade. But remember to keep the same ratio for every colour (like R: 127, G: 127, B: 127) to avoid any colour cast.
For that tutorial set background colour with amount R: 110, G: 110, B: 110 and fill over grain layer.

Go to the layers palette and change blending mode from Normal to Overlay.
You should now see the photo below in the current window. Grain layer will appear as transparent.

To make easier next step enlarge preview of your image to 50% or 100%.
It will give you better view what is going on now. Below is a crop at 100% from picture with no effect applied.

To add noise go to Filter – Noise – Add Noise. Set the amount between 10% and 30%, check mark monochromatic to make the noise black-and-white and distribution Gaussian.
Now you can see how your image look after applying noise, feel free to play around with different amount of noise. And click OK.

We added some amount of noise, but it looks not so pleasing and more like digital noise instead of film grain. So take next step to make that more realistic film grain.
Go to Filter – Blur – Gaussian Blur.
Set the amount between 0.3 to 0.9 but again you are free to experiment and I strongly recommend to play around with several settings to find that which works the best for you. Amount of blur depends of amount of noise you applied in previous step – you will discover that quickly. Click OK.

Now you created a new layer which contains quite realistic film grain.
Here is result with effect applied and without.

 

But that is not the end.
We can go further with adjustment of grain layer and change look of grain.
To have more subtle grain, in layers pallet change amount of opacity on grain layer from 100% to 80%. Results are below.

To achieve even more subtle effect go to the layers palette and change blending mode from Overlay to Soft Light. And again plat around with opacity of grain layer. See samples below.

To compare how looks like image with no effect applied.

Now you can adjust different amount of noise and blur choose blending mode and get very different result. If you are patient enough to play around in Photoshop very soon you can find your favourite settings and use it. Usually people stick to one or two favourite settings. I recommend to find some real examples of film grain (samples of film scans, or real old B&W prints in family album) and find similar settings to simulate particular size and shape of grain. You can always buy plugins for Photoshop and have that effect in two clicks or experiment yourself and get the same result. Beside that if you create an action then it is almost automatic and very flexible. And you could tell your friends you are one step closer to be a Photoshop Guru

 

Tagged as: create real film grain, organic grain, Photoshop, real film grain