Add Film Grain to an Image

Add film grain to a photo, in your browser

Pick an image and a grain amount — analog film grain is overlaid with ffmpeg, entirely in your browser. Film grain is the fine speckle of silver-halide photographic film; a touch of it makes a clean digital photo feel organic and cinematic, hides banding in smooth gradients, and gives a vintage or 35mm mood. The friendly Grain amount (0–100) maps directly onto ffmpeg's noise strength — 20 (the default) is a subtle film-like texture, 50+ is heavy, pushed-film grain.

Leave Monochrome grain checked (the default) for neutral gray grain that varies only brightness — the classic black-and-white film look that stays natural over color photos. Uncheck it for colored grain, where each RGB channel is speckled independently, the look of pushed high-ISO color film.

Worked example

Upload portrait.jpg and leave Grain amount at 20 with Monochrome grain checked — the result keeps the exact same dimensions and the grain reads as neutral gray speckle. In numbers: on a plain mid-gray test image (luma 126), monochrome amount 20 leaves the average brightness unchanged while spreading individual pixels to roughly luma 118–133, and the color channels stay equal (still neutral gray) — grain, no color shift. At amount 60 the same pixels spread much wider (about luma 96–155), a heavy grain. If you uncheck Monochrome grain, the red, green and blue channels drift apart per pixel, so the speckle picks up color.

Picking an amount

• 5–15 — barely-there texture; kills banding without looking noisy.
• 20–35 — a natural film grain; the default 20 sits here.
• 40–70 — a strong, obvious analog / pushed-film look for moody shots.
• 80–100 — very heavy grain; a stylised, degraded, lo-fi texture.

Limits and edge cases

• Input files up to 8 MiB; any image format ffmpeg can decode works (PNG, JPEG, WebP, BMP, GIF, …). The output keeps the input's exact dimensions — nothing is cropped or resized.
• Output format keep (default) keeps the input format; png, jpg or webp convert. Converting takes a single still frame, so an animated GIF keeps only its first frame — use keep to stay animated. jpg output is pinned to a high-quality encode (ffmpeg -q:v 2) so the grain isn't smeared by compression blocks.
• Amount 0 is valid and returns the image unchanged; values outside 0–100 are rejected with the expected range named.
• The grain is uniform, per-pixel noise with a fixed seed, so the same image and amount always produce the same result. Grain size (coarse clumps) and a separate luma/chroma balance aren't adjustable — ffmpeg's noise filter works at single-pixel resolution.
• Transparency is not preserved for monochrome grain: it processes in opaque YUV, so a transparent PNG comes back fully opaque.

FAQ