Film Grain & Noise

Intensity runs from 1 to 100 (default 30) and means something slightly different for each type:

The Monochrome noise box appears for Film Grain and Gaussian. If you change a setting after adding noise, press Add Noise again to update the results.

Grain alone doesn’t make a photo look old. It works best as the final touch:

• Start low. Try Film Grain at 10 to 20 with Monochrome noise ticked, and raise it until you can just see the grain at the size the photo will be viewed.
• Keep it grey. Monochrome grain usually looks more like film; colour noise looks more like a digital camera struggling in the dark.
• Change the colours first. Fade, warm or desaturate the photo with Adjust Image Colors, which has a Vintage preset, then add grain here last, so the adjustments don’t change the grain.
• Add dust with Salt & Pepper at a low intensity, or a white border for a printed-photo look.

Each speck is one pixel, and there’s no grain size setting. On a large photo, one-pixel grain is very fine: clear when you zoom in to 100%, but much weaker when the whole photo is shrunk to fit a screen.

• The live preview is a small copy (400 pixels on its longest side) with the grain added at that size, so it looks grainier than the full-size result shrunk to the same size. Judge the strength on the downloaded file, at the size it will be used.
• For coarser grain on a big photo, resize it smaller first, for example to 2,000 pixels wide, then add the grain.
• The grain is random, so every press of Add Noise gives a slightly different pattern, and the download won’t match the preview speck for speck.

Each result keeps the original’s format and is named after the noise: photo.jpg becomes photo_grain.jpg. JPGs are saved at a high 92% quality, WebP stays WebP, and PNGs stay PNG, with transparent areas kept. Browsers can’t save GIF, AVIF or BMP images, so those come out as JPG, or as PNG if they have transparent areas. iPhone HEIC photos come out as JPG, and phone photos stored sideways with a rotation tag come out upright. The copies have no EXIF metadata, so camera details and GPS location aren’t carried over.

Random noise is the hardest thing for any format to compress, so grain always makes a file bigger. In a test, a 190 KB JPG of 1600 × 1200 pixels became a 0.9 MB JPG with the default grain. Saved as PNG, as this tool used to, it was 3.5 MB.

Colour noise loses a little strength in a JPG, because JPG keeps colour in less detail than brightness. For the full effect, or to keep editing the image without losing quality, convert the photo to PNG first: a PNG stays PNG here. To shrink a grainy JPG further, compress it, checking that the grain survives.

Your browser adds the noise, on your own phone or computer, so your photos and the grainy copies are never uploaded or sent anywhere.

To check, open your browser’s developer tools and watch the Network tab while you add noise. The only requests are the page’s own code (such as the HEIC decoder) and anonymous usage counts, described in our privacy policy. After your first visit, the tool works offline too.