Image Noise and Grain Tool

Adding noise is sometimes the right answer

It seems backwards, since most image work removes noise, and there are real reasons to add it. A gradient rendered in 8 bits per channel shows visible banding, and a small amount of noise breaks the bands into a texture the eye reads as smooth, which is the same principle as dithering. Heavily denoised or upscaled images look artificially smooth in a way that reads as wrong, and grain restores the texture. Film grain is also a deliberate aesthetic with a long history.

Luminance and colour noise look completely different

Noise in brightness reads as texture and is largely acceptable, which is why film grain is tolerable at levels that would be unacceptable in colour. Noise in the colour channels reads as coloured speckle and looks like a fault at any level. Digital sensors produce both, and denoising tools remove colour noise aggressively while treating luminance noise gently, for exactly this reason.

Grain is not the same as noise

Digital noise is independent per pixel. Film grain comes from silver halide crystals of varying size clumped in an emulsion, so it has structure: it is coarser in the midtones, finer in the highlights and shadows, and the clumps span several pixels. Uniform per-pixel noise looks like a broken sensor rather than like film, which is why simply adding random values rarely produces the intended effect.

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