Real grain synthesized fresh every frame, with film-stock presets from 35mm to Super 8, not a static overlay clip. It rides the midtones and leaves the blacks clean, the way grain behaves on actual film.
How to use it
- Open the editor from this page — it loads demo media with the effect already set up — then drop in your own video or photo.
- Pick a film stock like 35mm, 16mm, or Super 8, then dial in amount, grain size, and color.
- Press play to watch it boil in motion, then export an MP4 or PNG.
What real film grain is, and where overlays fall short
Grain is what the picture is made of, not something sprinkled over the top. Film records light in millions of light-sensitive crystals, and how coarse they read comes down to the stock and the gauge: a Super 8 frame is a fraction of the size of a 35mm frame, so filling the same screen enlarges its grain several times more. That is why film stocks are the natural way to choose a look, and why this tool leads with them. A downloadable grain overlay is a scan of one piece of film played on top of your footage, so it loops, it sits at one scale, and it lays the same veil over a shadow as over a highlight. This effect generates the grain inside the image instead, fresh for every frame, so it rides the midtones hardest and leaves true black and paper white clean.
The character knobs are the rest of it: grain size works like enlarging the plate, color keeps the per-channel variation restrained so it reads as film rather than digital speckle, and film resolution softens the picture slightly under the grain so the grain stays the sharpest thing in the frame. The same Grain effect ships in the full Modulate editor, where you can keyframe any of it and stack it with the VHS, CRT, and vignette effects for a complete analog treatment.
Common questions
Is this film grain generator free?
Yes. This page opens the full Modulate editor, free with no signup, with the effect already set up. Anonymous exports run up to 5 seconds at 1080px with a small watermark; a free account removes the watermark and raises exports to 1920px and 30 seconds, and Pro raises the caps to 4K and 5 minutes.
Does it work on video or just images?
Both. On video the grain is regenerated every frame, so it boils the way real film does instead of looping. On a photo you get a still with authentic synthesized grain rather than a pasted-on texture.
How is this different from a film grain overlay?
An overlay is a recorded clip of real grain that you composite on top with a blend mode. It carries real texture but treats every pixel the same and repeats on a loop. This tool synthesizes the grain from your image, scaling it with tone so midtones carry the most and pure black stays clean, with no seam and no repeat.
Which film stock should I pick?
35mm gives fine, tight grain that barely shows until the light falls, the texture of a projected feature. 16mm and Super 8 are coarser and softer, the home-movie look. B&W (Tri-X) is pure monochrome grain, and Push exaggerates it for footage shot in bad light on purpose. Each stock is a starting point you can tune.
Are my files uploaded to a server?
No. The effect runs entirely in your browser on your GPU. Your media never leaves your computer unless you save it to a Modulate project yourself.
Go deeper
Film grain effect
Film grain is the visible texture of the particles that formed a photographic image: silver crystals in black-and-white stock, the dye clouds they leave behind in color film. Every frame carries a fresh random arrangement of them, which is why grain flickers alive on a projector instead of sitting still. A film grain effect puts that texture on digital footage, and the honest way to do it is to synthesize the grain in the image itself rather than paste a scanned loop on top.
VHS effect
The VHS effect makes digital video look like it was recorded and played back on tape: soft resolution, a wobbling image, tracking bands that tear across the frame, color that lags and bleeds behind the brightness, dropouts, and noise. Every one of those artifacts has a physical cause in the tape or the player, which is why a convincing VHS effect is a simulation of the machine, not a scanline overlay.
Vignette effect
The vignette effect fades the edges and corners of the frame toward a color, classically black, so the image sits in a pool of light and the eye is pulled to the center. It began as a flaw: lenses pass less light at the edges of their image circle than through the middle. Photographers and colorists then adopted the flaw on purpose, because attention follows brightness, and a gentle edge falloff frames a subject without adding a single visible element.
CRT effect
The CRT effect makes an image look like it is being displayed on a cathode-ray tube: the glowing phosphor stripes or dot triads of the mask, slight color fringing where the beams misconverge, and the darkened corners of a curved glass face. It is the look of every screen made before the 2000s, and it reads instantly as arcade cabinets, control rooms, and late-night TV.
There's more where this came from
The full editor lets you use every effect together, over video, text, 3D, and shapes. Free, no signup, nothing to install — it opens with this effect already set up.
Open the editor