Added Grain
Synthetic texture introduced into a digital image to imitate film grain or to disguise other artefacts.
Measured in
%
In depth
Beyond its aesthetic appeal, grain has two practical uses: it masks banding in smooth gradients by breaking up the boundaries between levels, and it hides the plastic smoothness left by heavy noise reduction or upscaling. Grain size should scale with output size, or it disappears in print and dominates on screen.
Examples in practice
A little grain across a heavily lifted sky eliminates visible banding without any other change.