After-Effect: "Film Grain" Noise (Patreon)

Hello patrons! 

I've got a guide for you on how to apply a film-grain effect to digital images, but I think it's just as important to know why you're doing something as how to do it. So here we go! 

What is Film Grain?

This effect is a mimic of something that occurs on old-fashioned analogy film and photography. This visual 'noise', disturbance and texture on images and film reel, was created by particles and chemical processes when capturing and developing the images. 

Why use noise on digital art?

It's crunchy as hell. I love it. 

When we see the noise it disrupts colour and adds a fuzzy layer. It creates what I think is a very pleasant texture that softens digital images and makes them seem more tangible and real. What would otherwise be a smooth gradient takes on a whole host of other colour and texture. 

It's one of the easiest ways to make a picture look complete and more traditional. It's a very quick and effective tool that helps my art look like a screenshot from an animated film or a traditional sketch (or so I hope!).

So, how do we do it?

In Clip Studio Paint, the fastest way to apply a noise layer is to use an 'Auto-action'. This is a function that allows you to apply several pre-set actions automatically with one double-click. You can program these action sets yourself or download them from the asset library. And extremely good one is by Razouru, and you can find it here.  It comes with a greyscale and rainbow/colour versions. 

To find Auto-actions in CSP and load in the set, follow these steps. When they're in, find the noise actions in the list and double-click them! Adjust the opacity of the layer it creates as needed. 

If you want to manually create a noise layer, you can use the Perlin Noise tool. There's a handy explanation of it here on Clip Studio's user manual.  

To do the same in Photoshop, you can go to Filter -> Noise -> Add Noise or use similar effects. 

Enjoy! I think this effect adds a really nice crisp and crunchy feel to art, I especially like that it adds interest and text to flat cell shaded pictures with otherwise might look especially cartoonish and artificial.