Textures and Effects

The core of Bitgrain is how it changes the pixels of your image. You can find these options in the center of the toolbar.

Textures

The Textures menu lets you pick the base look of your image.

Dither: The classic look. It uses dots of different sizes to create the illusion of shades.
ASCII: This turns your image into a grid of text characters. It looks like old computer art.
Braille: A finer character grid built from braille dots, good for delicate detail.
Halftone: Newsprint style dots in mono, color, or CMYK. A Voronoi cell mosaic style also lives inside the halftone controls.
Blocky: Reduces the image to chunky bands of brightness.
Grunge ASCII: Adds a dirty, scanned character texture with extra noise in the shadows.
Dot Matrix: Larger, more spaced out dots for a printed look.
Scanlines: Draws CRT screen lines, with curvature and a small red, green, and blue shift for that broken screen feel.
Contour: Traces your image into topographic lines, like a relief map.
Photocopy: A high contrast toner look, like a page run through an old copier.
Misprint: Shifts the color plates out of register for an off press printing feel.
Fold: Adds paper crease shading across the image.
Dust and Scratches: Lays analog film and paper wear over the top.

Filters change the colors and detail before or after the textures are applied.

Invert: Flips your colors. Black becomes white and white becomes black.
Grayscale: Removes all color from your photo.
Pixelate: Makes the image look blocky by grouping pixels together.
Color Grade (LUT): Applies one of 38 film and cinematic color grades.
Color Grade: Direct control over temperature, tint, and vibrance.
Duotone: Maps shadows and highlights to two custom ink colors.
Vignette: Darkens the corners with a soft falloff.
Posterize: Cuts the image into a small number of flat tone bands.
Sharpen: Boosts edge detail with an unsharp pass.
Colorwash: Washes a single color over the image in screen, overlay, or multiply.

These are for more experimental looks.

Film Grain: Adds tiny specks of noise across the whole image, heavier in the shadows.
Haze and Bloom: Lifts the blacks into atmospheric fog and makes the highlights glow.
Crosshatch: Redraws the image as hand drawn pen hatching.
Ink Wash: A soft sumi-e style ink bleed.
Manga: Screentone shading for comic and manga looks.
Pop Grunge: Bold comic book dot art with ink, paper color, and spatter.