Creative effects

Film grain, haze and bloom, crosshatch, ink wash and scanlines. These add atmosphere, texture and hand-made character, and most of them are designed to sit on top of, or underneath, the main effects.

Where to find them

Effect	Image editor	Video editor	Studio
Film grain	Film grain switch in adjust, with the Noise slider	Film Grain	Grain
Haze and bloom	haze button	Haze & Bloom
Crosshatch		Crosshatch Etching	Crosshatch
Ink wash	artistic, then ink wash
Scanlines		Scanlines (CRT)	Scanlines

Two more effects often grouped with these, manga and pop grunge, live on the halftone page because they are built on dot and hatch screens.

Film grain

Adds grain to every pixel, the same amount to red, green and blue so it reads as brightness noise rather than colored speckle. Like real film, the grain is heavier in the shadows and lighter in the highlights.

Workspace	Parameter	Range	Default
Video editor	Amount	`0.02` to `0.6`	`0.12`
Studio	Amount	`0` to `1`	`0.2`
Image editor	Noise (in adjust)	`0%` to `100%`	`4%`

In the image editor, open adjust and turn on Film grain. The grain is added before your current effect, and the Noise slider appears to control it. Preset links such as the /risograph and /glitch landing pages can also stack it after a dither. An amount of 0 removes the grain completely.

Grain comes from a seeded generator, so the same settings always give the same grain pattern. In video the seed changes with every frame, so the grain moves like real film.

Tip: Grain placed after a dither roughens the dots. Placed before, it becomes extra dither noise, which is a quick way to break up banding in skies.

Haze and bloom

Haze and bloom recreates what old lenses and film do with light: blacks lift into a soft fog, the whole frame gets a gentle glow, and bright highlights bleed a halo into their surroundings.

It works in stages:

Haze. Lifts the blacks, desaturates slightly, blends in a milky fog, and shifts the color temperature.
Diffusion. Blurs a copy of the hazed image and screens it back on top, the soft all-over glow photographers call the Orton effect. Its strength follows the haze amount.
Bloom. Finds everything brighter than the threshold, pushes those highlights toward white, blurs them into a wide halo, and screens the glow back over the image.

In the image editor, click haze. The popover ("Haze & Bloom, Film optical diffusion") has an on/off switch, and the sliders only respond once it is on ("Enable haze & bloom first").

Section	Parameter	Range	Default	What it does
Haze	Intensity	`0%` to `100%`	`30%`	Strength of the lifted fog and the all-over glow
Haze	Warmth	cool, neutral, warm	neutral	Color temperature of the haze. The label reads cool below about a third and warm above about two thirds.
Bloom	Intensity	`0%` to `100%`	`40%`	Brightness of the highlight halo
Bloom	Threshold	`30%` to `100%`	`70%`	How bright a spot must be to bloom. Lower it and more of the image glows.

In the video editor, Haze & Bloom has Haze, Bloom, Bloom threshold (0 to 1, default 0.7), Warmth and a Glow tint color picker that colors the bloom (white by default). Try a red tint for a cinematic halation, or blue for a cold night glow.

Haze and bloom is the one effect in the image editor that stacks with your main look. Turn it on and it runs after your dither, halftone or artistic effect. It is also the only effect that stays active alongside a LUT film grade, where it runs before the grade.

Tip: For a dreamy 35mm portrait, try Haze Intensity 40%, Warmth warm, Bloom Intensity 50% and Threshold 60%, then add the Portra 400 grade.

Crosshatch

Crosshatch redraws your image as pen-and-ink etching. Four layers of parallel lines run at different angles, and each layer only appears once the tone underneath is dark enough. Light areas stay as bare paper, midtones get single hatching, and the deepest shadows get all four directions crossing. Lines thicken as tones darken.

It draws in a dark brown-black ink on warm off-white paper.

Workspace	Parameter	Range	Default	What it does
Video editor	Spacing	`3` to `20` px	`8` px	Distance between lines
Video editor	Thickness	`1` to `4` px	`1` px	Base line weight
Studio	Spacing	`3` to `200`	`6`	Distance between lines
Studio	Thickness	`1` to `40`	`1`	Base line weight

Tip: Crosshatch reads best on well-lit subjects with clear shadows. Add a Sharpen or raise contrast earlier in the stack if the hatching looks flat.

For hatching with inked outlines and a comic feel, use manga in the image editor instead.

Ink wash

Ink wash paints your image the way a brush-and-ink artist would: a soft tonal wash in a few flat bands of ink, with drawn lines following the edges and a subtle bleed where the wash spreads into the paper.

It combines three passes:

Wash. The image is softened and flattened into a set number of tone bands.
Lines. An edge-finding pass draws ink lines along the shapes in the photo.
Bleed and grain. Darker wash areas pick up a soft, uneven bleed, and a faint paper grain sits over everything. Both come from a fixed pattern, so the result is the same every time.

In the image editor, open artistic and choose ink wash ("tonal wash, inked lines"). The popover is titled "Ink Wash, Tonal wash with inked lines".

Parameter	Range	Default	What it does
Line detail	`4` to `40`	`16`	Sharpness and darkness of the drawn lines. Higher values give bolder, more graphic lines.
Wash tones	`2` to `10`	`5`	Number of flat tone bands in the wash
Bleed	`0%` to `100%`	`35%`	How much the wash bleeds unevenly into the paper
Ink	Any color	Warm near black	Color of the ink
Paper	Any color	Warm off-white	Color of the paper

Tip: Try a sepia or indigo Ink on a cream Paper with Wash tones at 3 for a sumi-e sketchbook look.

Scanlines

Scanlines imitates a CRT screen. Every few rows, a line is darkened. The red channel is sampled from slightly to the right and the blue from slightly to the left, which gives the soft color fringing of an old tube, and an optional vignette darkens the edges like curved glass.

In the video editor, as Scanlines (CRT):

Parameter	Range	Default	What it does
Spacing	`2` to `16` px	`4` px	Distance between dark lines
Darkness	`0` to `1`	`0.4`	How much each line is darkened
RGB shift	`0` to `12` px	`2` px	Red and blue fringe offset
Vignette	`0` to `1`	`0`	Darkening toward the edges, like a curved screen

In Studio, Scanlines has Spacing (2 to 200, default 4) and Intensity (0 to 1, default 0.5), with a fixed 2 px RGB shift and no vignette.

Tip: Spacing is in working pixels. On a small working image, 2 or 3 looks like a real monitor. On a large one, raise it or the lines disappear into fine texture.