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Finish any app's export in three moves

Oct 13
3 min read

Grain, one colour grade and one blend take a clean render to a finished picture, whichever app it came from.

A pale stair set with red handrails on a near-black ground, covered in fine film grain, with a scratched black tag across the middle of the steps

A Stairset export after the three moves: Grain 0.12, Colour grade at contrast 1.4 and saturation 0.8, and a Scribe tag multiplied in at 0.8. From the free 2,480 × 1,748 px PNG.

A Stairset export is exact. Every tread is one flat colour, every shadow a clean polygon, and there is not a speck on it anywhere. What does it take to make it look printed and handled?

Three moves in Random Effects, always in this order: grain, one colour grade, one blend. Below they go over that stair set with the numbers that stayed, then over a Squaresmith tiling and an Average Abstraction composite with the same numbers. There is no settings link, because every version starts from an upload; the values are in the captions, and the app is at effects.krshi27.art.

How this one got made

Upload the export under Upload image in the controls. It becomes the working image, and each effect you apply replaces it, so the three moves stack.

Grain at 0.12, because 0.05 disappears

On the Stylistic tab, open Grain. Its one slider, Amount, starts at 0.05. Look at the file at full size and you can see that grain; shrink it to a phone or a blog column and it is gone. At 0.12 it survives the shrinking and still leaves the edges sharp.

The same close-up of steps and a red handrail three times: clean, with fine default grain, and with stronger grain at 0.12

A 1:1 crop from the three files. At full size even the default shows; 0.12 is the value that is still visible once the picture is scaled down.

Grain is one of four effects I built to imitate the Sony VX1000 camcorder and its fisheye lens, the look of skate videos; Vignette, Colour grade and Fisheye are the other three. I draw the grain at a fixed reference size and scale it up with larger canvases, so a big print keeps the grain size the A5 preview showed.

One colour grade: more contrast, less colour

Colour grade has three sliders, Contrast, Saturation and Exposure, and moves them together. It cannot warm or cool a picture. For this pass, contrast goes up from the default 1.2 to 1.4 and saturation down from 1.1 to 0.8; exposure stays at 0.

The Colour grade dialog with Contrast at 1.4, Saturation at 0.8 and Exposure at 0, above the Apply Colour grade button

The one grade used on all three exports below.

The dark green wall drops to nearly black, the pale steps lift, and the red rails lose some of their colour.

The grained stair set before and after the colour grade: on the right the background is almost black and the colours are muted

Before and after Colour grade. Watch the wall behind the stairs, which goes from green to almost black.

One blend: a tag from Scribe

The blend image here is a Scribe PNG: FREIBURG in black on white, with the same layers, opacity and seed as the tag in Freiburg, scratch by scratch. Upload it under Blend image (optional), open the Blend tab, choose Multiply, set Opacity to 0.8 and press Apply Multiply. Multiply leaves white alone and darkens where the lines are, so only the scratches land on the stairs.

Left, the Scribe tag as black scratched lines on white; right, the graded stair set with the same tag darkening the steps

The blend image and the result. Blend stretches the second image to the shape of the working image, so the square tag comes out a little wider.

The Scribe PNG carries its own small signature in the corner, and Multiply brings that along too, under the one Random Effects adds.

The same three moves on other exports

Upload a different export under Upload image. The new picture starts a fresh history and the blend image stays, so the pass is the same three dialogs with the same values.

Two rows of before and after: a Squaresmith tiling of slate and terracotta rectangles, and a soft averaged lake between wooded hills, each with grain, a grade and the scratched tag

Grain 0.12, the same grade and the same tag at 0.8 on a Squaresmith tiling and an Average Abstraction lake. The flat tiles take the grain like paper; the soft lake mostly gets darker hills and a paler sky.

The pass works on pixels and pays no attention to what they show: a tiling of squares and an average of lake photographs come through it the same way the stairs did.

From screen to object

Under Downloads, tick the terms once and PNG gives you the finished picture, capped at A5 and signed in the corner. Order a print of this creation sits underneath if you want it on paper.

Other moves, one line each

  • Screen is the opposite of Multiply: a white tag on black lightens instead of darkening.

  • Vignette darkens the corners and Fisheye bulges the frame: the two camcorder effects this pass leaves out.

  • Revert last takes back one move at a time, so a grade you regret costs one click.

Your turn

Take the last thing you exported from any of the apps, open Random Effects, and give it Grain 0.12, one Colour grade and one blend. Then change one number. If you like what comes out, send me what you made; I'll ask before I show it anywhere. Next, Watercolour from a render, one effect at a time walks through the rest of the app.

 
 
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