Film texture and glow, in a few sliders.Film grain
Procedural grain with size, roughness, luma and chroma amounts and a density response that peaks in the midtones. It is different every frame, correlated just enough to avoid flicker, and never repeats a static pattern.
Professional Film Texture & Optical Finishing
GRAINOVA
Finish your footage so it feels filmed, not rendered. GRAINOVA adds grain that changes every frame, glow that comes from your real highlights, and a soft, non-clipping film response. Built for video, for video editors and filmmakers.
Film texture and glow, in a few sliders.
Full guideWhat it helps with
- Turns clean digital video into a filmic finish
- Grain that changes every frame, plus glow around real highlights
- Subtle by default, so it never looks fake
How to use it
- Add GRAINOVA near the end of your grade and set Input Encoding to match your timeline.
- Pick a Preset, for example Cinematic Drama or Commercial Polish.
- Adjust Film Grain, then Halation and Bloom. Intensity fades the whole look.
Why it is strong
- Five groups, each with its own Reset
- Halation and bloom react only to real bright areas
- Free trial has every feature and no watermark
BeforeGRAINOVA
Unedited footage, rendered frame by frame by the real GRAINOVA engine (Clean Daylight film colour with warm-highlight and cool-shadow separation, halation, bloom and fine film grain) - not a mockup.
Real footage, real output
BeforeGRAINOVA
Unedited footage, actually rendered by GRAINOVA - not a mockup.
What it does
Grain format and character
Choose a film format (8mm, 16mm, 35mm, 65mm) or a character (Fine, Natural, Organic, Dense, Coarse, Experimental) to load a complete grain starting point. Then set how strong the grain is in the shadows, midtones and highlights, how steady it is from frame to frame, and how often it changes (every frame, 24 or 12 times a second). These are LASTFX creative profiles, not measurements of real film stocks.
Halation
A red-orange glow around bright areas only - light above a threshold is extracted, blurred and tinted, rather than a flat red overlay.
Bloom
Threshold-based glow with a tight core and a wide veil, controlled by radius, softness and strength.
Film response
Shadow softness, highlight compression, midtone density and gentle color separation. The curves roll off instead of clipping.
Film Color
Eight color and contrast looks (Golden Warm, Cool Cinematic, Clean Daylight, Faded Vintage, Soft Pastel, Rich Print, Bleach Bypass, Black & White) with an amount. They are LASTFX creative looks, not measurements of any film stock, and None leaves your colors exactly as they are. Choose a texture preset and a Film Color independently.
More film-like in new nodes
New nodes apply grain to the picture as it looks on the display, so the same Amount gives the same grain in Rec.709, sRGB or any camera log input. Halation spreads red farther than blue and fades in smoothly with no flicker at the threshold. Film Color keeps skin on the skin line and lets bright saturated colors roll toward white. Projects made with an earlier version keep their exact look.
Optional imperfections
Gate weave, flicker and dust - all off by default and never a cheap VHS look.
Resolution independent
Sizes are defined relative to the frame height, so a look built on a proxy matches full resolution.
Presets and reset
Thirteen starting looks, including ones named by what you are making (Cinematic Drama, Commercial Polish, Wedding & Event Glow, Music Video Grit, Warm Memory), a master Intensity control, and a Reset button for every group.
Deterministic
The same frame number always produces the same grain, so scrubbing and re-rendering are consistent.
The interface
- 1. PICK A LOOK
- Preset, Input Encoding, Film Color, Film Color Amount, Intensity, Show Original
- FILM GRAIN
- Amount, Size, Format, Character — Advanced: Roughness, Luma Grain, Chroma Grain, Response, Shadow / Midtone / Highlight Strength, Temporal Coherence, Grain Rate, Seed
- HALATION
- Strength — Advanced: Radius, Threshold, Red Response
- BLOOM
- Strength — Advanced: Threshold, Radius, Softness
- FILM RESPONSE
- Shadow Softness, Midtone Density — Advanced: Highlight Compression, Color Separation
- OPTIONAL IMPERFECTION
- Gate Weave, Flicker, Dust
What it is - and is not
- It is an emulation of film characteristics, not a scan of real film stock.
- Halation and bloom respond to the highlights that are actually in your footage. Flat, low-contrast footage gets little glow at the default threshold; lower the threshold or grade first.
- Grain and glow are processed on your computer. Nothing is uploaded.
Requirements
- Windows 10 or 11 (x64)
- DaVinci Resolve with OpenFX support (see the compatibility list on the Installation page for the versions that have actually been tested)
- Processing uses all CPU cores. On NVIDIA GPUs it also renders through CUDA when Resolve renders on the GPU (about 70 to 90 times faster than the CPU in our benchmarks on one RTX 5060 test PC), and it was checked inside DaVinci Resolve itself.