Download Free Film Grain and Light Leaks

When used well, a touch of film grain and a well placed light leak can really perfect a look. When used badly it can be carelessly sloshed all over your edit, leaving every transition relying on a blur of bright light.

As Spiderman knows, “with great power comes great responsibility.” Therefore use the following free film grains and light leaks at your own editorial risk!

Colorist David Torcivia shares why you want to add film grain to all your projects (yes all of them!) in this DaVinci Resolve tutorial and this accompanying blog post. In the post David articulates the numerous benefits to adding grain to your project, provides a free DaVinci Resolve node download for quickly adding grain and a free 4K grain emulation file, created in Nuke to mimic Kodak 5219 stock.

One of the benefits to adding grain to your video, is that it can help reduce colour banding, especially when compressing your video for the web.

This is one of the best reasons to use grain in your projects – especially if it is destined for a lossy web upload. Above is a gradient I created from yellow to blue. The top part of the gradient has a light grain applied while the bottom section is untouched. I’ve saved it in a low quality format in order to exaggerate the effects of color banding as you might find when compressing digital video.

Free Film Grain & Light Leaks

There are plenty of places to get free film grain downloads, including some of the sites that offer products like those from Gorilla Grain.

Here is a quick round up of the best of what’s currently available and unless I’m mistaken, all of these downloads can be used in commercial projects. If I’ve missed something – let me know!

Last updated – June 2020

These Cinetic Studio’s free film grain files are now available via PixelToolsPost.com, just add them to your cart for free.

Paid for Film Grain Packs, Inc 65mm Film Grain!

Filmmaker Noam Kroll, who also makes some superb professioanl LUT collections, has just released a brand new professional film grain pack featuring 8mm, 16mm, 35mm and (the first ever?) 65mm overlays.

This grain was hand crafted frame by frame, using scans from real Kodak motion picture film, and enhanced with a proprietary post-production process that yields unmatched results.

Each of the film grain packs is available in 6K resolution (6144 x 3456 resolution) with a 16:9 aspect ratio, so you are future proofing yourself a little, regardless of your current resolution needs. The files are in the Pro Res 422 codec running in a loop-able 15 seconds.

You can buy each pack individually for the price of the grain size (8mm = $8, 16mm = $16, 35mm = $35, 65mm = $65) or bundle it all for $97 saving $27 in the process.

Check them out for yourself, and download a fistful of free camera and creative LUTS at Cinecolor.io.

To me Gorilla Grain is the original king of film grain packs, and I know a fair few editors who make use of their packs. Currently you can purchase film grains from 16mm and 35mm stock, along with various light leaks and film grains.

If you’re after a 4K scan (4096 x 2304) from real 35 mm film then Gorilla Grain’s 4K Film Grain Pack includes just one 40 second Pro Res file for $49, which seems pretty steep to me, especially when you can get 9 HD film grains for $69 with various levels of density and cleanliness.

But if you need 4K, you need 4K.

This short tutorial from Gorilla Grain demonstrates how fast it is to add a 4K film grain to your footage in Premiere Pro and adjust it to taste with the brightness contrast filter.

Cinegrain are probably one of the most expensive places you can get film grain and look packs from, with prices starting at around $76 dollars and hiking all the way up to $999 for their full pack of 425 grains, looks, leaks, splices, headers and footers, dirt and scratches, flares – basically everything they sell, all delivered in Pro Res 4444 4K and shipped on a drive.

That said, in comparison to Gorilla Grain, their 35mm pack comes with 16 clips in Pro Res UHD for $96, (currently on sale at $48), which is a better deal than one 4K file for $49!

2018 UPDATE – Rampant Design Film Grain

Rampant Design have pretty much everything, which includes organic film grain packs. For $99 you can download 62 ‘organic film grain and noise overlays’ which were acquired on a RED Epic camera.

Delivered as 407 Pro Res files, the 4K download is a whopping 73 GB, but you can download them in 2K resolution too at a paltry 30 GB download.

As they are simple film grain overlays you can use them in pretty much any NLE by dragging them on top of your video and mixing them in.

Check out Rampant Design’s film grain in the promo video above or on their site for more info.

FilmConvert Film Grain Plugin

Save 10% on FilmConvert plugins with the promo code “ELWYN” or just click this link to apply it directly

FilmConvert’s film grain, which can be added separately from any colour correction, is derived from 6K film grain scans, where by the “grain response for each film stock has been collected and modelled to bring out the true grain characteristics of each film stock.”

This is one of the benefits of using a plugin that has a specific film stock to digital camera matching system, so that the specific characteristics of your originating footage, effect the density of the grain in the emulation.

I’ve written at length about FilmConvert’s plugin in this previous post, along with some tips and tricks I discovered along the way.

If you want instant results in a hurry it’s a really handy plugin to have at your disposal.

6K Simulated Film Grain

RGrain is one of the only sites I’ve seen that offers 6K film grain downloads at 6144 x 3160 and based on their most popular plate, RG 35mm Lush.

Their prices seem pretty reasonable, for example the single 6K file is $39, but it’s worth noting that these are digitally created film grains, rather than scans of real analogue material, e.g. 35mm film stock.

More Free Light Leak Packs

Edit With Light are offering a huge range of free post production effects for film editors to download from their YouTube channel. These packs include:

You’ll find Google Drive download links in each of the YouTube video descriptions.

Paid for Light Leak Packs

Edit with Light (formerly 5DLeaks.com) has some much more affordable products including 4K (4096 x 2160) grain shot on a RED camera for only $9.99.

They also sell animation elements, light leaks, hues, vintage bokeh and more. You can also grab a free ‘digital artefacts’ pack featuring 15 unique short digital noise animations.

If you’re after some high quality, 4K, light leaks and flares then this 4GB pack of 120 assets from Rocketstock could be just the thing.

You can check out some of the flares in this promo video (above) – which actually demonstrates some pretty classy ways of using the light leaks within shots rather than just slapping them on as transitions – or download 13 free light leaks from Rocketstock to try before you buy.

The pack costs $79.

This tutorial from Michael James, featuring the Rocketstock 4k light leaks, walks you through how to composite light leaks effectively in Adobe Premiere, FCPX and After Effects, all in under 7 minutes.