Noise?

pbc

no, its more than noise

I spent around ten minutes in Photoshop transforming this stock photo (found via Google Image Search) into this.

Is that sort of what you had in mind? Here’s a quick summary of how I did it:

I converted the image to CYMK, then copied each CMYK channel into a separate new grayscale document.

For each of the four new documents, I added two 50%-gray layers and set them both to Overlay mode. Then I used Add Noise on each of the 50%-gray layers followed by Gaussian Blur. I used a different amount of Gaussian Blur on each of the two layers: a 1.5-pixel radius for the first one and 0.75 pixel for the second. The idea was to get two levels of grain: one coarse, and one finer.

Then I flattened all four of the CYMK gray documents and copied each one back into the appropriate channel in the original document.

I converted back the image to RGB, then added a Hue/Saturation layer to bring down the saturation. Finally, I added a Curves layer to boost the center of the red channel and depress the center of the blue channel.

One thing about P-Shop is that there are usually many paths to the same result. Traditionally fast film produces a grain like this on its own.

Not knowing the source of the image makes it largely impossible to give one formula. You may also find one formula will give a certain result on a specific image and not another.

http://www.google.com/search?q=Fast+Film+Grain+Photoshop&sourceid=mozill...

Also Polaroid tansfer technique.

http://www.google.com/search?q=Polaroid+Transfer&sourceid=mozilla-search...

Wow thanks! Great responses. I’m going to follow these steps to see if I can recreate this in photoshop. I’ll post some before and after results.

Here it is, I think it turned out pretty good.