wear

experiment 08 · grain, lift and a little halation · pictures only

the grain is inside the filter, which is attached to the <img> and <video> elements and nothing else. the white ground and the type never enter it, so there is no way for it to land on them. no overlay sitting on top of the page.

the black lift is doing double duty — it washes the picture out and bumps the brightness, because lifting the floor off zero is the same move as raising exposure on the shadows. that's why there's no separate brightness control.

lift .055

halation .16

softness 4

grain .055

colour .88

reel

loading…

0:00/—

the filter runs on every frame. if it stutters on a laptop, drop softness — the blur is the expensive part.

stills / drag sideways

what it's running

<filter id="wear">
  saturate        0.88
  slope           0.90
  intercept       0.055   <- the wash
  blur            4
  halation        0.16
  grain           0.055
</filter>

.worn img,
.worn video { filter: url(#wear); }

notes

lift is the one that matters. it raises the black floor, which is exactly what an aged print does — nothing sits at zero any more. past about .09 it starts looking foggy rather than aged.

halation at .16 is deliberately small. it is a blurred copy screened back over the picture, and it is the only thing that stops a digital frame reading as crisp. take it past .3 and it turns into a glow.

grain is zero-mean — it darkens and lightens in equal measure rather than fogging the image, so it adds texture without changing exposure. .055 is visible at full size and invisible at a glance, which is about right for something you look at every day.

hit worn to A/B it. the difference is smaller than you expect and that's the point.

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