As the title says, i want to achieve this super dark and grainy look in blender or any other tool paid or free i don’t mind either way, here’s some examples
I found some filters on Topaz Studio but it feels like a shortcut, i want to understand the process, is just a film grain filter plus a black and white filter and a smudge texture? When i do that it looks kinda cheap and fake
For one, if you are rendering these images, try and get the noise with reduced samples, or use things such as volumetrics that would produce a lot of noise.
All the other grainy textures and defects could probably be sourced from the internet and overlayed onto the original image.
The high contrast look can be made with fiddling around with Blender’s nodes (or the effects from any other image editing software). An RGB curve node is good to increase the darkness and boost the highlights. A sort-of “s” shaped line would do such a thing.
I just recommend you keep messing around with Blender’s compositing nodes until the image looks right.
