Photoshop - how to generate those noisy pixels

Question

How can I generate those noisy pixels in Photoshop or Adobe Fireworks / Illustrator? I have tried it with Photoshop Noise Filter+ Mezzotint, but it doesn't look as good as it should.

Maybe anyone knows on which program I can generate those noisy pixels or if there are some plugins?

Answer 1

There are many different ways to achieve a result like this. Impossible to tell exactly how your example was made. It might just have been drawn by hand.

You don't need another program or plugins to make stuff like this. You just need to use more than one effect and play around with different methods.

Here is one way, which I believe gives a similar result. I'm just recreating the right part of the image. You can take this as inspiration to how to make the left part.

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We'll start with creating some noise using Photoshop's Diffusion Dither.

• Create a grayscale image.
• Fill it with 60% gray
• Change the color mode to Image > Mode > Bitmap and set Method > Use to Diffusion Dither.

This noise has some paths which kind of resembles the ones in your example, but we need to manipulate it a little bit.

• Select all and copy the pattern to the clipboard.
• Create an RGB image with the same dimensions as the pattern we just created.
• Fill the background with the orange color.
• Create a brown solid color layer and paste in the pattern in its layer mask.
• Make a duplicate of the brown layer, nudge the mask 1 pixel down to create more vertical lines.
• Set the blend mode of the duplicate to Dissolve and set the opacity to 50% to add some randomness to those vertical lines.
• Create a green solid color layer and set the blend mode to Dissolve.
• Use a soft black brush on the layer mask of the green layer to create those random green spots.

I think the result is quite similar to your example, but of course you can experiment with different settings.