Come on, Feel the Noize–adding noise to your WPF applications

In contrast with all this things in the digital world are often much flatter and less visually interesting, without any of the suggestion of texture and the associations they bring. Complex textures (like leather) are usually best achieved with photos of real-world objects, but increasingly subtle use of digital noise is being used to create a little bit of visual variation to otherwise flat UIs.

So how can I use this in my WPF application?

The simplest way to add noise to your WPF applications has been to create a ‘noisy’ texture using an imaging program like Photoshop, the GIMP or Paint.NET, and use it as an image source to an ImageBrush in WPF. If you’re working with a visual designer this is probably what they’ll do. One pretty common trick here is to make the noise image almost completely transparent – it can then be layered over the top of gradients and the like to create more complicated visual effects which would otherwise need to be created as a single large bitmap. This technique can be seen in ‘SimpleNoise’ sample application in the download. An ImageBrush is defined like so, using a ‘noise’ PNG image that has been created with the GIMP added as a Resource to the project as the ImageSource:

<ImageBrush x:Key="noise" ImageSource="noise.png" TileMode="Tile" Viewport="0,0 128,128" ViewportUnits="Absolute" />

When overlaid on a dark gradient the following dark and slightly noisy background is created. In the sample shown a small amount of noise has also been added to background of the light block of text in the middle.

Read more:  Learn WPF

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