FWIW, I evaluated several of the available grain plugins on the market a while back. I found Alien Skin's grain plugin to be too artificial looking and much prefer Imagenomic's "RealGrain" plugin:
http://www.imagenomic.com/rg.aspx
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=106365\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
Some canned grains might be a bit artificial looking but some of them I found quite good. You do need to take the layer opacity down somewhat to get rid of the artificial look.
Besides that you also have to be careful mixing the alien skin plugin with other stuff because that will become too much very quickly.
