This is interesting to anyone who — like me — muses on the aesthetic differences between digital and analogue photography.

TrueGrain is a creative tool for accurately recapturing the aesthetics of black and white film with digital imagery.

TrueGrain takes the form of a stand-alone image processing utility that imposes the physical characteristics of a real-world film stock onto a digital image. The synthesis is done through measured and sampled data gathered from the actual film and development process being reproduced…

Here’s the workflow:

1. Prepare a color digital photograph as a TIF file

2. Load the TIF file into TrueGrain

3. Choose a film stock

4. Save the resulting image

It’s ingenious, but expensive. A single licence costs $300. Having just taken delivery of a batch of chemicals for processing some recent films, I’ll stick with chemistry for the time being.

There’s a nice irony in using sophisticated digital processing techniques to create an analogue effect!

Many thanks to Boyd Harris for spotting it.