Grainmaker is a modular, additive set of tools designed to give your digital photos an analogue touch. ✨
We've built Grainmaker over the last few years, while simultaneously running a film lab, leveraging our access to world-class film processors, scanners and other lab machines, as well as our thorough knowledge and experience with film, having developed tens of thousands of rolls in the past five or so years.
Running a lab daily has given us close proximity to the ever-changing culture of film photography; why people are falling in love with it, and why people have moved away from it. Endless conversations, observations and opinions being floated around - raising costs, supply issues, lack of functioning second-hand cameras, but the desire to shoot images that have a little more 'soul' than a typical digital photo persists. The grain, the grit, the texture, the happy accidents, the softness - there's plenty of reasons people have gravitated toward analogue photography, and it seems, plenty of reasons people have strayed away from it too.
We started building Grainmaker to bridge the divide - extracting the special ingredients of analogue film photography, isolating them, formatting them and putting them back together to utilise with your digital photos. It's taken us about two years to build these set of tools - and we're incredibly proud of the results.
We've put Grainmaker through its paces in those past few years, travelling the world and shooting all sorts of subjects, styles and scenes through all sorts of digital cameras - refining, crafting and polishing these tools to a point where we truly think the results speak for themselves.
Everything works within an additive, modular workflow, all contained neatly in Photoshop - stacking true analogue elements together to create endless possibilities and variations. You can work with varying densities of grain, then add a variety of different light leaks, film burns, date and time imprints, film borders, and a few weird and wonderful oddities and damaged artefacts too.
All these ingredients have come directly from real film, processed through immaculate processors and scanned in at incredibly high quality through industry scanners, giving us complete control over these nuanced and specific elements, and giving us the ability to not just 'replicate' film components, but to truly extract and apply them to digital imagery.
The result is a way to compellingly and creatively sculpt your digital photos in ways which make them look more like they've been shot with a Leica M7 rather than your Sony A7.
So if you're moving away from film photography to digital, or you're currently shooting both, or perhaps you've never shot film but want to explore the aesthetic qualities, dig into Grainmaker, explore its features, and see the results for yourself!
