“SilverChrome” Film Simulation App for macOS in Development
Back in 2017, I began developing a simulation of the effects of Kodak TRI-X 400 black and white film and its chemistry in Photoshop.
Fast forward to 2021, I’ve updated and tweaked the Photoshop action and produced a YouTube video explaining how it all worked. It was even published on PetaPixel with a very positive response.
What always bugged me about it, despite the success I had with the outcome, was how long it took to run in Photoshop and Silver Efex Pro as well as the time it took to launch the behemoths of Adobe software.
I’m a full-time software developer with graphics experience, so I finally began to look into how I might be able to recreate the entire Photoshop action, film grain simulation and all using Apple’s CoreImage framework and some custom GPU shaders.
If I was successful, I could work to turn the project into a standalone piece of software that ran much faster and required no additional software to use!
I could then add a number of controls to change the settings and tweak the way the simulation “developed” the photo into black and white, from halation strength to exposure bloom, grain intensity and edge sharpening effects as well as simple B&W tonal controls.
Before and after processing (close-up)
The Good News!
I spent a few days working on it and I was able to create a experimental film simulation engine with various settings to control the intensity of each effect.
So I’ve begun working on a macOS version of the software with a full user interface to adjust the settings.
It requires a lot of optimisations as well as UI and user experience development, but I’m hopeful I can create something that makes the process easier than using Photoshop and Silver Efex Pro via Lightroom.
I plan to implement black and white tonal controls as well as the ability to save and restore presets.
Each of these presets should be able to simulate different styles of film and developer combinations. The defaults being a sharp and gritty Rodinal developer used on a grainy Kodak TRI-X 400 black and white film stock as seen in my own real world scans.
More on this as it develops!