This fast, free film grain app gives your photos the film grain look like Kodak Gold – but there is one downside

This might sound strange to younger generations, but there was once a time when film grain was considered undesirable. Film stocks were advertised as having the ‘finest ever’ grain, barely perceptible – until the digital revolution arrived, and suddenly people found themselves nostalgically hankering after a bit of grit in their images. And so arrives ‘TheGrain’, a piece of photo-editing software I’ve been trying out that allows you to add film-style grain into your digital images.

TheGrain is the brainchild (grainchild?) of Andreas Gamsreiter, founder of the Munich-based retouching studio RETUSH. The idea of putting analog-esque grain into digital images is of course not new – there are plenty of apps that do it, such as VSCO, and pretty much every piece of editing software from Photoshop to GIMP offers it in some form.

However, Gamsreiter felt that nothing on the market was giving his images that kind of authentic-feeling grain that he wanted, with most simply overlaying a pre-made grain texture. So, he built TheGrain, a dynamic image-editing tool that creates bespoke grain for individual images, generating millions of particles and placing them according to the content of the image – and I’ve been trying it out over the past few weeks.

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