Film Emulator - Photo editor

This app is a film emulation editor that lets you edit picture images with the color response of many different types of film stock.

This app features 166 different presets designed to replicate various film stocks from Agfa, Analogfx, Kodak, Ilford, Polaroid, and Fuji film.

I hacked together a little analog film emulation tool in Javascript. It's based on the awesome work of Pat David. I wrote it mainly to play with some new tech but I liked the result enough to share it with you. You can try it here.

How the Film Emulation works

I guess the most interesting part for most people is the actual film emulation code. It's using Color Lookup Tables (cluts).

So in simplistic terms:

For every pixel in the image

Take it's color values r, g, b

Look up it's new color value in the lookup table

r', g', b' = colorLookupTable[r, g, b]

Set the pixel to the color values (r', g', b')

In practice there are a few more considerations. Most cluts don't contain values for all 16 777 216 (224) colors in the rgb space. A simplistic solution to this problem would be to always just use the closest color (nearest-neighbor interpolation). This is fast but results in very ugly banding artifacts.

So to keep things fast I use random dithering for the previews and trilinear filtering for the final output. The random dithering is probably a suboptimal choice, but it was easy to implement.

You can find more details about how the lookup tables were create on Pat Davids website.