Grain2Pixel is here!

Hello everyone!

Finally, I managed to grab all code wrote in the last few months in a single piece of software and name it Grain2Pixel for the lack of a better name 🙂

The reason behind

Few months ago I started to develop my own solution for digital camera scan inversion. After a 12 days holiday in Portugal, I came back with 20+ rolls of film. I have an Epson V750 flatbed which is a very powerful tool in my opinion and I recommend it any time (along with visiting Portugal). The problem with my flatbed came when I realized that 20 rolls of film will take some serious amount of time for getting everything done, so having already a rig for digital camera scanning, I decided to go on this route.

The main problem with digital camera scans were colors on final images. Using existing plugins gave me many headaches and I spent a lot of time correcting all sort of color shifts.  On the other side, my Epson was giving me very good results in terms of colors, only that it was slower or much slower for the amount of film I had to scan.  

So, after a long pain, I decided to finish everything on my Epson and started to research how could I invert a negative scanned with a digital camera without facing all color issues I had. After a while, I started to write the code for this Grain2Pixel , which is basically a tool I made for myself in order to get the colors I know that film can deliver. Recently I created a more pleasant interface for it , in order to make it more easy to use.

What is it?

Grain2Pixel it’s a Photoshop based app which allows digital camera scans to be loaded and converted in positive scans avoiding Adobe Camera Raw. During my tests I realized the ACR (Adobe Camera Raw) it’s changing the raw file while opening, making irreversible changes which are a real pain to counteract.  ACR is a tool designed for real digital photography and in conjunction with normal digital pictures is a very powerful tool, but not with film scans, unfortunately.

How it works?

The workflow it’s pretty simple, but you’ll have to watch the videos for a better understanding.

Which software/OS is compatible with?

  • Windows
  • Mac OSx (requires some manual settings to allow the app to read/write files on disk)
  • Photoshop CC series

For the moment, it woks just fine on Windows. I made some tests for Mac OSx, with the help of some friends ( because I am an Windows user) and it seems to work pretty well, but some permissions needs to be manually added in order to allow the app to read and write files on disk. Check this video.

It’s tested Photoshop CC 2019 and above and it works just fine. However, I didn’t tried it on older versions like CS5 or CS6.

You may get it from Download page