Tom Schucker, the photographer and maker behind the Pieca Project — a 3D-printed Raspberry Pi camera with a Leica M-mount that went viral in 2022 — has released Wholegrain, a photo editing app built specifically around film simulation. The app includes more than 50 film stock emulations, a custom grain algorithm, creative effects like bleach bypass and expired film looks, and a full suite of standard editing tools. It is free to download.
The film simulation app market is not new. VSCO built an empire on it before pivoting away from Lightroom presets (and then, as we recently covered, pivoting back). Fujifilm built hardware film simulations directly into their cameras. RNI, Mastin Labs, and dozens of other companies sell preset packs that approximate specific film stocks. What makes Wholegrain worth attention is the approach to grain and the fact that it comes from someone who clearly understands the underlying physics of analog imaging.
The grain problem
Most digital film simulations handle grain as an overlay — a texture layer applied uniformly across the image after color processing. The result is grain that looks pasted on because it is pasted on. Real film grain is an intrinsic part of the image formation process. The silver halide crystals that make up the emulsion respond to light exposure at the molecular level, and the resulting grain pattern is influenced by the film stock's sensitivity, the developer chemistry, the exposure level, and the density of the final image. Shadows have different grain characteristics than highlights. Underexposed areas show more pronounced grain than properly exposed areas. The grain is the image, not a layer on top of it.
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Schucker's app uses custom grain algorithms that attempt to model these relationships rather than simply overlaying a static texture. The grain responds to image content — density, luminance, color channel — rather than sitting uniformly across the frame. Whether this achieves true photographic accuracy is debatable at the pixel level, but the perceptual result is grain that feels more integrated with the image than what you typically get from preset-based approaches.
Film stock selection
The simulation library covers the stocks that most photographers would want: Fujifilm Provia, Superia, and Velvia on the slide and consumer negative side; Kodak Ektachrome and Portra for the Kodak loyalists; Rollei IR 400 for infrared enthusiasts; and dozens more across color negative, color reversal, and black-and-white categories. Each simulation has adjustable parameters, so you are not locked into a single interpretation of a given stock. This is important because film rendering varied significantly depending on lab processing, scanning equipment, and exposure choices — there was never one "correct" look for Portra 400.
The creative simulations extend beyond specific stock emulation into more stylized territory: bleach bypass, cross-processing effects, expired film looks, and variations like "summer vibes" that apply broader color grading with analog characteristics. These are the filters that will get the most casual use, but the straight stock simulations are where the app shows its technical ambition.
Why this matters now
The timing of Wholegrain coincides with a broader cultural moment in photography. There is a widespread and growing dissatisfaction with the way modern digital cameras and smartphone computational photography render images. The hyper-sharpness, aggressive noise reduction, excessive dynamic range, and synthetic HDR processing that define contemporary digital photography are technically impressive and aesthetically sterile. Photographers — professional and casual alike — are actively seeking ways to reintroduce the qualities that digital processing engineered out: grain, limited dynamic range, color responses that are characterful rather than accurate, and optical imperfections that give images a sense of physical materiality.
This is what is driving the film camera revival, the Fujifilm X100VI backorder situation, the explosion of film simulation recipes on social media, and the market for apps like Wholegrain. The technology itself is not the point. The aesthetic correction is the point. Photographers want their digital images to feel less processed, and the irony is that achieving that feeling requires more processing, not less — just processing aimed at re-creating analog characteristics rather than eliminating them.
Where it fits in a workflow
Wholegrain is primarily tuned for iPhone photos, though Schucker notes the simulations work with images from any camera. For photographers shooting dedicated cameras and processing through Lightroom or Capture One, the app is most useful as a final-stage creative tool — apply your technical corrections in your primary editor, export, and run the result through Wholegrain for the film treatment. For iPhone-only shooters, it functions as a complete editing environment with the film simulations as the primary creative differentiator.
The free price point removes the evaluation barrier entirely. Download it, run your own images through it, and decide whether the grain and color rendering match what you are looking for. In a market full of paid preset packs and subscription-based editing apps, a free tool from a photographer who builds cameras from Raspberry Pi boards and 3D-printed parts carries a certain credibility that is hard to manufacture.