Introducing
theLAB is a simple “Edit In” companion app for Lightroom Classic built for photographers who want a more believable film look. Lightroom’s built in grain, like the grain tools in most popular editing apps, is procedural rather than real film grain. It can add texture, but it lacks the color depth, variation, and organic character that true film grain brings to an image. theLAB is built around realism first, using over 30 real scanned grain plates sourced from a range of film stocks to give your images a richer, more authentic analog feel.
Start for free with a curated selection of real film grain across all ISOs. When you're ready to master the look, theLAB Pro unlocks every scanned grain plate, plus our entire suite of borders, textures, and rare analog artifacts.
It also gives Lightroom something it still does not have on its own: convincing film halation. Instead of faking the effect with masks, glow, or local adjustments, theLAB targets the brightest parts of the image and lets highlights bloom and bleed color into the surrounding areas more like real film. You can shape the look with controls for amount, threshold, softness, radius, hue, and saturation, taking it from a subtle warm bloom to a deeper red, Cinestill inspired halation. On top of that, theLAB includes over 100 real film borders, along with paper textures, light leaks, and experimental artifacts, so you can push images further while keeping the process inside a Lightroom-based workflow.
The workflow stays simple: in Lightroom Classic, choose Edit In → theLAB, adjust the look, then either save the edited TIFF straight back into your Lightroom catalog or export a TIFF anywhere you want.
Currently available for macOS only.
I designed theLAB because the alternatives I tried never quite got film grain right. Grain is one of the most distinctive characteristics of film, but it’s also one of the hardest things to recreate convincingly in digital post-processing. I wanted a tool that could reproduce that texture with more realism and accuracy.
