Film Lab: Give Your Photos the Look of Real Film, Right in Your Browser

For about a hundred years, photographs came with a personality baked right in. The film stock you loaded decided how the picture would feel: the warm, flattering skin tones of Kodak Portra, the punchy greens and skies of Velvia, the gritty grain of Tri-X black-and-white, the dreamy red glow that Cinestill leaves around streetlights at night. Digital photos are sharper and cleaner than any of that … and, if I’m honest, a little colder.

So I built a little darkroom for the browser. It’s called Film Lab, it’s free, and it gives your digital photos that film character back.

If you’ve ever run a photo through an Instagram filter, you already know the basic idea: pick a look, and your picture takes on a whole mood in one tap. Film Lab is that, but built for people who actually care about photography: the looks are tuned after real film stocks instead of generic “Filter #3,” you get a strength dial and full manual control, and, the part I care about most, your photo never leaves your computer.

A whole shelf of film stocks

Drop in a photo and you’ll see it instantly rendered through eighteen looks: your actual picture as the thumbnail, so you can see what each one does before you commit. There’s Portra, Kodak Gold and Ektar; Fuji 400H and Velvia; Cinestill 800T with its glowing halation; Tri-X and Ilford HP5 in black-and-white; plus sepia, faded matte, bleach bypass, cross-process, a teal-and-orange cinema grade, Polaroid, golden hour, film noir and a sun-bleached 70s look. Tap one, then slide the strength from a whisper to full send.

Then make it yours

• Real film texture: dial in grain, halation (that soft glow around bright spots), bloom, a matte fade, vignette, and procedural light leaks in three styles.
• Full manual control: exposure, contrast, highlights and shadows, white balance, saturation and vibrance, plus a draggable tone curve and an HSL colour mixer for targeting just the skies or just the greens.
• Crop for anywhere: a drag-to-frame crop box with one-tap Square, Portrait, and Story (9:16) ratios, plus straighten.
• Finishing touches: film-print, Polaroid, filmstrip, rounded, drop-shadow and torn-edge borders; a caption (lovely on a Polaroid); and a retro orange date stamp that can even read the date your photo was taken.
• Share your recipe: built a look you love? Copy a link that reproduces your exact settings on anyone else’s photo. And you can save your own presets, or batch a whole folder through one look and download them as a zip.

And it never uploads your photo

This is the part most “online” photo editors get backwards: they make you upload your picture to their server first. Film Lab doesn’t. Every bit of the work (reading your photo, applying the look, saving the result) happens right here on the page, using your own device’s graphics chip. There’s no account, no sign-up, no analytics, and nothing is ever sent anywhere. Turn off your Wi-Fi and it still works. You can even add it to your phone’s home screen and use it like an app, offline.

It’s free, there are no ads, and there’s nothing to install. Bring a photo and give it a little soul.

Try Film Lab →, or browse the rest of the Workshop.