Granular is a native macOS app for giving still images a more photographic, film-like finish—quickly. It combines film tone, light shaping, lens diffusion, halation, and light-responsive grain in a focused workflow built for macOS.
- Instant mode — a film-back interface: pick a recipe from the canister, drop images onto the film strip, and each one is processed and saved right away. An exposure counter tracks the frames you've shot.
- Edit mode — open an image, fine-tune the look with a live preview, inspect details at any zoom level, hold the eye button to compare against the original, then export. Switch between Instant and Edit from the toolbar.
- Watched folders — automatically process new images placed in a selected folder.
- Recipes — start with a small set of built-in looks, then save, rename, reorder, and share your own as
.granularrecipefiles in the Recipe Library (⌥⌘R). - Film tone — choose from curated color stocks and adjust exposure, contrast, saturation, vibrance, and warmth with a photographic response.
- Optical and finishing effects — shape the frame with vignette, imperfect edge-focused lens blur and prismatic RGB separation, Black Pro-Mist-style diffusion, restrained halation, detail-preserving landscape glow, and signal-dependent grain.
Granular processes JPEG, HEIC, PNG, and TIFF images. The rendering order is fixed:
film tone → spotlight/vignette → lens blur → diffusion → halation → landscape glow → grain
- macOS 26 or later
- Apple Silicon or an Intel Mac capable of running macOS 26
Granular currently ships as source. Building requires the full Xcode 26 application, including Icon Composer.
The easiest route is to double-click Build Granular.command in Finder. It creates the app at dist/Granular.app and reveals it when finished.
Or build from Terminal:
swift test
./Scripts/build-app.sh
open -R dist/Granular.appDetailed setup and troubleshooting instructions are in BUILDING.md.
The three cinema stocks are baked from the MIT-licensed spectral_film_lut model; the rest are parametric looks fitted to the author's own reference renderings. See THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.txt for details.
Film-stock and manufacturer names are descriptive only. Granular is not endorsed by or affiliated with their trademark owners.
Copyright (c) 2026 Daniel McCullum.
Granular is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. It is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; see the license for details.
Bundled third-party components keep their original licenses.