Micronegative is a running experiment in film-accurate photo processing — new ways of looking at an image, tried out in the open. Some of it's solid. Some of it's still rough at the edges. All of it's free, local-first, and yours to push on. Open a photo, try something new, tell us what worked.
Join the experimentFree to use*. No account, no upload, nothing running in the background.
Micronegative isn't a finished product pretending to be one. It's a lab — new ways of processing a photo, built in the open and put in front of you as soon as they're worth trying, not once they're perfect. Some tools here are as solid as anything you'd pay for. Others are a first pass at an idea we're still testing.
Play with it. Break it. If something works — or doesn't — tell us. That feedback is most of how this gets better, and it's the difference between a tool built for a spec sheet and one built with the people actually using it.
Most photo tools have grown into platforms. Micronegative stays small on purpose — every tool in it is one we actually use, ourselves, regularly.
It's a film tool at heart, built for grain, tone, and character. Not pixel-perfect correction. It won't make your photos technically correct. It'll make them feel like something.
8-bit is the default. Flip HIGH-BIT and the tonal chain runs in 32-bit float instead, with a genuine 16-bit TIFF out the other end. RAW (CR2, NEF, ARW, DNG) decodes right in the browser either way.
Edits are non-destructive throughout, and your files are never locked inside the app. They stay on your drive, in your folders, exactly where you left them.
You know the moment. Drop the Portra preset on and it's close — warmer, nicer, still a digital file wearing a costume. Push it: the reds sit right and the leaves go radioactive. Pull back for the leaves and the reds go flat. There's no number where both are right. That's not you being bad at this.
A filter can only ask what colour a pixel is. Film asks where the tone sits — a red in shadow and a red in light aren't the same thing to an emulsion, and two reds sitting side by side in the same shadow can pull apart in opposite directions at once. Every filter you've bought had to split that difference. We don't.
Portra drags yellow-greens down about twice as hard as Ektar — that's the whole reason one goes soft and pastel and the other doesn't. Cinestill glows because the anti-halation backing was scraped off, so nothing else in the box glows like it. Grain lives in the midtones and survives into the highlights, where digital noise dies to nothing — that survival is most of why a clean file reads as plastic. Shoot bigger, enlarge less, get finer grain.
And every one of those is a slider — nothing's welded shut, nothing gets repainted, no model hallucinating detail back in. Full resolution in, full resolution out. Free, in a browser tab. No account, no upload, no subscription — your photos never leave your machine. Drop one in and see if the leaves go right.
Drop any photo or drag it straight in. No import dialog, no library to set up first. You're already in the negative.
Push grain, tone, contrast. Shape a look. Every control is there because it does something. Nothing exists just to pad the interface.
Save back to your folder. Your file stays yours. Edits are non-destructive and nothing is locked in a format you can't open without the app.
Studio is the darkroom. These are the specialists next door, running entirely on your machine.
A black & white darkroom: contrast-filter conversion, real B&W stocks, Zone System spot meter, chemical toning, paper and grain.
Open /mono →Finish a print: gallery borders, real film frames, burned edges, a caption plate, 300ppi and Instagram export.
Open /print →On-device super-resolution: 2×/4× upscale, JPEG-artifact removal, before/after compare. Nothing uploaded.
Open /restore →The whole app, in three moves.
Nothing to configure before you start.
* Everything here runs entirely locally in your browser and is free — no account, no subscription, no paid hosted API, ever. A few tools (the Fixer inside Clone & Heal, Sky Recovery, Light Zones, subject-aware sharpening in Finishing, and Auto Face in Facelift) download a small machine-learning model once from a public CDN on first use, then run entirely on your machine from then on. Your photograph itself is never uploaded, by any tool, ever — what's downloaded is model weights, not a place your images go.
A ten-knob control surface that takes the filmstrip's place. One pair of keys drives whichever knob is selected and one pair moves the selection, so the whole surface is two things to remember rather than twenty. Opens on Tone.
Film-stock and filter names are trademarks of their respective owners, used only to describe the look each preset emulates. Micronegative is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by any of them; all emulations are independent approximations.
Nothing you edit leaves your device — read the privacy policy