01
Developed live
Aim at a negative and the finished photograph develops on screen as you watch: colours true, the orange mask lifted, nothing to scan and no waiting around.
Your digital darkroom, in real time
Point your camera at a negative and watch the finished photo appear: colours true, the orange mask gone, developed live. The darkroom feeling, on Mac, Windows and Linux.
macOS, Windows & Linux · tethered capture · processes locally
For the love of film
See your film come to life, the moment you shoot it
No scanning and waiting. No bouncing into another app to invert and fix it afterwards. Just your film, the way it was meant to look.
02
Negative in, positive out
See the negative going in and the finished positive coming out, side by side, with dual histograms so every frame is well exposed.
03
Sharp every frame
Focus peaking, a composition grid and clipping warnings keep every shot crisp. A satisfying shutter saves your photo the instant you press it.
04
Dial in the look
Nudge exposure, contrast and white balance and watch the positive shift in real time. The look is yours, dialed in while you shoot.
05
Shoot the whole roll
Move down the roll frame by frame without breaking rhythm. Each one develops, saves and you're on to the next in seconds.
Works with your gear
Your camera, your film, your machine
No special hardware. Tether what you already shoot with and start developing.
Cameras
Hundreds supported
Any camera libgphoto2 drives over USB. If yours shoots tethered, it most likely just works.
Film
C-41 · E-6 · B&W
Colour negative, slide and black & white, detected from the negative automatically.
Output
RAW · TIFF · JPEG
Save the format you want, full EXIF metadata written the instant you capture.
Privacy
100% local
Everything runs on your own machine. No cloud, no account, nothing ever leaves it.
Why FilmBench
From negative to photograph, without the detour
The old way
- Scan every frame
- Import to the computer
- Invert and pull the orange mask
- Correct the colour by hand
- Repeat, frame after frame
With FilmBench
- Point the camera at the negative
- Watch it develop, live
- Press the shutter
- Saved, on to the next
A note from the maker
Hi, I'm Bogdan. I have a Bachelor of Arts in photography, and I love shooting film. The trouble is always the part that comes after: I've got rolls and rolls of negatives sitting around, all waiting to be scanned.
I tried doing it the usual way, processing the raw scans by hand, and it was slow and fiddly every single time. The tools made it worse, too. Linux is my daily driver and support there is rough, and even on my Mac I could never find anything that made the whole flow feel friendly.
So I leaned on my other life. I'm an experienced software developer with a degree in computer science, and once I put the photographer and the engineer in the same room, FilmBench fell into place: point the camera at a negative and the finished photograph appears on screen right away, the way an image swims up in the developer tray, except live, with the negative still in your hand.
That's the whole idea, a friendly, budget-friendly way to scan film at home, with the darkroom feeling kept intact. I hope it brings some of the joy of film back to your desk. Now go shoot something beautiful.
BA Photography Computer Science Software developer