a film lab for files that never went through one.
Cosmic Lab puts a digital photo, or one frame of video, through the stages a lab puts film through — the stock’s color response, then the scanner — and writes out a picture, a batch, or a .cube LUT you drop on a whole clip. it reads which camera shot the file and starts from there. everything happens on your own machine, offline.
what it does
photos and video, one app
photos come in as raw or JPEG and go out as finished files. for video you drop in a single frame from your timeline, grade it until it’s right, and export a .cube LUT to apply to the clip in your editor. the same stocks and the same sliders do both.
it reads the camera off the file
the app pulls the camera out of the file’s metadata and normalizes for that body before any look is applied, so one stock name means the same thing on a Nikon raw and on a phone photo. you can set it by hand for frame grabs and screenshots, which arrive with no metadata at all.
film stocks, built one at a time
color negative, black and white, and cinema negative — Portra, Gold, Ektar, Pro 400H, Tri-X, HP5, Vision3 50D through 500T, Eterna. each is its own tone curve, per-channel crossover, and hue response, so the stocks disagree with each other the way the emulsions do.
the scanner is a switch
the same negative comes back one way off a Frontier and another off a Noritsu — more contrast, a lower black point, golden skin where the other gives pink. the scanner sits after the stock as one global layer, so any stock can be rendered either way.
the LUT matches the frame you approved
one switch bakes that frame’s own balance into the .cube, so the clip comes back looking like the still you signed off on. turn it off and you get the neutral grade instead, safe to lay across a clip you have already balanced yourself. the card written next to the file says which of the two you exported.
digital preset packs
five packs — Film, Wedding, Whimsical, Editorial, Essentials — for the days you want a finished look on a digital file without going through a stock. pick one on a single frame and apply it to everything you imported.
eleven LUTs in the box
sample .cube files come with the download: Portra, Ektar, Gold, and Pro 400H on a Frontier, Eterna 500 against a 2383 print, and the Vision3 negatives against 2383 and 2393. something to put on a clip before you grade anything yourself.
a card that says what the LUT left out
a LUT carries color and nothing else. every .cube export comes with a plain-text card naming what could not travel with it — the glow, the vignette, the grain — and the exact settings to add back in your editor, already worked out in pixels for the footage size you named. if the clip is log, that card is also where it tells you to convert to Rec.709 with the camera’s own LUT first and grade the frame after that, never before.
crop, rotate, favorites, grid
crop to the usual aspect ratios over a thirds overlay, rotate, mark favorites, and switch between a contact-sheet grid and a single-image view. arrow keys walk the roll; a held button shows you the original.
export the way you need it
JPEG, 8-bit PNG, or 16-bit TIFF, full size or resized to a long edge you choose, into a folder you choose. filenames are built from a pattern using the original name, the preset, the camera, the date, and a number.
your credit written into every file
set artist, copyright, and contact once and they go into the metadata of everything you export. the camera’s own EXIF — date, lens, settings — is carried through unless you turn it off. an optional text watermark has its own position, size, and opacity.
your originals are never touched
a look is a recipe, held separately and applied when you export. the app reads your source files and never writes to them, at any resolution, in any format.
where the grain comes from
Not in the build yet. The grain switch and its two sliders are in the app, but as of build 1.1.0 they do not change the picture — the modelling below is what grain is being built to do, not what it does today. This section becomes a description of the shipping app when that lands, and not before.
most film-grain sliders lay one noise texture over the picture and fade it up. Cosmic Lab is being built to make grain at a physical size instead — noise generated at the grain’s own cell size and grown to the diameter that stock’s crystals actually have, applied as a change in density rather than a layer sitting on top, and weighted by the exposure under each pixel so it rides heaviest through the midtones and leaves true black and paper white clean.
the per-stock numbers are anchored to each film’s published RMS granularity — Ektar at the fine end, Tri-X at the coarse — so the stocks disagree about grain the way they disagree about color.
size is held in microns on the negative and converted to pixels from your file’s own dimensions, so one number per stock comes out right on a 36-megapixel raw and on a phone photo instead of one looking digitally noisy and the other looking coarse. grain is off by default; turn it on and you get an amount slider and a size slider — which, in the current build, is as far as it goes.
who it’s for
you shoot film and digital on the same job
you know what your lab’s scans look like, and you want the digital frames to sit next to them in one gallery without anyone picking out which is which.
you grade your own footage
you pull one frame out of the timeline, work it until it reads, and take the .cube back to your editor instead of paying for the grade.
you have four hundred frames to get through
one look applied to the batch, one export, and the originals still exactly where you left them.
what sets it apart
what stays on your computer
Cosmic Lab works offline. there is no account to make, no sign-in, and no Cosmicore server holding your photographs — the app makes no network connection at all, which is also why it collects nothing.
your pictures are opened from your disk and written back to a folder you pick. the credit fields you set are written into the files you export and nowhere else.
one-time, no subscription
Cosmic Lab
the full app, bought once; updates to the version you bought will cost nothing extra. phone versions are planned and will be a separate purchase.
it is not priced yet, so there is no number on this page to hold anyone to.
questions about it before it ships go to hello@cosmicore.net.
common questions
when can i buy it?
it is not finished, so there is no date and nothing here is a pre-order.
does it work offline?
yes. it makes no network connection, needs no account, and nothing is uploaded. it opens files from your disk and writes files back to your disk.
does it change my original photos?
no. the app reads your originals and never writes to them. a look is a recipe applied when you export, into a folder you choose.
what files can it open?
raw from most bodies — NEF, CR2, CR3, ARW, RW2, RAF, ORF, PEF, and DNG among them — plus JPEG, HEIC, PNG, TIFF, and WebP.
how does it work on video?
you export a still frame from your footage, grade that frame in Cosmic Lab, and export a .cube LUT to apply to the clip in your editor. a LUT carries color only, so the card exported alongside it lists the glow, vignette, and grain settings to add back there.
my footage is log. what do i do first?
bring the clip to Rec.709 with your camera’s own conversion LUT, then take the still frame you are going to grade from the converted clip. a look built on the log curve will not match once the clip is converted, and the card that exports next to the .cube says so.
do i need a subscription?
no. Cosmic Lab is a one-time purchase, and updates to the version you bought will cost nothing extra. there are no ads, no in-app purchases, and nothing to renew.
what will it run on?
Windows first, with macOS and Linux to follow. one purchase covers the desktop app on every platform it runs on. phone versions are planned as a separate purchase.
is the grain just a texture overlay?
it will not be — but it is not in the build yet. As of 1.1.0 the switch and sliders are present and do not change the picture. What is being built: grain applied as a change in density, weighted by the exposure under each pixel, with its size held in microns on the negative rather than in pixels, so the same setting reads correctly on a 36-megapixel raw and on a phone photo, and the per-stock numbers anchored to each film’s published RMS granularity.