Cary, North Carolina-September 18, 2007-Grubba Software today introduced TrueGrain, a professional creative tool for accurately recapturing the aesthetics of black & white film with digital photography.

The TrueGrain software contains a library of grain samples and profiles for a number of classic film stocks, some of which are no longer available and are unlikely to be available in the future. TrueGrain users can easily import high resolution digital imagery-such as that produced with today's professional DSLR cameras-and immediately see a close approximation of how the image would look if it had been exposed using any of the film stocks in TrueGrain's library, right down to the fine grain structure details only visible under magnification.

"People have been fooling around with techniques for recapturing the look of film for a while now, but most of these attempts have been tentative and generic in both thrust and result," said Martin Doudoroff, Grubba Software collaborator. "We think TrueGrain goes quite a bit further through its empirical approach: high resolution film grain samples and meticulous databases of measurements. Our approach is brute force, but it produces the kind of results professionals are looking for. And our software makes it all quite accessible."

The inspiration for TrueGrain was the alarmingly swift decline of the traditional film photography industry and the equally swift maturation of the digital photography industry.

"Recently, we realized we weren't going to be able to get the films we were accustomed to. The majority of black and white films are out of production and entire manufacturers have gotten out of the film business," said Gus Grubba, the principle software engineer for Grubba Software. "We decided the only way we could continue to achieve the look we got from film was by processing digital images. We went on a film hunt on eBay and bought just about everything we could find. Between that and the films we already had stockpiled, we had a good basis for TrueGrain."

The primary application for TrueGrain is as a creative tool. In addition, TrueGrain has the potential to improve large prints of up-scaled digital images, and may prove useful for matching existing film images in restoration and compositing situations.

Pricing and availability: TrueGrain is now available for US$300 through the TrueGrain web site at http://grubbasoftware.com. A downloadable demo edition is also available. TrueGrain requires Mac OS X version 10.4.9 or later, a Macintosh computer, and at least 2GB RAM.

Grubba Software is an independent software developer based in Cary, North Carolina. Principal software developer Gus Grubba is a veteran of the computer graphics industry and an accomplished fine art photographer. Collaborator Martin Doudoroff is an escapee from the computer graphics industry, an amateur photographer, and an acknowledged cocktail expert. Released in September 2007, TrueGrain is Grubba Software's first product.