Introducing pxlmonk

I shoot both digital and film, and for years I’ve fought the same problem every hybrid photographer runs into: RAW development and film scanning live in two completely different toolchains. Lightroom-style editors treat a film scan as a JPEG with weird colors. Dedicated film software doesn’t do RAW at all. Neither wants to talk to the other.

Why film conversion deserves to be a first-class feature

pxlmonk starts from a different premise: a film scan and a digital RAW file are the same kind of problem — a sensor (or a scanner) recorded some light, and the job of the editor is to turn that recording into a photo you actually want to look at. So film ingest is a real stage in the same pipeline, before white balance and everything else, with proper density-space inversion, per-channel level matching to remove the orange base mask, and a paper-grade tone curve — not a generic "invert" filter bolted onto an image editor.

Local-first, on purpose

pxlmonk runs entirely on your machine. There’s no account, no server, no forced sync — a deliberate trust signal, not a missing feature. Your photos never leave your computer unless you choose to export them.

What’s free, what’s not

The free tier is a full-quality, non-destructive editor: exposure, tone, color, HSL, geometry, local masks and retouching, with no time limit and no feature cap while you’re editing. The gates only apply at export — a watermark and a resolution cap. Film negative conversion, creative 3D LUTs and 16-bit TIFF export are part of the Pro tier, which is how the film-conversion work actually gets funded.

What’s next

pxlmonk is still in development. If you want to know the moment it’s ready to download, join the waitlist — that’s the only thing that email address will ever be used for.