Black and white film look: what makes it, how to shoot it

The black and white film look isn't a colour photo with the colour drained out. It comes from three things film does on its own: it decides which colours turn light and which turn dark, it builds the image out of grain, and it lets bright light glow into the shadows.

It's having a moment, too. In October PetaPixel covered MARS, a new iPhone camera app from Japanese photographer Keitaro Kobayashi that shoots black and white only, with just three controls: Glow, Exposure and Grain. Here's what each of those is actually imitating, and how to get the look on any phone.

What makes the black and white film look

Strip away the romance and a black and white film photo is the result of three choices:

• Colour to grey. Film doesn't see colour, but it does respond to it, and not the way your eyes do. A red door and a green hedge can land on very different greys.
• Grain. Every tone is made of silver grain, from the smooth, fine kind to the gritty, classic kind.
• Glow and contrast. Bright lights spread into dark surroundings, and each film has its own idea of how deep the blacks go and how long the greys run.

Get those three right and a photo reads as film. Miss them, and it reads as a phone photo with the saturation slider at zero.

How film turns colour into grey

Ilford's guide to colour filters puts it simply: normal black and white films are sensitive to all visible wavelengths of light, but the way they translate a scene's colours into greys won't always match how you see it. That's why black and white shooters carry colour filters. They change, at the moment of capture, which colours come out light and which come out dark.

Filter	What it does (per Ilford)	Typical filter factor
Yellow	Darkens blue sky so clouds stand out; keeps skin natural	2
Orange	Very dark skies, bold sky-to-cloud contrast	4 (about +1 stop)
Red	Blue skies go close to black, storm-like drama	4 to 5 (+1 to +2 stops)
Green	Lightens foliage that would otherwise go muddy	2
Blue	Adds haze and mood; darkens yellows, oranges and reds	2

Ilford's flower example is the best illustration. Without a filter, flowers and the leaves around them often end up almost the same grey. Add a red filter and, in almost every case, they separate clearly.

Some films go further on their own. Ilford's Ortho Plus is orthochromatic: sensitive to blue and green but not red, so reds and deep oranges come out dark and contrasty.

The lesson for a phone: a plain desaturate maps colours to grey by brightness alone, so two colours of similar brightness merge into one flat grey. A convincing black and white look decides which colours to pull apart. If your app offers colour filter or channel controls, a "red" setting is how you get those dark skies.

Grain: classic or clean

Black and white film comes in two broad grain personalities.

Classic grain. Films like Ilford HP5 Plus and FP4 Plus use established emulsion technology. Kodak still describes Tri-X 400 as having classic grain and wide latitude. Ilford notes that its Plus films have more exposure latitude than its Delta films, cope better with pushing and pulling, and are more forgiving of over-development, which is why it suggests beginners start there.

Clean grain. Ilford's Delta films use newer emulsion technology with a lower grain-to-speed ratio: less grain at the same speed, and a slightly cleaner, sharper look. Analog.Cafe's 8 October review of Delta 100 describes its flat, tabular grain against the cubic grain of HP5 Plus, FP4 Plus and Tri-X. Kodak's T-Max line, now sold as Ektapan after this year's rename, sits in the same clean-grain camp.

Two more rules of thumb. Ilford notes that slower films generally have finer grain. And the developer changes how grain looks: Analog.Cafe found Rodinal gave Delta 100 crisper grain and DD-X the smoothest.

On a phone, pick a grain on purpose. Big, gritty grain suits street photography and night scenes. Fine grain suits portraits and architecture. Either way, the grain should feel like part of the image rather than a texture laid over it. That's one of the six tells of a real film look.

Glow, contrast and tone

Halation doesn't vanish in black and white. Without colour layers, the glow around a strong light simply comes out white instead of red, as we explain in what halation is and why it happens.

That glow is what MARS is built around. Kobayashi describes its Glow control as "how much the light overflows": the brightest highlights bleed outward into the shadows, as they do on film. It's the halo you see around streetlamps in night shots on black and white film.

Contrast is the other half. Some black and white looks crush the shadows to pure black and let highlights burn bright. Others keep long, soft runs of grey. Films differ here as well: Analog.Cafe's review puts Delta 100's useful range at about 8.3 stops, from its datasheet, and notes HP5 Plus holds considerably more.

The enemy of both is heavy HDR. Phones that lift every shadow and pull down every highlight turn black and white into grey mush. We explain why in why phone photos look overprocessed.

How to shoot a black and white film look on a phone

A short checklist that works whatever app you use:

1. Shoot light and shape, not colour. Side light, hard shadows and silhouettes do the heavy lifting in black and white.
2. Expose for the highlights. Drag exposure down a touch and let the shadows go black. That's where the drama lives.
3. Use colour knowingly. A red coat against green leaves will separate beautifully, or vanish, depending on the look's colour response. Check before you rely on it.
4. Choose your grain. Gritty for streets and night, fine for faces and buildings.
5. Hunt for glow. Point lights against dark backgrounds at night are where film-style glow shows best.
6. Commit while you shoot. Seeing in black and white changes what you notice. Shooting in colour and converting later is a different habit.

Apps to try, and where trycheese fits

MARS is the newest dedicated option. According to PetaPixel, it develops each frame live from the iPhone's HDR signal, so the viewfinder shows what you'll keep. It offers 1:1, 5:4, 4:3, 3:2 and 16:9 crops, and costs $6.99 with no ads, no subscription and no data collection. PetaPixel reported a 1 November 2026 launch on the App Store, as an iPhone app, though we couldn't find a listing to confirm it on 2 November.

trycheese takes a different route. Its catalogue includes two black and white film looks: Smoked, a hard black and white, and Swiss, a soft one. Like every trycheese look, they bake grain, halation and a filmic tone curve into the photo at the shutter. There's no live filter preview, so you frame the scene and see the result a beat later.

trycheese is coming to iPhone and Android together, free at launch. It isn't out yet. In the meantime, try the checklist on your phone's own camera this week: one street, one light source, no colour.