Press Kit

Film physics, not filters

Licht started as a late-night experiment.

Héctor García builds interfaces at GitHub — design systems, accessibility, the infrastructure behind how developers interact with software. On the side, he makes things: shaders, particle systems, audio visualizers. Things that don’t need to do anything, built because he got curious what would happen.

One of those experiments was a WebGL film emulation — real-time film presets applied to a live camera feed in the browser, using shaders that modeled each stock’s optical properties: the tone curve and shoulder compression, grain structure, halation around bright highlights. It worked surprisingly well. Because the physics was right, not because someone had tuned a filter to approximate the look.

That’s the problem with most film camera apps. Your iPhone shoots a frame, Apple’s computational pipeline processes it (sharpened, noise-reduced, white-balanced) and then the app drops a color grade on top. You’re filtering a digital photo to look like film. The tones compress wrong. The grain is texture, not optics. The halation is a glow effect, not light bleeding through emulsion layers.

The browser experiment needed to be a real camera.

Licht is the native iOS version of that experiment, rebuilt with a 14-stage Metal GPU pipeline that runs the full optical simulation in real time on the live camera feed, before the shutter fires. What you see in the viewfinder is what you get — because the physics is running on every frame, not applied after capture.

10 film stocks. 3 cinema print emulations. 5 film formats. Fully offline. No ads, no subscriptions, no tracking.

The name is German for light. The app exists because a WebGL shader experiment turned into the camera app that should have existed already.