Film grain and halation, now on the iPhone (18Pro)
September 26, 2026 • 5 min. • 1038 words
For about a decade, the phone camera has been engineered to remove things. Noise, blown highlights, soft edges, uneven skin. Every generation got cleaner, smoother and more even, until a lot of us started to find the results a little lifeless.
This year Apple went the other way. The iPhone 18 Pro (only) adds a Film texture and a Grain control to Photographic Styles, which put back two things film photographers spent a century trying to get rid of: grain and halation.
Before looking at what the iPhone does, it’s worth knowing what these actually are.
What grain is
Film records light using tiny silver halide crystals suspended in an emulsion. When you develop the film, the exposed crystals turn into specks of metallic silver (or, in colour film, clouds of dye). Up close, those specks clump together, and at print size that clumping shows up as a fine, irregular texture. That’s grain.
Faster film has larger crystals so it can catch more light, which is why ISO 3200 looks rough and ISO 100 looks smooth. Grain is also most visible in the midtones and tends to disappear in the deepest shadows and brightest highlights.
Grain is not the same as digital noise. Noise comes from the sensor and electronics, often shows up as coloured speckles, and is worst in the shadows. It looks like a fault. Grain is part of the image structure itself, which is why it tends to read as texture rather than damage.
What halation is
Halation is the soft, often reddish glow you see around bright light sources on film: street lamps, neon, a sunlit window behind someone’s head.
It happens when strong light passes all the way through the emulsion, bounces off the film base or the camera’s pressure plate, and comes back to expose the emulsion a second time from behind. Because the red-sensitive layer sits deepest in colour film, that returning light mostly shows up as a red or orange halo.
Most film stocks carry an anti-halation layer to stop this. Kodak Portra shows only a little. CineStill 800T, which is motion picture stock with that layer removed, shows a lot, and that glow around tungsten lights is a big part of why people buy it.
What the iPhone 18 Pro does
The new controls sit on top of Photographic Styles. You can add the Film texture, which includes halation, and Grain, which can be used on its own or with any other texture. Grain is switched on automatically when you pick Film, but you can turn it off. It’s all off by default, so the Camera app still produces what people expect an iPhone photo to look like.
A few details from the early reviews:
- The Film slider controls how much halation you get. Austin Mann found it sometimes goes too far and recommends dialling it back. John Gruber had the same experience with a glow around his dog’s head.
- There is no control over the amount of grain. PetaPixel notes that Apple decides how to apply it image by image.
- Photographic Styles only work when shooting HEIF. Switch to JPEG or RAW and the option disappears.
- It’s limited to the iPhone 18 Pro models and the iPhone Duo. Apple had originally listed older phones as supported and then corrected that .
Tyler Stalman compared it side by side with real Portra 400 and found the grain and halation convincing, but the overall colour and contrast still didn’t quite match film.
None of this is new as an idea. Apps like mood.camera and Leica Lux Pro have offered grain and halation on the iPhone for a while, and Fujifilm has had a Grain Effect in its cameras for years alongside the film simulations. What’s new is that it’s in the default camera app, on the phone most people actually carry.
Why a small sensor wants grain
The interesting argument here isn’t nostalgia. It’s that grain suits a small sensor.
A phone sensor produces noise. For years the fix has been heavy noise reduction, which smears fine detail into that slightly waxy, painted look. Gruber put it well: he’d rather have a look that accepts the sensor’s nature than one that compensates for it with computational smoothing. Adding grain lets the processing back off. Texture replaces smear.
That’s a genuinely photographic decision, not just a filter.
What it changes
A few things, I think.
The look stops being a signal. For a while, grain and halation marked a photo as film, or at least as someone making an effort. When it’s a toggle in the Camera app, it’s just a look. That’s fine. The film simulations on my Fuji never made anyone a better photographer either.
It’s baked in at capture. With the grain amount decided by the phone, and no option on RAW files, you’re committing to the look when you press the shutter. That’s closer to film than editing presets afterwards ever was. You choose your stock, then you live with it.
It needs restraint. Halation works because it’s occasional: it appears where the light is strong enough to earn it. Turned up on every frame, it becomes the digital equivalent of a vignette slider pushed to the left. The reviewers who liked it most were the ones who pulled it back.
And it shifts what “a good phone photo” looks like. Clean and sharp is no longer the only default worth aiming for. That might be the most useful part.
Where I’ve landed
I’ll use it, carefully. Grain on, Film texture low, and mostly at night where there’s actual light for the halation to work with. For event work I’ll still hand over clean files, because clients can add character but can’t take it away.
Film’s artefacts were never the point of film. They were the side effects of a physical process, and we learned to love them because they came with the pictures we cared about. Now they’re a slider. The photographs still have to be worth the grain.
Austin Mann: iPhone 18 Pro Camera Review
Daring Fireball: The iPhones 18 Pro
PetaPixel: iPhone 18 Pro Camera Review
Cult of Mac: Texture and Grain controls locked to iPhone 18 Pro
iPhone in Canada: Tyler Stalman’s review