I'm Markus — a software engineer living in Munich, spending most weekends either in the Bavarian Alps or arguing with Rust's borrow checker. This site is where those two things collide.
I started BergCraft in 2024 out of frustration. I had a trip to Berchtesgaden planned, brought back 400 RAW frames, and spent three evenings in Lightroom trying to reproduce the warmth of a scan I'd made from a Portra 400 roll I shot there in 2018. I couldn't. The presets felt either too aggressive or just wrong in the highlights. I found myself writing a script in Python to apply a curve I had measured from the scan, and things kind of spiralled from there.
The name comes from a portmanteau of Berg (mountain, in German and several Scandinavian languages) and craft — both in the sense of a skill practised carefully and a small purposeful tool. I wanted something that felt like a workshop, not a SaaS platform.
What BergCraft is
BergCraft is a film simulation library and CLI written in Rust, compiled to WebAssembly for browser use. It can currently simulate three film stocks with physically-modelled grain and spectral response curves:
- Kodak Portra 400 — warm shadows, compressed highlights, fine grain structure
- Fuji Provia 100F — cooler midtones, punchy greens and blues, very fine grain
- Ilford HP5 Plus — classic B&W with characteristic shoulder roll-off
I measured the tone response curves from real scans made on a Noritsu HS-1800. The grain statistics are derived from microscope images of actual film emulsions published in academic literature — specifically the DX/DL model from a 2019 paper by Newson et al. I won't claim the simulations are indistinguishable from actual film. They're not. But they're honest.
What it's not
BergCraft isn't trying to replace Lightroom, Capture One, or RawTherapee. It does one thing: apply a small set of carefully-crafted film looks to processed images (TIFF or JPEG input). It has no RAW decoder, no library management, no AI-anything. If you want that, there are excellent tools that do it already.
It's also not a startup. There's no monetisation plan. I'm not building a team. The code is on GitHub under Apache 2.0 and will stay there.
The photography side
I've been shooting mountains since 2014, mostly in the Alps — Dolomites, Zillertal, Ötztal, Berchtesgaden — and a few trips further out (Lofoten in 2022, Iceland in 2023). My main kit right now is a Fuji X-T4 with the 35mm f/1.4 and 90mm f/2. I shoot RAW + JPEG, use the JPEGs for scouting and the RAWs for anything I actually print.
I'm not a professional photographer and I don't aspire to be. I'm a software person who happens to love being above 2,000 metres and has opinions about colour grading.
Contact
If you've found a bug, the best place is GitHub Issues. If you want to say hello or have a question that isn't a bug, email works: hello [at] bergcraft.icu.
I try to reply to everything, but I'm slow. Especially in July and August when the afternoons belong to the mountains.