Launching today
Metrochrome
A pocket darkroom. Every film is a measurement
3 followers
A pocket darkroom. Every film is a measurement
3 followers
A darkroom in your pocket. Load a roll, develop it, print from it — on film that is measured, not imagined: 36 emulsions digitised from the makers' own datasheets. Print with an enlarger head, ring-around, test strip, dodge and burn. Every film is free.
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Eleven years ago I co-launched BLACK here, a black and white photo app. This is the one I wanted to make then, and I've been working on it for a while.
The idea is that a film should be measured rather than guessed at. All 36 emulsions in it are digitised from the manufacturers' own datasheets: spectral sensitivity, characteristic curve, dye density, grain. Each film has a datasheet page in the app that plots those curves, and the renderer samples the same tables the page draws from, so what you read is what you get.
The name is an old instrument. A metrochrome measures colours, and the chemist who built one, George Field, is the same man who wrote Chromatography in 1835.
The other half of the name is Metro, the Windows Phone 7 design language. I used to build Windows Phone apps, so I wanted the controls done properly rather than approximated: the pivot, the application bar, the list picker, the tilt. Every value is read out of the Windows Phone Toolkit source or Microsoft's old WP8 design templates.
You pick a film for a whole roll rather than per picture, then develop and read every frame on it. Printing works the way a darkroom does: a colour enlarger head in printing points, a ring-around of nine filter packs so you can judge a cast against its neighbours, a test strip, dodge and burn, lens filters, an eleven-patch step wedge.
No account, nothing to sign up for. Every film is free and stays free, and the Pass is one payment for the printing tools — Adjust, Crop and the step wedge are free. iOS and Android, in 24 languages.
Let me know what you think.