Halidestep: Darkroom Log

Version 1 could tell you a burn was nine seconds long. It could not tell you those nine seconds were landing on the shoulder of your paper, where there is no density left to buy. The gap between those two sentences is what this release closes, and it runs through every part of the app. Highlights were pixels before; they now sit on a real characteristic curve, one of a family running grade 00 through 5 with its own toe, straight section, shoulder, base fog and Dmax, so the headroom above a sky is a quantity rather than a hope. Filtration used to be a label attached to a time. It is two emulsions now, a fast soft one and a slower hard one, exposed against a single shared maximum black, which is what makes split grade behave like split grade; equal soft and hard time is held to the published grade two and a half curve within 0.05 density, by a test that runs on every build and is allowed to fail. Card work was arithmetic and is a gesture. Press and hold on the print and the seconds pile up in real time, at the pace you will stand there on the night, so a nine-second burn takes nine seconds to ask for. Edge softness comes off card height. On lift the move takes its place in an ordered plan. Rebasing from twelve seconds to sixteen was a sum you did badly at the enlarger; burns are carried in stops now and dodges in seconds withheld, clamped at the base time so a dodge cannot run past paper white, and the plan recompiles itself. Flashing was a percentage applied to nothing in particular, and goes on today as a linear sub-threshold dose, so the toe drops and the shoulder stays put. Dry-down lived in a notebook; wet and dry sit side by side now, at a figure you edit per stock. Where the old build left you to find out at the enlarger how long a print was going to run, you walk in already holding it: base time, split balance, filtration, and the card moves in order, each with its stops and its seconds. Papers are described by behaviour rather than by brand — warmtone fibre, glossy, long toe, Dmax 2.10 — and every curve knot is editable, because your box and the datasheet are two different things.