Silver Lab vs Agitate

Developing film should feel like a craft, not a calculation. Silver Lab is a darkroom timer built for film photographers who want to focus on the process and not the math. Select your film stock and developer, dial in your temperature and push/pull, and Silver Lab handles the rest. Development times are pulled from an extensive B&W film chart and automatically adjusted for temperature compensation and push/pull processing. For C-41 color negative, the full standardized process is built in and ready to go. When the timer starts, Silver Lab guides you through every stage — agitation cycles, stop bath, fixer, and optional Permawash and Photo-Flo steps. The animated agitation timer tells you exactly when to agitate and when to let the film sit, so you can put the phone down between cycles and not think about it. Features - Automatic development time calculation across a large library of B&W film stocks and developers - Temperature compensation and push/pull adjustment - Configurable agitation timing — set your own initial agitation, rest interval, and cycle duration, independently for Developer and Fixer - Optional Permawash and Photo-Flo steps - C-41 color negative process with push/pull support - Screen stays on throughout development - Live Activity functionality for longer developments - No accounts. No ads. No data collection. Everything runs locally on your device.

A timer for developing film at home. Black and white, C-41 and E-6 in one app, entirely on your device. THE CLOCK IS THE TRUTH Most timers count down, and a counter can stop — when a call comes in, when the system reclaims memory, when the app is force quit. Agitate stores the moment your step ends, not the seconds left in it. A call, a reboot, a phone that ran flat and came back: on return it works out where you are from the clock. There is nothing that can freeze, because there is nothing counting. BUILT FOR A DARK ROOM • Safelight mode: red on true black, screen driven to its lowest brightness, and the Live Activity uses the same palette so nothing lights up behind your back • The whole screen is the button, so you can start the next bath blind, in gloves, with wet hands • Every agitation is a tap in your hand. Sound if you want it, and it plays through the silent switch • Large tabular figures that do not jitter, readable across the room • A segment chain that always shows where you are in the process THE DETAILS OTHER TIMERS GET WRONG • The drain is called ten seconds before time, as the makers specify. A timer that simply rings at nine minutes gives you nine minutes and fifteen seconds of development, every time • Nudge the running step by fifteen seconds, or re-read the thermometer mid-run and let only the remainder be recalculated — without abandoning the run • Agitation as published: four inversions in the first ten seconds of each minute is one maker's scheme, five to seven inversions every thirty seconds is another's. They are not interchangeable. Stand and semi-stand are here too, marked as the community methods they are • Time and temperature converted for black and white between 14 and 27 °C, in Celsius or Fahrenheit. Refused for C-41 and E-6, where deviation is a colour shift that no extra time repairs • Minimum concentrate counted per film, not per tank. A 500 ml tank holds two 35 mm films, so a highly diluted developer can be half short while looking fine EVERY TIME FROM A DATASHEET Hundreds of published combinations, searchable, each row naming the manufacturer document it was transcribed from. No scraped database, no crowd-sourced numbers of unknown origin. If a combination cannot be sourced, it is not in here — write it as a recipe of your own instead, which is unlimited and free. WARNINGS BEFORE YOU POUR Expiry, exhaustion, minimum quantity, re-use surcharge and temperature tolerance are all in the free version. A warning behind a paywall would make the free version dangerous, so none of them are. AGITATE PRO Free develops your film. Pro remembers. • A development journal: every finished run with the film, the recipe, the temperature you actually measured, the push, and your own note. Searchable • A chemistry ledger: bottles with mixing date, fill level and film count, so the app knows when a developer is out of life or out of capacity • Export of all of it, recipes included, as CSV and JSON Pro is a one-time purchase. Not a subscription, nothing renews. PRIVACY No account, no sign-up and no server of our own. The free version loads advertising from Google over the network, and Agitate Pro removes it. Your recipes and your journal never leave your device. Agitate is independent and is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by any manufacturer of film, paper or chemistry. Product names are used only to identify which products a published time applies to. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners. TERMS AND PRIVACY Terms of Use (EULA): https://agitate-app.vercel.app/terms Apple's standard EULA also applies: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/ Privacy Policy: https://agitate-app.vercel.app/privacy