Bantam Tools Hatch vs Phosphor Press

Bantam Tools Hatch™ is a photo-to-drawing tool that transforms everyday photos into beautiful SVG line art, ready to draw with real pens on real paper using your Bantam Tools drawing machine or another .SVG compatible pen plotter. Choose from four distinct drawing modes and three color modes to control how your image is translated into lines, marks, and color. Crosshatch Build tone and depth with layered intersecting lines, turning photos into richly shaded pen drawings. Squiggle Use flowing, wavy lines to create playful drawings with a distinctly algorithmic feel. Pixel Turn photos into bold pixel-art compositions, translating tonal detail into structured, dithered patterns. Stipple Build images from clusters of short dots and marks, creating texture, shading, and detail through density. Hatch is designed for an intuitive, visual workflow. Adjust your image, explore different drawing styles and color modes, and export clean SVG artwork ready for your Bantam Tools drawing machine or another compatible pen plotter. From photographs and portraits to experimental generative compositions, Hatch makes it easy to move from pixels on a screen to physical drawings on paper.

Phosphor Press turns a photograph into the kind of picture a machine would have shown you before it could show everything: a few tones, a visible grain, and hard pixel edges. Not a filter laid over your photo. The picture is taken apart and rebuilt on a palette of two, four or sixteen colours, with the dithering that made those palettes bearable in the first place. SCREENS AND PRINT Paper — dark ink on warm paper, four tones. The one to start with. Ink — the same, at two tones, for a woodcut edge. Amber and Green Terminal — the monochrome monitors, at two levels or four. Inked 256 — full colour under hard black outlines. CGA 1984, CGA Outline, EGA Adventure — the hardware palettes, matched in a perceptual colour space so four colours still look deliberate. Mosaic — your photo's own colours in big square blocks. CONTROLS THAT DO SOMETHING Pixel size, from a coarse mosaic to a fine grain. Period screen modes keep their original non-square pixels, so 320x200 looks the way it did on a real monitor. Outlines that follow shapes rather than brightness. The app segments the picture into regions and draws the boundaries between them, so a line closes around an object instead of breaking up wherever contrast dips. Even lighting, which divides out the light in a scene so a surface split by a shadow stays one colour instead of becoming two objects. Auto levels, contrast, saturation, flattening, and frame shapes from square to 16:9 with a manual crop. WHAT IT IS GOOD AT Strong shapes and clear contrast: architecture, landscapes, silhouettes, objects against a plain background, anything backlit. A photograph reduced to four tones keeps what a silhouette is made of. It is honest about the rest. Fine texture — hair, foliage close up, crowds — is what these palettes have to throw away, and portraits are the hardest subject of all. Monochrome handles them better than the colour palettes do. NOTHING LEAVES YOUR DEVICE No accounts, no analytics, no advertising, no server. The app works with the network switched off entirely. Your photos are read, converted and shown back to you, and they go somewhere else only when you save or share them yourself. FREE, AND PRO Every palette, every dither mode and every frame size are free, forever. Phosphor Press Pro is a single one-time purchase. It removes the signature from exports, adds CRT effects — scanlines, phosphor glow, aperture grille, vignette — adaptive palettes picked from your own photo, exports up to eight times the pixel size, and your own saved presets, exportable to another device.