Print Lab vs Phosphor Press

Print Lab turns ordinary photos into print-textured artwork — the kind of ink, dot, and paper character you'd get from an actual Risograph, a newspaper press, a screen-printing shop, or a copperplate engraver's bench. FIVE PRINT STYLES Risograph — bold duotone color separation with visible halftone dots and the slight color misregistration that gives real riso prints their handmade look. Newspaper — high-contrast black and white with authentic newsprint grain and halftone dot screening. Screen Print — flat, posterized color with a coarse screen pattern, like a hand-pulled silkscreen poster. Engraving — fine wavy lines that swell in the shadows and cross-hatch in the darks, like a banknote etching. Stipple — thousands of tiny ink dots whose density carries the tone, like a vintage stamp. MADE FOR Independent designers, photographers, illustrators, poster and zine makers, musicians and podcasters who need a fast, recognizable print look for covers, social posts, and prints — without learning prepress software. HOW IT WORKS Pick a photo, pick a style, and Print Lab renders it instantly. Adjust texture and grain with two simple sliders and see the result update live. Compare before and after, then export — free, up to 2048px on the long edge, plenty for social media and messaging. PRINT LAB PRO All five styles are free to use at full quality preview. A one-time Pro purchase (no subscription) unlocks export at your photo's full original resolution — real print-quality output, not a downscaled preview. PRIVACY, BY DESIGN Your photos are processed entirely on this device and never uploaded anywhere. Print Lab only asks for permission to add exported images to your photo library — it cannot read your existing photos beyond the ones you explicitly pick. All print textures (paper grain, ink grain, halftone screens) are generated procedurally by Print Lab itself; this app ships no third-party image assets, fonts, or textures. Print Lab is a focused tool, not a general-purpose photo editor. It does one thing: turning digital photos into print-styled artwork.

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.