tone+ vs Phosphor Press

Separate. Press. Print. Zero ads. 100% free. tone+ is an app that genuinely reprints your photos as Risograph art. It doesn't just slap a color filter over your image; it mathematically simulates the physical phenomenon of analog printing. ■ The Printing Process We break your photo down into separate color plates, convert them into halftones, and print them layer by layer. The app perfectly replicates the beautiful, unpredictable imperfections of a real printing press: • Misregistration ― Plates shift slightly, creating vibrant, off-register edges. • Dot Gain ― Ink bleeds into the paper, fattening the halftone dots. • Ink Unevenness ― Imperfect roller pressure creates authentic texture variations. • Paper Grain ― Paper fibers absorb ink differently, altering the visual texture. • Overprinting ― Where two inks overlap, a rich third color is naturally born. That’s why when you zoom in, you see actual halftone dots. Change the paper stock, and you change how the ink sinks in. Print with just two inks, and watch a third magically appear in the overlap. ■ Inks & Papers Choose from 14 classic Risograph inks: Fluorescent Pink, Blue, Bright Red, Black, Green, Medium Blue, Orange, Sunflower, Cornflower, Yellow, Aqua, Teal, Purple, and Burgundy. Want something specific? You can dial in your own custom colors. Print on 5 paper stocks: White, Natural, Cream, Gray, and Kraft. Just like real life, the paper dictates how the final ink looks. ■ Simple UI, Deep Controls When you open tone+, you just see your photo and a dice. Tap the dice to roll a completely random, beautiful print. Not quite right? Just swipe left or right to seamlessly browse your print history and undo/redo. Ready to get technical? Pull up the bottom bar to reveal a fully equipped darkroom: • Tones ― Adjust your ink selections, brightness, contrast, and saturation. • Textures ― Choose your paper, toggle between Halftone and Grain, set the line frequency (12–110 LPI), dot shape (Round, Ellipse, Square, Line, Cross), screen angles (Same, Offset, Rosette), ink density/opacity, misregistration, and ink unevenness. • Framing ― Aspect ratios (Original, 1:1, 4:5, 3:4, 2:3, 16:9), orientation, margins, rounded corners, deckled (rough-cut) edges, scale, and position. Need total control? Open "Details" to adjust the LPI and screen angle for each individual color plate. ■ Presets & Sharing tone+ comes loaded with 13 built-in presets to get you started, and you can easily save your own custom configurations. When you're done, you can share your final print along with its "recipe." You can even generate a custom link—when someone taps it, your exact print settings are instantly loaded into their app. ■ The Fine Print (The Good Kind) • No account or sign-up required. • Works 100% offline. Every feature works flawlessly in Airplane Mode. • Zero data collection. Your photos and data stay on your device. • Fully unlocked from day one. No in-app purchases, ever. • Fully optimized for both iPhone and iPad.

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.