SaltPrint — Getting started
From an empty window to a negative on film
From an empty window to a negative on film
SaltPrint turns your photographs into digital negatives — the transparencies you contact print from for salt, cyanotype, platinum, van dyke and the rest. Point it at a folder, decide how the negatives should look, and save the whole roll at once.
It reads camera raw files, TIFF, PNG, JPEG and HEIC. Nothing is uploaded, and your originals are never changed.
SaltPrint works on a folder at a time, because a darkroom session is usually a roll rather than one picture.
The input folder is where your photographs are. You don't pick files — SaltPrint lists everything it can read in that folder, ignores the rest, and doesn't look inside sub-folders. Your originals are opened, never written to.
The output folder is where negatives are written. Leave it
and SaltPrint uses a SaltPrint Output folder beside your
photographs. Keeping them apart means re-opening the input folder next week
doesn't show you last week's negatives as though they were more work to
do.
Both are remembered, under File ▸ Recent….
Everything readable appears in the list on the left. Click a row to open it; ◀ Prev and Next ▶ step through in order.
The preview shows the negative — what will be written, not what you started from. That's the thing you'll print through, so it's the thing worth judging.
Each row has a checkbox and a highlight. Those mark which frames Save All Selected will write, and nothing else: ticking a frame doesn't change it, and browsing doesn't change what gets saved. The All button ticks or clears the lot.
Settings above the divider are marked “Applies to every file” and mean it: they describe the kind of negative you're making, so they hold for the whole folder.
Below the divider, the box headed “Editing: your file” belongs to that frame alone. Set the contrast on frame 4 and frame 5 is untouched.
The Tone controls are where most of the work happens:
There's no white-balance control, and that isn't an omission: the output is a tonal scale, so what matters is where the tones sit, not what colour they were. Interpret a raw file's colour in your raw software and give SaltPrint the result.
Alongside: Orientation (flips and quarter-turns), Straighten, and Crop (drag on the preview). Edits are remembered per frame, and Frame ▸ Undo steps back through them.
To give several frames the same treatment, set it on one and press “Apply tone & orientation to selected”. It carries tone and orientation only — a straighten angle is measured off this frame's horizon and a crop is in this frame's pixels, so neither means anything on another photograph.
A line at the bottom says what was written and where. From there it's film, your UV source, and the process.