The two previews, and popping them out
Source (as-is), Live Output, and how to get them onto a second screen
Source (as-is), Live Output, and how to get them onto a second screen
SaltPrint shows you two pictures of the same frame: the photograph you started from, and the negative you're about to write. Each can be popped out into its own resizable window — which is what a second monitor is for.
The file as it exists, in colour, before SaltPrint does anything to it. It's a viewer: it sits outside both scope groups in the options column because it changes nothing.
Under it is a View slider. That lifts the shadows on screen so a dense scan is actually visible while you work — and it is display only. It does not touch the source, and it does not touch anything that gets written. Use it to see into a dark scan, not to fix one — the controls that change the output are in the Editing box. The ↺ button puts it back to 1.0.
The negative itself: reversal, tonal scale colour, curve, orientation, straighten and crop all applied. What you see is what lands in the file.
This is the one to judge — with one permanent caveat, which is the whole reason the test sheets exist: a screen cannot tell you how a transparency behaves under UV. The preview tells you about framing, tones and mistakes. It does not tell you about density. For that, print something.
Each preview has a Pop out button in its header. It opens a plain window holding that image, which you can resize and drag anywhere — including onto another display. Clicking Pop out again doesn't make a second window; it brings the existing one forward.
A pop-out is a mirror, not a copy. Every time the main window re-renders, it hands the new image straight over, so a pop-out is never stale — change a slider in the main window and the detached one updates as you drag.
Close it whenever you like. Nothing is lost: it holds no state of its own beyond its zoom, and reopening it fills it again immediately.
Every window — the main preview and each pop-out — keeps its own zoom level, deliberately. Zooming into a window you've dragged onto a second monitor shouldn't yank the other two around.
Above 1× you are not looking at a magnified thumbnail. SaltPrint renders that window a genuinely higher-resolution image for the zoom you asked for, so zooming in shows you more detail, not bigger pixels — which is what makes it useful for checking a crop edge or whether a straighten actually landed.
Once you're past 1×, scroll to pan around the image, or drag it. The ↺ button returns to fit.