Photo Lith began life as a program to create high contrast images easily. As I was doing this other ideas came to me and this has now developed into a group of programs: the original Photo Lith, Photo Lith Posteriser and Photo Lith - Black & White.

Photo Lith is a program that can be used to produce high contrast black and white images that would conventionally be produced using lith film in a photographic darkroom. It takes an image and based on the thresholds set by the user and the filter selected it produces the final image ready for saving. The final result is shown immediately on screen, you know what you will get straight away, no mucking about with smelly chemicals and hours of trial and error.

Photo Lith

Posteriser

Black and White

Photo Lith Posteriser is used to create multi coloured images in a similar fashion to creating these images with various registered lith masks. Here you just select the brightness levels you want to have the transition at and the colour you want to quickly produce an image with up to eight colours, or if you want you can keep some parts as the original image. This is much quicker and easier than doing it conventionally and you have total control.

Photo Lith - Black and White allows you to create black and white images from colour RGB files in a similar way to conventional photography. The image can be filtered to alter how colours reproduce in a way that is similar to using coloured filters on the cameras lens but rather than being limited to a few filters this effect can be continuously varied with respect to the colour and density of the filter, you can get just the effect you want. The contrast and exposure of the image can also be adjusted and the final image can be toned or tinted to any colour you want.

Developing Photo Lith is my hobby. I will try to update and improve it as rapidly as possible and to answer any questions that I receive promptly but unfortunately work and life will probably get in the way of this so I make no promises about when I will manage to do anything but I will try!

Neale

Photo Lith is written entirely in Java and as such requires the Sun Java Runtime Environment to run.
This can be downloaded from the Sun website here.
The link you are looking for is Download JRE with a number after it. From this page select the correct download for your operating system.

The Photo Lith files are hosted by SourceForge.net and can be downloaded from here.
There is a Windows installer that will install the program on a Windows machine, this also requires the Java Runtime Environment.
A zip file that contains an executable JAR file and the Help and Licence folders if you want to try installing on another operating system.
A zip file that contains the source code for this program.
The SourceForge.net website can be accessed by clicking the logo at the top left of any page on this site.

Today I have released version 2.0.2 of Posteriser and 1.1.2 of Black & White.
These releases fix a bug that prevented the correct handling of TIFF files by these two programs. I checked the correct box when I built the archives!! Sorry for the inconvenience.
I have also added the name of the file being processed to the application title bar.

Today I have released new versions of Photo Lith, Posteriser and Black & White.
These are the same as the previous versions I have just altered the program icon. If you have the previous version there is no need to download any of these versions.

This website has been updated today.
There are separate pages for each of the different applications in this project with improved FAQs and an archive page for older news.

Version 2.0 of Photo Lith Posteriser was released today.
There has been a major rewrite of the code to improve things and use improved file loading and saving methods.
When creating a posterisation now a smaller preview image is used that makes any alterations show much more quickly to reduce waiting time. When the final image is saved the settings applied to the preview are applied to the original image to create the final posterisation at this time.
I have also added a Splash Screen at the start.

The next step is to introduce colour management to all of the programs.

Version 1.1 of Photo Lith - Black and White was released today.
There is an improved algorithm to create the black and white image and I have added a splash screen.

Work continues on Posteriser and hopefully the new version will be released soon.

Version 1.0 of Photo Lith - Black & White was released today.
This is the first version of this program. It works as intended, there are only a few minor additions to be made and then I will release the updated version.

Work is continuing on Posteriser and I hope to release a new version soon, it should work a bit faster than it does at the moment. I am also working on an improved version of this site.