1. General

1.1 What are Photo Lith, Photo Lith Posteriser and Photo Lith -Black & White?
1.2 What file types are supported?
1.3 Do these programs change the size of my image?
1.4 Why do I get a malicious script warning when I run these programs?
1.5 Why are Photo Lith and Photo Lith Posteriser very slow?
1.6 What is this Brightness Table that gets created?
1.7 Why don't I get an image preview from my file?
1.8 Are these applications colour managed?
1.9 Why is there no Print option in any of these applications?
1.10 What other libraries were used in making Photo Lith?

2. Photo Lith

2.1 What are the controls for Photo Lith?

3. Photo Lith Posteriser

3.1 What are the controls for Photo Lith Posteriser?

4. Photo Lith - Black & White

4.1 What are the controls for Photo Lith - Black & White?
4.2 How do I create a sepia toned image with Photo Lith - Black & White?

1. General

1.1 What are Photo Lith, Photo Lith Posteriser and Photo Lith - Black & White?

Photo Lith is an image processing program that can produce images that were previously produced in a darkroom using lith film, a very high contrast film, without mucking about with chemicals, finding a darkroom and without waiting ages and trying again and again to get the effect you were looking for. I always liked these type of images but as I got older I enjoyed the darkroom less and less and I had a computer so I wrote Photo Lith to save me time and money. I also decided to make it freely available to anyone else who would like to use it. It is distributed under the GNU General Public Licence a copy of which is included with the program or can be viewed here. One important aspect of this licence is that the software is supplied as-is and it has no warranty, you are responsible for any problems you have or any damage it causes to your system. However, it has been running on my computer and others without any problems turning up so far.

Photo Lith Posteriser is a development of Photo Lith. It allows you to create multicoloured images with up to eight different colours or, if you want, you can use the original colours from the image in place of some of the colours. Posteriser is released under the same licence as Photo Lith and is supplied as-is and it has no warranty.

Photo Lith - Black & White is an extension of Photo Lith. It allows the creation of black and white images in a way that will be familiar to conventional photography. It is simple and intuitive to use. It is released under the same license as Photo Lith and is supplied as-is and has no warranty.

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1.2 What file types are supported?

At present Photo Lith and Photo Lith Posteriser only supports RGB jpeg and uncompressed RGB TIFF files. When saving these no compression is applied, they are saved at the highest possible quality. It is intended to add support for other file formats to future versions.

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1.3 Do these programs change the size of my image?

Although the images displayed on screen will change size when you resize a window this has no effect on the file that will be saved, this is purely a display phenomenon. The image that is saved at the end will have the same resolution and number of pixels in each direction as the original but as the image has been altered the size of the file will change.

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1.4 Why do I get a malicious script warning when I run these programs?

As of version 1.9 this will no longer happen. I have now wrapped the JAR file in a Windows .exe file that properly sets up the program without the need for batch and script files. If you get this I would download the newest version, it doesn't give the warning and it is better.

Older versions, pre-1.9, under Windows used a batch file to run Photo Lith. Normally this would lead to two windows being open when the program is running which I, personally, do not like. I have, therefore, used another short batch file and a .vbs script to hide the extra window that would be visible. The script should only contain one line of code:

CreateObject("Wscript.Shell").Run """" & WScript.Arguments(0) & """", 0, False

Open the file invisible.vbs and check this if you want.
If you would rather not run any scripts you can change the target of the shortcut to runPL.bat rather than photoLith.bat. This will not hide the window the batch file is running in but will have no effect on the running of Photo Lith.

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1.5 Why are Photo Lith and Photo Lith Posteriser very slow?

When these programs start they set the memory of the JVM to 256MB to allow for the handling of large files. If you have less than 256 MB of RAM windows will be paging causing slow progress.
When Photo Lith and Posteriser load an image they create a Brightness Table, see below, for the image this can take some time to create for a large image and accounts for most of the delay when opening an image.
To allow changes to be seen quickly both Posteriser and Photo Lith - Black & White use a smaller preview image to show you what your results will look like, when you come to save you images these programs then apply the same settings to the original image to create the final output before saving and this accounts for most of the delay when saving images.

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1.6 What is this Brightness Table that gets created?

The thresholds used in Photo Lith are based on the brightness of each pixel. To avoid having to calculate this every time a slider is moved or a new filter selected Photo Lith does this whenever a new image is loaded to save time later. Technically it is a HashTable with brightness values as the keys and Vectors of Point objects that have this brightness value as values.

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1.7 Why don't I get an image preview from my file?

Photo Lith will produce previews from Jpeg and uncompressed TIFF files only. Also if your file is a large one it can take Photo Lith quite some time to generate the preview, that's life I'm afraid.

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1.8 Are these applications colour managed?

At present there is no controlable colour management in any of these applications. However, when opening an image if it is tagged with an ICC profile Java will convert this to its working colourspace and save the image in this space even although the saved image will not be tagged with a profile. The colourspace used is sRGB. If an image saved from any of these applications is loaded into a colour managed application the sRGB profile should be assigned to the file when it is opened.

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1.9 Why is there no Print option in any of these applications?

I always get my images output photographically for the best quality and therefore have not felt the need to have this option so it is not a priortity. It will be added in future when time allows.

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1.10 What other libraries were used in making Photo Lith?

When writing Photo Lith I used the standard libraries and also the Java Imaging I/O library, Java Advanced Imaging and to open the web site I used the following library from Stephen Ostermiller, http://ostermiller.org/utils/ .

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2. Photo Lith

2.1 What are the controls for Photo Lith?

Here is a picture of the user interface for Photo Lith version 2.0.

1 - The "lith" image that is the result of the thresholds set and the filter applied.
2 - The original image being processed.
3 - The combo box used to select the required filter.
4 - Colour Select Panel (only visible when needed).
5 - The slider used to set the upper threshold.
6 - The spinner used to fine tune the upper threshold.
7 - The slider used to set the lower threshold.
8 - The spinner used to fine tune the lower threshold.
9 - The Status Bar that informs the user what is happening.
10 - The Progress Bar that indicates how much work has been done.

The File menu contains options to open and save images and to exit the program. The Help menu gives access to the Help system along with the License agreement and a link to this web site.

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3. Posteriser

3.1 What are the controls for Photo Lith Posteriser?

Here is a picture of the user interface for Photo Lith Posteriser.

1 - The posterised image produced by the program, clicking this will toggle between the posterised image and the original image.
2 - The sliders used to set the thresholds for the colours. A slider must always be equal to or higher than the slider to its right, if a slider passes another one the other will move to the same value as the one moved.
3 - The colour that will be displayed for all pixels with a brightness between the values set by the sliders on either side. Clicking on the colour patch will open a colour chooser dialog to allow the selection of any colour.
4 - If this box is checked the original image pixel values will be displayed for brightnesses between the sliders rather than the colour of the patch.

The File menu contains options to open and save images and to exit the program. The Help menu gives access to the Help system along with the License agreement and a link to this web site.

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4. Photo Lith - Black & White

4.1 What are the controls for Photo Lith - Black & White?

Here is a picture of the user interface for Photo Lith - Black & White.

1 - The black and white image produced by the program.
2 - The original image being processed.
3 - The pre-filtering checkbox, if this is ticked the filter will be applied.
4 - This gives an indication of the colour of the filter that will be applied.
5 - A drop-down list of preset coloured filters.
6 - Sliders that are used to adjust the colour and density of the filter to be applied.
7 - The slider used to alter the overall contrast of the image, the Reset button will set this back to the default setting.
8 - The slider used to alter the highlight contrast of the image, the Reset button will set this back to the default setting.
9 - The slider used to alter the shadow contrast of the image, the Reset button will set this back to the default setting.
10 - A slider used to alter the brightness of the image, this works in a similar way to altering the exposure in the camera when taking conventional photographs. The Reset button will set this back to the default setting.
11 - A slider used to alter the brightness of the image, this works in a similar way to altering the exposure in the enlarger when printing conventional photographs. The Reset button will set this back to the default setting.
12 - The toning checkbox, if this is ticked the final image will be coloured.
13 - The toning type radio buttons.
14 - This gives an indication of the colour that the final image will be toned.
15 - Sliders used to alter the colour that the image will be toned. When Tone is selected there are two sliders, one for Colour and one for Density. When Tint and Pure Tint are selected only the Colour slider is available.
16 - A drop-down list of preset colours for toning.

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4.2 How do I create a sepia toned image with Photo Lith - Black & White?

There is no preset for a sepia tone as everyone has their own idea of what sepia is. The simplest way to produce this is as follows

1. Tick the Toning checkbox.
2. Select the Tint radio button.
3. From the preset list select Yellow.
4. Move the Colour slider towards the left slowly until you get the required colour.

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