I made a tool that helps to visualize the Tonal reproduction of the B&W process

reneboehmer · 2025-08-14T10:44:33-0400

Hey there,
so I made a little HTML tool on my website that helps people understand how the tonal translation from scene to paper works. Its interactive and you can change curve steepness of both Film and Paper. The website is called https://analogworkshops.at/ It's initially in German, but if you press the button "rechner" it will go to the visual calculation tool and all the settings there are in English. I hope this helps anyone who needs a more visual, interactive way to understand the key concepts behind analog workflows. Also, I'd love if you guys would give me some feedback and check if I made any errors

koraks · 2025-08-14T10:53:17-0400

...and I think this is really awesome to play with! I had a quick go at it and it's really cool.

aconbere · 2025-08-14T11:01:15-0400

Very cool! On a phone the controls sit so low on the page that you can’t see the curve changes. But it does all work, which is a minor miracle!

Stephen Benskin · 2025-08-14T11:38:44-0400

It looks pretty cool. Definitely a fun tool to play with. I have two observations. The way to truly determine how the film / paper combinations works is to include a Reproduction curve. It basically compares the original scene to the print. Quadrant 4 in the typical four quadrant reproduction diagram. That is only if you want to look at the whole process. Phil Davis' also has a 2 quadrant negative / print comparison as part of his plotting program.

The second observation is with the Zone scales. I like how they are comparing the way the tones are distributed in each stage, but the overall range in each scale would change. In other words they wouldn't have the same widths if you are using a system of measurement such as logs, but is fine if you are just showing the relative values from black to white. Kodak has published a version of this type of diagram in a number of publications. I don't have access to them now, but might upload one later.

Stephen Benskin · 2025-08-14T12:40:03-0400

Please ignore the red. They were for a different post.

reneboehmer · 2025-08-14T14:48:56-0400

Stephen Benskin said:
It looks pretty cool. Definitely a fun tool to play with. I have two observations. The way to truly determine how the film / paper combinations works is to include a Reproduction curve. It basically compares the original scene to the print. Quadrant 4 in the typical four quadrant reproduction diagram. That is only if you want to look at the whole process. Phil Davis' also has a 2 quadrant negative / print comparison as part of his plotting program.

The second observation is with the Zone scales. I like how they are comparing the way the tones are distributed in each stage, but the overall range in each scale would change. In other words they wouldn't have the same widths if you are using a system of measurement such as logs, but is fine if you are just showing the relative values from black to white. Kodak has published a version of this type of diagram in a number of publications. I don't have access to them now, but might upload one later.

Dear Stephen,
Yes, I was thinking of including these, I have seen them many times. But I wanted to keep it as simple as possible. Maybe it would be a good idea though. I'll try to include it in the future.

The whole scale width changes! I didn't account for that, you are right. I will most definitely add this! Thanks so much

reneboehmer · 2025-08-14T14:50:04-0400

aconbere said:
Very cool! On a phone the controls sit so low on the page that you can’t see the curve changes. But it does all work, which is a minor miracle!

Thanks! Yes, the graphs don't scale on mobile properly yet. Maybe I'll just not show this tab on mobile. It's a bit convoluted on the small screen.

I made a tool that helps to visualize the Tonal reproduction of the B&W process

reneboehmer

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