Session, print and layer logging for alternative-process printing — gum bichromate, cyanotype, Van Dyke brown, platinum/palladium and salt print — with objective density measured from a photo of the print instead of guesswork.
Coated. Exposed. Washed. Every print day becomes a session with the weather it happened in, every gum layer is recorded pass by pass, and every finished print gets real density numbers.
PrintLog is live — the first 10 sessions are free.
Gum bichromate, cyanotype and platinum printing depend on a long list of variables — paper, sizing, coating, pigment ratios, humidity, UV, exposure — and a multi-layer gum print repeats that list for every pass. Most printers keep it in a paper notebook, if at all, and judge the result by eye. Repeating a good print months later is often luck.
PrintLog organises work the way a printer works: a session for each print day, the prints made in it, and — for multi-layer processes — each layer with its own exposure, coating notes and pigment : gum : bichromate ratio. Conditions are saved with every session. Each print keeps its original scene, digital negative and final print side by side. A photo of the finished print is sent to a companion analysis service that returns D-max, D-min, contrast and a density histogram, stored straight onto the print record.
| Backend | PHP + MySQL/MariaDB, JWT auth |
| Frontend | React web app with sign-up, settings and an upgrade screen |
| Analysis | Flask + Pillow/NumPy density microservice; images via Cloudinary |
| Hosting | printlog.datacraft.com.pk |
If your work runs on notebooks and instinct, there's probably a better logbook to be built.