Artlab

Artlab is a press for generative screens, and a personal project still in development. You give it a photograph, a video clip or your webcam, and it turns continuous tone into marks: halftone, dither, engraving, contour, stipple, weave. What comes back is at press resolution, as vector, or as a loop.

Everything runs in the browser tab, on your own processor. Your pictures never leave the machine, because the software has nowhere to upload them to, and there is no account to create. The tool opens with a reference sphere already screened and animating, so you can see what it does before loading anything.

There are fourteen screens, crossed with three grid geometries: cartesian, polar and hex. Each one lays ink in its own way instead of filtering the photograph. The screening is built for print, with rotated screens at real printing angles, dot area proportional to the square root of ink, and error diffusion walked in serpentine so the grain does not line up.

Every setting lives in the address bar, so a link carries the recipe instead of the picture. Send it and the same treatment arrives, ready for any other image. Exports go out as PNG and WebP up to 4K, as SVG with the paths grouped by ink for a plotter or a press, and as WebM or GIF recorded over the exact period of the pulse.

It is somewhere to experiment. One person builds and maintains it, screens and settings keep changing, and parts of it are still unfinished. It is free to use, and there are no plans to charge for it.