Artlab

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

Everything runs in the browser tab, on your own processor. There is no server that sees your pictures, no upload path anywhere in the software, and nothing to sign up for. The tool opens with a reference sphere already screened and animating, so the first thing you see is the thing working.

Fourteen screens, each a different way of laying ink rather than a filter stacked on a photograph, crossed with three grid geometries: cartesian, polar and hex. 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 has no direction.

Every setting lives in the address bar, so a link carries the recipe and not the picture. Send it and the same look arrives, ready to apply to 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 so the loop has no seam.

It is a place to experiment rather than a finished product. It is built and maintained by one person, screens and settings keep changing, and parts of it are still being made. That is also why it is free and why it stays free.