Lith Printing Simulation

Lith Printing is a photographic technique that overexposes negatives onto special purpose paper. Lith prints are becoming increasing popular because their visual appearance is considered to be: “Beautiful, different and personal. Its flexibility offers almost limitless ways of interpreting a negative” [TR98]. But, there are various problems associated with lith printing. It is difficult to duplicate results, materials are expensive, the process is time consuming, and unwanted chemical reactions can affect print quality. The purpose of this project is to design a computer simulation that will teach users the principles of photographic development and the techniques required to create a lith print, also to provide a solution to the problems defined above. The emulation of the lith process will need to incorporate an interactive model representing the darkroom environment (such as the photographic equipment, chemical solutions, etc.) and an algorithm that is capable of generating a realistic lith image. The implementation of the Lith Printing Simulation will use the principles of Object Oriented Programming, Usability Engineering, Human-Computer Interaction and 2D image processing techniques, amongst other concepts, to produce the final application. To determine the performance of the simulation, and ultimately its potential for teaching the aspects of lith printing, the product will be subjected to extensive user testing throughout the software development process.