About

The Alternative Process Lab is a browser darkroom. It takes the photographic processes of the nineteenth century, the chemistry, the waiting, the small failures, and rebuilds them as light and mathematics so that anyone with a phone can print the way the first photographers printed.

Each simulation follows the real workflow of its process: the negative, the coating, the exposure, the wash. The results are honest to the chemistry, including the ways a print can go wrong.

Privacy

Every step runs on your own device. Photographs are never uploaded, stored, or seen by anyone else. The apprentice's ledger, your saved prints, seals and answered letters, lives in your browser's local storage and nowhere else. The downloaded print is rendered locally and carries no hidden data from the original file.

Credits

A project by Bin Youn. Statement and credits to follow.

Set in IM Fell English, digitised by Igino Marini, and EB Garamond by Georg Duffner and Octavio Pardo, both under the SIL Open Font License. All simulation, sound and interface code was built for this site.

Imagery

Everything you see inside the lab is made by the lab: the sample prints on the process cards and the cyanotype developing on the front page are rendered live by the same simulation engine you print with, not photographs.

The historical studio scenes in the history section are AI-generated illustrations: imagined moments, not archival photographs. Each one is labelled where it appears.