Phosphor Press

Amber and green phosphor, ink on paper, and the hardware palettes that came before colour was cheap. Everything happens on your phone.

Phosphor Press turns a photograph into the kind of picture a machine would have shown you before it could show everything: a few tones, a visible grain, and hard pixel edges.

Not a filter laid over your photo. The picture is taken apart and rebuilt on a palette of two, four or sixteen colours, with the dithering that made those palettes bearable in the first place.

SCREENS AND PRINT

Paper — dark ink on warm paper, four tones. The one to start with. Ink — the same, at two tones, for a woodcut edge. Amber and Green Terminal — the monochrome monitors, at two levels or four. Inked 256 — full colour under hard black outlines. CGA 1984, CGA Outline, EGA Adventure — the hardware palettes, matched in a perceptual colour space so four colours still look deliberate. Mosaic — your photo's own colours in big square blocks.

CONTROLS THAT DO SOMETHING

Pixel size, from a coarse mosaic to a fine grain. Period screen modes keep their original non-square pixels, so 320x200 looks the way it did on a real monitor.

Outlines that follow shapes rather than brightness. The app segments the picture into regions and draws the boundaries between them, so a line closes around an object instead of breaking up wherever contrast dips.

Even lighting, which divides out the light in a scene so a surface split by a shadow stays one colour instead of becoming two objects.

Auto levels, contrast, saturation, flattening, and frame shapes from square to 16:9 with a manual crop.

WHAT IT IS GOOD AT

Strong shapes and clear contrast: architecture, landscapes, silhouettes, objects against a plain background, anything backlit. A photograph reduced to four tones keeps what a silhouette is made of.

It is honest about the rest. Fine texture — hair, foliage close up, crowds — is what these palettes have to throw away, and portraits are the hardest subject of all. Monochrome handles them better than the colour palettes do.

NOTHING LEAVES YOUR DEVICE

No accounts, no analytics, no advertising, no server. The app works with the network switched off entirely. Your photos are read, converted and shown back to you, and they go somewhere else only when you save or share them yourself.

FREE, AND PRO

Every palette, every dither mode and every frame size are free, forever.

Phosphor Press Pro is a single one-time purchase. It removes the signature from exports, adds CRT effects — scanlines, phosphor glow, aperture grille, vignette — adaptive palettes picked from your own photo, exports up to eight times the pixel size, and your own saved presets, exportable to another device.