A darkroom without the dark.
Bring a photograph into the tray and make it your own. Brush on developer, pull back the highlights, layer toner, scrape the emulsion, and watch chemistry flow, pool and dry across the paper. This isn’t a filter. It’s a print you work by hand—and no two come out the same.
It isn’t a filter. You don’t choose an effect and move on. You brush, pour, tip the tray, lift the bleach and build the image one gesture at a time. The liquid leaves its mark. The paper keeps the evidence. The print becomes a record of what you did.
Tip the tray and the chemistry follows. It runs downhill, gathers at the low edge, beads on the surface and breaks into drips when there’s more liquid than surface tension can hold. Every drop has weight, movement and a path of its own.
Developer brings the image up. Stop bath halts development. Fixer makes the print permanent. Bleach takes the silver back, beginning with the highlights, so toner can bring it back in another colour. The sequence matters—and in WetPrint, each liquid does its own work.
Sepia warms the highlights. Selenium deepens the shadows toward purple-brown. Gold shifts the image toward blue-black. Split toning lets different colours settle into different tones. Brush a toner exactly where you want it, or lower the whole print into a bath.
Brushes leave streaks and dry-brush edges. A sponge makes mottled washes. Pour from a jug, flick spatter across the sheet, press a blotter to lift liquid back out, or leave a fingerprint behind. With a pressure-sensitive pen, a stroke can swell and thin like a real hand at work.
Paint on wax and watch the chemistry travel around it; peel the wax away to reveal untouched paper. Draw with light during development for a Sabattier reversal and its pale Mackie lines. Or start with blank exposed paper and bring the image up only where you brush on developer. Experiment first. See what happens.
Fold the sheet and the emulsion cracks along the crease. Grime gathers; worn areas reveal the paper beneath. Add crackle, foxing, oxidised edges, silver fading and the mottled patina of a photograph passed from hand to hand. Dial in a little age—or let the damage tell the story.
Fibre paper draws chemistry inward, leaving soft, feathered edges. Resin-coated paper holds it closer to the surface for sharper marks. Choose glossy, semi-matte or matte; warm or cool paper; then frame the image with a brushed emulsion edge, hand-coated paper, a filed carrier or the rebate of a sheet of film.
A stain texture can only sit on top of a photograph. WetPrint models the paper, the liquid and the emulsion beneath it. The image you see is the result of those systems interacting—not an overlay added at the end.
The liquid on the sheet is a shallow-water simulation: depth, flow and momentum on a fine grid, pulled by gravity as the tray tips. Surface tension and a contact angle give it a rounded edge, so drops bead, puddles dome, and drips form only when there's too much for tension to hold.
Each liquid carries dissolved chemistry. It diffuses through the liquid, soaks into the paper and keeps working there after the surface dries, feathering past the wet edge. Fibre paper drinks it in; RC holds it on top. Thin brushed films dry fast; deep pools stay wet.
Under the liquid is a model of the emulsion: a latent image from your photo, silver that develops at a rate set by the developer's strength and age, bleach that turns silver back to halide, and toners that convert it. Density becomes reflectance through the paper's maximum black and surface.
Sabattier reversal comes from a flash part-way through development, and Mackie lines from bromide released along tone boundaries. Exhausted developer goes slow, soft and olive. Grain lives in the silver, so clean paper stays clean. Nothing is pasted on.
Fibre tooth, dust, wax and creases all shape the surface the liquid flows over. Liquid gathers in a fold and in the trough along the paper's edge, runs around wax, and creeps along the grain. Scraping wears through the emulsion, then the baryta, then into the fibres.
It all runs on the graphics chip with Metal. WetPrint measures your Mac on first launch and sets the detail to suit, and keeps chemistry in real time so it behaves the same on a MacBook Air as on a Mac Studio. Exports and prints always render at full quality.
Paper grade, exposure in stops, maximum black, and coloured filters on the lens.
Diffusion glow, halation, film grain with adjustable size, and silvering in dense blacks.
5×7 to 16×20, Letter, A4 and A3, with borders as wide as you like.
Edge-to-edge printing on the paper you chose, with your paper's own tone as the white.
Save the sheet mid-work, liquid still wet, and pick up exactly where you left off.
The print lies in a darkroom tray that tips with it, or on a wood table.
Hold Z for a 100% loupe; hold \ to compare with the original photo.
Several steps back, because chemistry is less forgiving than software.
Built in and searchable, with every tool, liquid and setting explained.
Bring your photograph. Try something unexpected. See what comes up in the tray. WetPrint is coming soon to the Mac App Store.