Exports & Sessions

Everything the app writes is in the toolbar’s Export menu, with the common ones also on the File menu. The whole menu stays disabled until an analysis has produced a result.

Adjusted curve (.acv)

⌘E, or Export → Adjusted Curve… (.acv). A Photoshop Version 4 curve that replaces the active curve — see Curves, Aim & Proofing for what goes into it. Tones the print never exercised are carried through from the active curve unchanged.

ICC profiles

Export → ICC Profile… asks for a folder and writes two grayscale profiles — <name>-as-printed.icc (what this print did) and <name>-next-print.icc (what the next one should do). Install them in ~/Library/ColorSync/Profiles and use View → Proof Setup → Custom in Photoshop.

PDF report

A print-analysis sheet that restates the whole window, so a filed print is reproducible from the sheet alone:

• source and scan thumbnails, labelled source (truth) and scan, with the registration verdict — confident, review corners, or corners placed by hand — and the match percentage
• the Print Process method and paper
• the Registration settings (margin, overlay, scale, aspect) and the Analysis settings (bins, edge exclusion, flat radius, smoothing, window)
• the Curve block: the active curve, the aim, and whether the target was the printable range
• the response plot with measured, target, active-curve and adjusted series, and the low-confidence bands
• the Statistics block — white and black points with their provenance, print max/min, paper, frame min, coverage, samples, mean and max error
• your Notes for this print, and — under a separate WARNINGS heading — whatever the analysis flagged
• the full per-bin table with the scanned / normalized / target tone tiles

CSV report

A commented metadata header — date, source, scan, active curve, method, paper, your note, both endpoints with their provenance, the raw scan extremes, coverage, sample count, and every warning — followed by the table:

bin,sourceLevel,measuredMedian,count,spread,confidence,fittedResponse,correctionOutput

Empty bins leave the median and spread blank rather than writing a zero.

Export filenames

Exports are named from the scan plus your process metadata, so a folder of them stays readable:

raw-2026-08-04-0005-Platinum-Palladium-Bergger-COT320-adjusted.acv

Slashes, colons and spaces in what you typed are folded to hyphens — “Platinum/Palladium” is the most common method in alt-process work and would otherwise be a path separator.

Sessions (.apdt)

⌘S writes the session in place; ⇧⌘S always asks for a location and makes that file the one ⌘S writes to from then on. The first save after a launch asks, since there is nothing to write back to yet.

A session holds:

• references to the source, the scan and the active curve — paths plus security-scoped bookmarks, so they resolve again after a restart
• the registration quad
• the analysis parameters — bins, edge exclusion, flat radius, margin, smoothing mode and window, aim strength, and the printable-range setting
• the method, the paper, and your Notes (schema v3)

Sessions written before Notes existed still open, with the note empty.

Open one with Open Session… (⌥⌘O), from the Session menu’s recents, the File menu’s Open Recent Session ▸, or by dropping an .apdt onto the window.

A new scan starts a new session

Dropping or opening a different scanned print names the session after it: the window lets go of the .apdt it had open, and the next ⌘S asks where to put the file with <scan>.apdt already in the name field, instead of writing the new print back over the previous print’s session. Save As opens on the folder the previous session was saved in, not on your scans folder, so sessions keep landing where you keep them. Re-loading the same scan file — a re-scan saved over itself — is still the same session, and so is swapping only the source image.

Close Session

File → Close Session, or Close Session in the toolbar’s Session pull-down, hands the window back an empty canvas between prints. The source, the scan, the quad and everything measured from them go, along with the note and the .apdt identity — so the next ⌘S asks where to put the file rather than overwriting the session you just closed.

What survives is the way you work: the loaded .acv, the Method and Paper, and every analysis setting, so the next sheet does not start by re-picking all of it. Work that is not already in a session file asks first — Save / Don’t Save / Cancel — and the autosave goes with the close, so the next launch opens empty instead of resurrecting the print you just finished. Saved .apdt files are untouched and still in the recents.

There is no keyboard shortcut on purpose: ⌘W is Close Window, and the two are one keystroke and one wrong assumption apart.

Autosave

The live session is also autosaved silently and restored on the next launch, so a correction in progress survives a restart without an explicit save. As in StepWedgeDensitone, a restored autosave does not claim a session file: the first ⌘S after a launch asks where to write, so a recovered working state can never overwrite the .apdt you last saved deliberately.

Privacy

Everything is computed locally on your Mac. The app reads the files you open, writes the files you export, and keeps its preferences and autosave in its own container. Nothing is uploaded.