Curves, Reports & Exports

The curve you printed through

Load it in the inspector’s Curve section with Load .acv, or from the recents menu on the filename chip. The loaded curve appears on the response graph as the Curve series and, crucially, becomes part of the maths that produces the export.

• Unload drops it and falls back to a straight line, which is what you want when the negative was printed with no curve applied.
• The chip menu keeps your five most recent curves, with the current one checkmarked and unreachable files marked “(missing)”. Browse… opens a file panel; Clear Recents empties the list.
• The .acv format read and written is Photoshop’s Version 4 curve file.

What the corrected curve actually is

For every step in the table the app asks: what input value would have to go into the current curve for this patch to have printed at its target tone? It answers by inverting the measured response — a cubic spline through the smoothed, normalized readings — and then evaluating the loaded curve at that input. The result is written out as the new curve.

Two consequences worth being clear about:

• The export is a replacement, not a correction layer. Load it into Photoshop’s Curves dialog in place of the curve you loaded here. Stacking it on top applies the same correction twice.
• If no curve was loaded, the replacement corrects from linear, which is the right answer for a negative printed without one.

Export → Save Adjusted Curve… writes it, defaulting to the scan’s folder with the name <scan>-adjusted.acv. The inspector’s Save button in the Curve section writes the same curve, and any curve you save is added to the recents list.

Reports

The report exports all live in the toolbar’s Export pull-down.

PDF report

A print-ready analysis sheet for your darkroom records. It contains:

• a header with the image and curve filenames, the step count, and the Method, Paper and Notes from the inspector
• the scan, plus a Step Wedge (detail) figure cropped to the quad
• the Calibration Graph (digital negative) with all five series, and a Target vs Measured graph with just those two
• a Statistics block reproducing the on-screen panel row for row — the white and black readings, the reading spread, the density range, mid-tone, both gammas, σ and the point count
• a Parameters block recording exactly how the measurement was made: steps, columns, rows, cell-order axis and step-0 corner, image rotation, Blur, Edge, Radius, Display mode, smoothing mode and window
• the full Measurement Data table — step, tone tiles, source, normalized, normalized-in-step and error

Both graphs are rendered in the light theme regardless of the theme you are using, so the sheet stays paper-friendly. The figures are cut from the unprocessed scan, not from the blurred or edge-detected preview: a report is a record of what was scanned.

CSV report

The same per-step table as comma-separated text, with the image filename, curve filename and notes in the header. Written with a StepWedgeDensitone_ filename prefix and opened after saving.

Batch reports

Export Reports for Sessions… — in the Export pull-down and on the File menu — writes a PDF report for every .wdge session you point it at, in one pass. A report is frozen output: whatever the app printed the day it was exported. A session file is not — it stores measurements, and its report can be re-derived at any time. So every change to the report leaves a shelf of exported PDFs stale beside sessions that are still perfectly good, and the only thing between the two was opening thirty sessions and clicking Export thirty times.

Two panels: pick a folder (searched all the way down) or individual .wdge files, then pick a destination, which starts in the folder the sessions came from. Reports are named after the session rather than the image, since several sessions of one scan — different smoothing, a re-measured quad — would otherwise collapse onto one filename; same-named sessions from different folders become -2, -3, … rather than overwriting each other.

A session whose scan has moved is collected into a summary at the end instead of raising a dialog for each one, and the summary offers Show in Finder. Each session is applied to a scratch context, so the wedge you have open, its quad and your unsaved edits are untouched — and your sliders and last-opened-file are not walked through thirty settings either. The parameters block of a batched report is rebuilt from the session, so it documents the measurement it was saved from.

Adjusted values

Save Adjusted Values… writes the smoothed table as tab-separated text in the GRAY / LAB_L / LAB_A / LAB_B layout some densitometry tools expect — the step percentage and the normalized value ×100, with zero LAB columns.

ICC profiles for soft-proofing

Export ICC Profiles… asks for a folder (the sandbox grants write access to a chosen directory, which is what lets the app write both files) and writes two grayscale ICC v2 profiles:

They are the forward description of your process, where the .acv is the inverse correction. Use them in Photoshop under View → Proof Setup → Custom → Device to Simulate; the profile description carries your Method and Paper, which is what makes a folder of them readable later. Soft-proofing is display-only — it changes neither the PSD nor the digital negative.

The export needs at least two steps with a real tonal range between them; with a flat or unmeasured wedge it declines rather than writing a meaningless profile.

Where files go

Export panels default to the scan’s own folder and pre-fill a name built from the scan’s filename. The folder you pick for ICC profiles is remembered for next time.