Terms of use

1. Who you are dealing with

Trichroma Lab is made by Michał Zaborowski, a sole trader registered in Poland under the business name whitecode Michał Zaborowski, ul. Kazimierza Morawskiego 5/14, 30-102 Kraków, Poland, NIP 6612315577 ("we"). Contact: the contact form.

By installing the application or by posting on our Discord server you agree to these terms. If you do not, do not install it — and nothing is lost, because the trial asks for neither an account nor a card.

2. What the software does, and what it needs

Trichroma Lab turns three black-and-white separation exposures — shot through red, green and blue filters — into one colour image, using our own implementation of the kind of colour pipeline a laboratory scanner runs.

Read this before buying. The application needs a rig: a copy stand, a camera, and a light source with three narrow bands. Colour depends on that light. Every frame published on this site was shot on one calibrated light source, and on a different light source the colour will land somewhere else until that source has been measured. We will happily work out a calibration for your rig with you — that is what our Discord server is for — but we do not promise in advance that any particular rig will match, and nothing here is a promise that the software works with every camera or every lamp.

3. The trial

The trial runs for seven days or fifteen rolls, whichever ends first, with every feature switched on. It needs no account and no payment details. It is registered against your machine, so it can be taken once per machine. When it ends, the application processes no new rolls, and once closed it does not open again until a licence is in force.

4. Your licence

When you buy, you get a non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use the application for as long as your plan allows. You may install it on up to two machines that you use.

Two plans. Personal and Pro develop the same colour; Pro adds the features listed as Pro-only on the pricing page. A feature listed there as coming is not part of what you buy until it ships.

You may not resell, sublicense, rent out or redistribute the application or your licence key, and you may not attempt to defeat the licensing.

The camera driver is open source. On macOS the application talks to cameras through libgphoto2 and libusb, which ship inside it as one separate library, trichroma_gphoto2, under the GNU Lesser General Public License, version 2.1. Nothing in these terms takes away what that licence gives you: you may change that library for your own use, put your changed version into your own copy of the application, and reverse engineer the application solely to debug the changes you make to that library. Its complete source, and how to rebuild and replace it, are published with every release.

The colour engine is ours, and stays ours. TrichromaColorEngine, and the models, curves and coefficients embedded in it, measured and fitted over years of calibration, are our original work and remain our property. Your licence lets you use the engine as part of the application; it does not let you extract its embedded data, decompile it or otherwise reconstruct how it works, or reuse any of it in another product. The application also carries technical measures that protect this work, and getting around them is a separate breach of these terms. The one limit on this: nothing here takes away a right the law does not let us take away. In the European Union that includes observing and testing how the software works while you use it normally, and decompiling it only as far as you need to make another program work with it (Directive 2009/24/EC, Articles 5(3) and 6).

What happens when a licence ends: the application stops processing new rolls at once, and once you close it, it does not open again — no opening, grading or exporting the rolls you have — until a licence is in force again. Nothing is deleted: every roll you processed stays on your disk, in a file that is yours, and opens as you left it once you renew; the images you exported are ordinary files and yours for good. A lifetime licence does not end.

One thing needs the internet, on every plan. The colour engine is unlocked with a key that travels in your licence, and each new version of the engine needs its own key — so when an update brings a new engine, the application fetches that key on its next connection and then works offline again. A lifetime licence works offline on the engine version it last unlocked; moving to another version — a newer update, or an older build reinstalled — asks, once, for a connection.

5. Buying, renewing and cancelling

Lemon Squeezy is the merchant of record. They are the seller for every purchase, they take the payment and they handle VAT — so their terms of sale govern the transaction itself, alongside these terms which govern your use of the software.

Monthly and yearly licences renew automatically at the then-current price for that plan until you cancel. You can cancel at any time from the receipt Lemon Squeezy sent you, or by writing to us; cancelling stops the next renewal and your licence keeps working until the period you have paid for runs out. A lifetime licence does not renew and is not a subscription.

Updates. A monthly or yearly licence covers every version released while it is paid for, major versions included. A lifetime licence covers the major version it was bought for — version 1 and every 1.x update — and keeps working with it for good. A later major version (2.0 and on) is not included in a lifetime licence; we may offer it to lifetime owners at an upgrade price, and staying on the version you have is always an option.

Prices are shown on the pricing page. If we change a price, the new one applies to your next renewal and never retroactively; we will tell you before it takes effect.

6. Your right to change your mind

If you are a consumer in the European Union or the United Kingdom you normally have fourteen days to withdraw from a distance purchase without giving a reason.

Digital content is the exception: if you ask for the download to start immediately and acknowledge that doing so ends your withdrawal right, that right is lost once delivery begins — which is what the checkbox at checkout is for. This is why the trial exists: seven days and fifteen rolls, with everything on, so you can find out whether the software suits your rig before any money changes hands.

Beyond that, if the software does not do what this site says it does, write to us. We would rather refund you than argue.

7. Discord, and the forum archive

The Trichroma Lab server on Discord is free, optional, and separate from your licence. Discord's own terms apply there as well as these. The forum at forum.trichromalab.com is a read-only archive of what was posted before the community moved; nothing new can be posted there.

What you post stays yours

You keep the copyright in everything you write and every image you upload. By posting on our Discord server — or, before it, on the forum — you give us a non-exclusive licence to display it there, and to keep forum posts as part of the archive. You confirm that what you post is yours to post.

The rules

• Be civil. Disagree with the measurement, not the person.
• No spam, advertising or link-dropping.
• Nothing unlawful, and nothing that harasses or endangers anyone.
• Do not post other people's photographs or writing without their permission.
• Do not try to break, flood or scrape the site or the server.

We may edit, move or remove posts, and remove members from the server, when these rules are broken. If we get it wrong, say so.

Images in the archive carry their metadata

Images in the forum archive are stored exactly as they were uploaded, including EXIF metadata — camera, lens, date and GPS coordinates if the camera recorded them, and they are public and indexed by search engines. If one of yours was shot somewhere you would rather not publish, ask us and we will remove it. On Discord, what happens to an image's metadata is up to Discord.

8. What we do not promise

The software is provided as it is. We do not warrant that it is free of defects, that it will match any particular rig or film stock, or that it will run without interruption. Colour is a measurement of your equipment, and equipment varies.

To the extent the law allows, our total liability for any claim relating to the software, the forum archive or our Discord server is limited to what you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, and we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss. Nothing here limits liability that cannot legally be limited — including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for a consumer's statutory rights, which these terms do not affect.

Keep your own backups. The application writes to your disk and works on your files; it is not a backup system and it is not a substitute for one.

9. Ending it

You can stop using the software at any time, and ask us to remove what you posted on the forum archive by writing to us. We may end your licence or remove you from our Discord server if you materially break these terms — in practice, after asking you to stop first, unless the breach is serious.

Tampering with the licensing or getting around the measures that protect the application — including attaching a debugger to it or modifying it in order to get past them — is a serious breach, and we may end your licence for it without asking first.

10. Law, and changes

These terms are governed by the law of Poland, and disputes belong to the Polish courts. If you are a consumer, this does not take away the protection of the mandatory law of the country you live in, nor your right to bring a case where you live.

If these terms change we update the date at the top and, when the change matters, say so on this site and on our Discord. Continuing to use the software after that means you accept the new version.

See also the privacy policy.