Zerno for Windows

1. The whole chain on the graphics card. Light, optics, film, development and print run through DirectX 12 — on an integrated graphics card or a discrete one. On an integrated AMD Radeon 780M a 24-megapixel colour frame prints in about three seconds; the preview on screen updates in steps, and the badge in the status bar shows which one you are looking at.
2. RAW and HEIC. RAW from cameras LibRaw knows, monochrome ones included, JPEG, and HEIC from a phone — decoded the same way as on the Mac: the same file gives the same frame on both systems.
3. Source. The first card of the rack: RAW exposure before the film (Auto, Protect highlights, Protect shadows, As shot) and white balance (Film, As shot, Custom with temperature and tint).
4. One project on two systems. A .zerno file written on the Mac opens on Windows in full — settings, crop, marks, presets — and the other way round. The project keeps paths to its frames relative to itself, so a folder with the project and its frames can move to another drive as a whole.
5. One licence for the Mac and the PC. Seats are counted as machines of any system: two machines can be a Mac and a PC, two Macs or two PCs. The activation code is the same; Help → Licence… shows the term and unlinks the computer before you sell it.
6. Five days free. “Try it for 5 days” in the licence window — the full program with no limits and no marks on frames; an internet connection is needed at every launch.
7. A window that follows Windows. Its own title bar with the menu and the SELECT · DEVELOP switch, snapping to screen edges, Ctrl and Alt instead of ⌘ and ⌥ — the full list is behind the “?” button in the title bar. F is full screen, Tab is a clean view without panels; File → Open Recent lists the latest projects.
8. Export that keeps colour grain. Our own JPEG without chroma subsampling, as on the Mac: colour grain reaches the file intact. The social copy, batch export and the contact sheet as PDF are in the same place, the File menu.
9. The Three matrices preset. A print from a slide as it was made for exhibitions: Kodachrome 64 and dye transfer — three matrices, one per dye. The softest of the prints from a slide: contrast close to the slide itself, dense reds and blues, the white a warm paper white. Last in the Slide group.

1. The presets panel without stray chips. Built-in presets no longer show a row of block chips. Once the Source block appeared they were counted as partial. The chips stay only on truly partial presets, and the word in a chip no longer wraps.
2. Presets in Select. They now apply to the selected frames, or to the frame under the cursor if nothing is selected, as one undo step. Before, clicking a preset in the grid did nothing; it only worked in Develop.
3. An untouched frame and the first touch start from the Neutral film. Before, the rack of an unprocessed frame named Portra 400, which was not on the frame, and the first knob you touched silently gave its colour. Now “Neutral”, where printing starts, is the Neutral film, the Neutral lens and the Neutral scan: the first touch barely changes the picture, and the film is yours to choose.
4. The graphics card no longer drops out on heavy lenses. After a few lens switches Windows could reset the graphics card, and instead of the frame you saw “Zerno for Windows cannot print this process yet” — although nothing was missing. Now the work on the graphics card goes in pieces that Windows does not treat as a hang, and the slower the card, the smaller the pieces. If the card is reset anyway, the program recreates it by itself and recomputes the frame; if even that does not help, a window “The graphics card stopped responding” gives advice and a Try Again button.

1. The grid opens at once, and the preview cache is half the size. Finished tiles are kept on disk and found by a “view key” — the file's fingerprint plus everything done to the frame; a project opens with them at once without loading the sources into memory, and a project of hundreds of frames no longer takes ten gigabytes of memory. Source previews are stored two and a half times more compactly. In Print the tile is updated from the same print that is on screen. After the update, previews and tiles are recomputed once — the first opening of each project will take longer than usual.
2. Slide presets are lighter. Goldin, Eggleston and Long evening came out very dark and clipped in the shadows and highlights: the first two printed on reversal papers, and an already dense slide darkened a second time. Now all three are the slides themselves on a film scanner, and the tone is set with the scanner's contrast, not its exposure: the white stays white. For a print from a slide, use the new Three matrices preset or a paper in the PRINTING block.

The program checks for a new version once a day and offers it by itself: it downloads the installer, verifies its checksum and shows it in File Explorer. You run it — “How updates work”.