The Film Friend: Light Meter

About

A Complete Companion for Film Photography Built for photographers who work with film every day, this app combines modern design with precise tools for exposure, development, and large-format workflows. Everything is customizable, distraction-free, and designed to support the analog process from capture to darkroom. Guided tutorials and a quick welcome tour help you get started from the very first launch. Light Meter and the Zone System - A built-in light meter with spot metering, aperture or shutter priority, a live histogram and an EV readout - Apertures in thirds of a stop, so a reading lands where your lens actually clicks - A live Zone System map drawn over the scene: every region of the frame labelled with its zone, one stop per zone, so you can place a shadow and see where the highlight lands - Tap to meter a single spot and place it on any zone Sun Tracker - Plan natural light for any location and any date: the sun's path, the golden and blue hours, and twilight - A live augmented reality overlay draws the sun's path over your camera view, so you can see where the light will fall - Upcoming solar and lunar eclipses with local timing, plus alerts for moments like sunrise or golden hour - Entirely offline: every calculation and every dataset lives on your device Development Tools and History - Development history keeping a detailed record of past processes - Custom development processes you can create, edit, import, export, and share - A guided development runner with agitation cues, countdown, and a phase-end alarm that keeps timing even on the lock screen - Chemistry tracking for batches, capacity, and expiry, with reminders before your chemistry runs out - A test strip timer for f-stop print exposures, and a mixing calculator for dilutions and volumes - Support for the most common processes and kits: black and white, C-41, E-6, RA-4 and ECN-2 Your Film, Tracked - A catalogue of 247 films: pick one and the brand, ISO, process, type and format fill themselves in - Film holder management for sheets, holders, statuses and exposures, with a full history of every sheet - Inventory for cameras, lenses, tripods, film stock, lights and accessories, with expiry reminders - Analytics across four dashboards: what you shoot, what you have left, how your chemistry is holding up, and how your development runs compare Darkroom-Friendly Design - Dedicated darkroom themes designed for film safety - Spectral color selection to precisely choose wavelengths that minimize the risk of fogging - Custom darkroom colors and a clean, low-distraction interface optimized for low light More Calculation Tools - Reciprocity compensation for long-exposure corrections - Bellows extension compensation for large format - Depth of field with near and far limits, hyperfocal distance, and a visual preview - Focal length equivalency across formats - Negative preview that inverts your film to a positive in real time, with a library, a curves and tones editor, and contact sheet printing Yours, and Offline - No account, and no signal required for anything but the optional cloud backup - Import and export your data, keeping full ownership and portability - Cloud sync to back up your library and restore it on another device - Available in 33 languages Designed for the Analog Workflow This app respects traditional photography while taking advantage of your phone's modern capabilities. Whether you are in the field, the studio, or the darkroom, it provides accurate tools and a flexible interface that let you focus on the image instead of the calculations. Built for film. Designed for photographers.