LIME

What is LIME

Lime is the system that is built to emulate how a piece of film is treated in a real camera. It stands for:

• L - Latent
• I - Image
• M - Multiple
• E - Exposure

It's effect is very simple. If you make an exposure that is to be written to the camera mag. The VOP will first check to see if there already is a TIFF file there from a previous exposure. If there is. It treats it as a Latent Image and adds the new exposure to the existing one. Making it a Multiple Exposure.

Latent in as much as the image is there in the file. And the treatment is the same as when a film strip is in the gate of a real camera. If there already is a latent image on the film strip, exposing to it a new image doesn't erase the old. It just adds the new exposure to it.

Things to keep in mind with the LIME system

There's no technical limit for how many of these exposures you can do on a single TIFF frame. The VOP will happily accept thousands of exposures on the same file.

What can become an issue in practical terms however is the buildup of exposure of the image.

A single 6 second exposure may be perfectly fine to do. But if you do 5 exposures of 5 seconds each. You have now effectively exposed it to 25 seconds of light. And if your blacks in the exposures aren't clean. You will be seeing buildup of the noise floor to match.

To mitigate this somewhat. Especially for users like myself who can't afford a good 16 inch OLED screen with high resolution. Is to just cheat the black levels a bit. By using the noise crusher on the calibration page.

LIME is strictly additive

In keeping with this project's philosophy of needless realism. The LIME system is strictly additive. This means that with each exposure you can only make pixels brighter. You cannot directly make them darker.

You can, however, get around that "limitation" by using the LAB / INVERT button to make the latent images color inverted. That way, when you add more light to it and do another invert procedure. You have inverted the new bright values so they become dark.