Everything looks better lit

A chapter is the look. The light is what the flash is doing, full in the dark and gentler in daylight, and the camera picks it from the room. Every chapter works in either light, and the streak goes over both.

The first drop comes with the app. A drop is a new chapter: more of them arrive in updates, and with Pro each one is included from the day it arrives. There is no schedule: each one turns up when it is good enough to stand beside these.

PARTY

Full flash in the dark. The subject is lit hard and everything behind them falls away. The mode the app was built around.

FILL

Flash in daylight. It lifts faces out of shadow instead of taking over the scene, so the background survives.

STREAK

Not a light but glass, in the lens drawer, over either one. The look of a dragged shutter: the edges of the frame streak and the middle, where the flash lands, stays sharp.

Tap the light's name on screen to choose it yourself, and it holds until six in the morning or until you next open the app.

Shooting a chapter without flash gives you the grade with nothing underneath it to grade, which is why the flash opens on, every time. Turn it off and the app will not argue with you about it. It comes back on next time, because the reason to turn it off is usually a room rather than a preference.

Flash is what makes that possible. Most of what a phone does to a picture at night is there to drag it out of the dark, and a flash near your subject leaves far less to drag.

SINGLE

One frame, the way a camera has always worked.

HALF-FRAME

Two uprights sharing one picture, the way a half-frame camera fits two pictures into one frame of film.

STRIP 3

Three in a column, the way a booth prints them.

STRIP 4

Four in a column, the way a film strip runs.

QUAD

Four in a square. The easiest to look at.

BURST

Three, five or ten frames, about three seconds apart with the flash, or one second apart without it. Put the phone down and let it work.

INTERVAL

Leave it on a table and it keeps shooting the room by itself. Nobody poses, which is the point.

VIDEO

Fifteen or thirty seconds, filmed through the same chapters, with sound.

You can set a roll to develop in the morning instead of showing you each frame as you shoot it, the way a disposable worked: you shot, and it held everything until it was light out.

A photograph you already have can come in too: Reprint a photo develops it in a chapter you choose, and keeps it on a shelf of its own.

Everybody in a roll is a light. Pick one as you come in, a candle, a moon, a flame, or go by your initials; whoever started the roll is the bolt.

In the morning the whole night is in the roll, on every phone in it: everybody's photographs, in the order they happened, and one tap takes them home to your camera roll. The roll lives three days after it develops, and then closes for good; your own frames stay in the app. The photographs travel locked, and the key is in the link, so only somebody holding the link can open them.

Sending into a shared roll needs an iPhone signed in to iCloud.

Whoever gets one watches it running on their own room before they decide, and nothing on their camera changes unless they keep it. The link carries the settings themselves, so there is no account behind it.

Pro is all ten chapters instead of five, every chapter that arrives later, a whole selection exported at once, and never being interrupted: no mark, no advertising, no waiting. Free exports leave at 2048 pixels with a small GETFLSH mark; one ad buys five that leave clean at full size, the same file Pro gets, and they keep until you use them. Without Pro, two darkroom pages also carry a small ad at the foot.