What is it

The last few months I've been spending a few days here and there working on Lumen Tool. It's a free browser software for photo and videographers, portrait painters and anyone who looks at faces professionally I guess.

There are some other tools that do stuff like this. The professional option is set.a.light 3D. It's great, but it's expensive and does way more things, which might be too much for anyone looking for just portrait lighting. There's also Virtual Lighting Studio I believe it's called. Which runs in a browser, but it works by cycling through hundreds of pre-rendered photos. It feels outdated and slow.

Why I made it

I wanted something in between. Open a tab, see a 3D head, drag a light around, watch the shadows move in real time. I also wanted it very lightweight, fast and easy.

I think it came out quite good.
The only downside is, this won't work on mobile and older tablets. It's pretty much a desktop/laptop tool.

As with everything, it's a work in progress. Features will be added when I have time and feel like it. But as a 3D portrait lighting simulator, right now, it does what it needs to do!

Advanced Options

Advanced Mode gives you a more complete workflow. You can save multiple lighting states, load or save a local project file, switch between the 3D view, diagram view and setup view, and export your work as screenshots. Also you can print sheets or PDF reference sheets and it adds more detailed controls such as extra lights, gels, Kelvin settings, light ratios and lighting-pattern analysis, so you can build a full setup and come back to it later.

How it's built

The whole thing is a single HTML file. The 3D rendering runs on Three.js. The head is a GLB model that gets pulled from the server on load - that's the only external request the tool makes.

To keep dependencies minimal, the GLB model is parsed directly without extra libraries. So there's no loading screen, no dependencies beyond Three.js itself, and no data sent anywhere. Your browser does all the work. Total size including everything comes in just under 1MB.

I run basic Analytics just to see where the traffic comes from and how long they are on the site. I'm not interested in building user profiles etc.

Thanks for checking it out!

Franck