It’s been a little quiet around here for a while.
The main reason is that I’ve spent a huge amount of time on another project: Wedding Desk. It’s a workflow tool for wedding photographers and videographers, built to help organise and run a wedding day with things like timelines, shot lists, intake information and day-of tools.
That project has taken up most of my time over the past few months. Wedding Desk is now working, in beta, and people can actually use it. So for the moment I’m putting development there into a slightly lower gear. If Wedding Desk sounds useful to you, feel free to send me a message. Access is free while it’s in beta.
But back to the reason you’re probably on this website.
I finally have time to properly continue building Lumen Tool.
Over the past few months I’ve had several really nice messages from people who found the tool useful and enjoyed working with it. That has been genuinely motivating, especially since until now Lumen Tool has mostly been a fairly small side project.
Most updates so far have been small improvements. Refining things, adding a few extra controls, gradually making the existing lighting tool better.
I’ve decided to take a much bigger step now.
Lumen Tool Studio
I’m turning Lumen Tool into a much more complete software package called Lumen Tool Studio.
The current tool, placing lights around the head and immediately seeing how the shadows change, stays an important part of it. But Studio goes a good deal further than that.
The idea is to build several different “studios”, or rooms, inside the software, each one around a different task.
One thing I’m working towards, for example, is being able to upload a photograph and analyse the lighting and shadows in that image, so you can better understand how it was lit and recreate that setup yourself.
Another part will be an archive where you can keep photographs, references and other material you want to use while working.
And there will be more.
I’m deliberately keeping the scope fairly open at this point. If I come across something that belongs naturally alongside the lighting tools, and I think photographers, artists, sketchers or other people already using Lumen Tool could benefit from it, I want to explore it.
If you have an idea yourself, I’m always interested in hearing it. I really enjoy people thinking along with me, and some of the most useful ideas come from people actually using the tool.
Free and paid
There is one less exciting part of this next step.
Lumen Tool Studio will eventually become a paid product.
Building what I have in mind will take months of work, and at times probably full weeks dedicated entirely to this project. As much as I would like to make everything available for free, that simply isn’t sustainable at that scale.
I do want to keep the pricing as reasonable as possible. I mostly see it as a way to make continued development possible, not as something that needs to become an expensive piece of professional software.
The basic version of Lumen Tool will also stay free.
That means the simple lighting tool you currently see the moment you open the main page stays available to everyone. You’ll still be able to use it without paying for Lumen Tool Studio.
For now, I’m going back to building.
I’ll post updates here from time to time as Studio develops and there’s something worth showing.