I wanted to share a little update about what’s currently on my roadmap and where I plan to take Lumen Tool over the coming months.
Since moving out of beta, launching version 1.0 and introducing paid subscriptions, I feel I’ve reached a point where I’ve built a pretty solid product. Lumen Tool now has seven studios, each offering something different, and I’m really happy with what I’ve managed to put together so far.
I’m already working on another studio (more about that in a moment), but I think it’s time to shift my focus a little. Instead of constantly building new things, I want to spend more time improving what I’ve already built, especially the smaller quality-of-life improvements that make the whole experience just that little bit better.
As far as I know, nothing is seriously broken and everything is working as intended. There’s always room for improvement though, and that’s what I want to concentrate on over the coming month.
Improving the existing studios
I expect Studio 5, the Set Builder, will get the most attention. Partly because, as I’ve mentioned before, it’s still very much in its beta phase, and partly because there’s simply so much more that can be added to it.
The original Lighting Simulators in Studios 1 and 2, for photographers and artists, already feel like pretty mature products to me. There are always things I could add or change, and I’ll certainly look into that. But there’s also that old saying: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I don’t want to start changing things just for the sake of it, especially when they’re already working well.
One area I definitely want to revisit is the Reference Lab, particularly the photo upload and lighting approximation.
That remains a difficult feature, because perfectly reconstructing a lighting setup from a photograph simply isn’t possible. It’s about getting as close as reasonably possible. I’ll be looking into whether there are ways to improve the results further. Maybe there are, maybe there aren’t. I’ll see what I can do!
Studio 6, Color Lab, also seems to be working very well, and I don’t see anything that urgently needs improving there. To be fair, Color Lab was always meant as a fun little extra. It was an idea that popped into my head and turned into a working studio pretty quickly. I still see it as a nice addition rather than something I’ll be developing for the next three years.
Then there’s Studio 7, Hand Reference.
The hand and arm model itself looks fantastic, and I’m really happy with how that turned out. What I’m less happy with is everything around it: the room, the presentation, the overall look of the space the model lives in. The hand deserves a nicer home, so that’s definitely something I want to improve.
A proper mobile Archive
This one is quite high on my priority list, and I think it could be a really useful quality-of-life improvement.
As you’ve probably noticed by now, Lumen Tool is designed primarily for desktop and laptop computers, and potentially tablets like the iPad. It isn’t designed for phones, and that’s a deliberate decision. Trying to make all these fairly complex 3D studios work properly on a small touchscreen would introduce so many limitations that I’d rather offer a good desktop product than a half-working mobile version.
But there’s one part of Lumen Tool that I do want to work properly on mobile: the Archive.
Imagine spending some time at home creating a lighting setup, experimenting with colors or building a complete scene in the Set Builder, and saving it to the Archive. Later, you’re at a photography studio, in a drawing class, at your workplace or simply in another room. You take out your phone, open Lumen Tool and immediately have your saved setup in a clear, properly formatted mobile view. Your saved setups, easy to find and easy to read, without squinting at buttons that were designed for a 27-inch monitor.
I think that could be incredibly useful. And technically, it shouldn’t be rocket science to build.
The one thing I haven’t quite decided yet is how to handle the rest of the website on mobile.
At the moment, you can actually open Lumen Tool on your phone, log in and get into the studios. Some things might even work reasonably well, although the site was never designed with mobile in mind. I’m not particularly happy with that situation.
One option would be to leave everything accessible and simply make the Archive properly mobile-friendly. The other option, which I’m currently leaning towards, is to make the mobile experience entirely about the Archive. You log in on your phone, and that’s where you land.
On the other hand, I don’t really want to take anything away from people who might already be using parts of the studios on their phones. So that’s something I’m still thinking about.
Either way, a properly working mobile Archive is one of the main things on my roadmap for the coming month.
Studio 8 Product Reflection
In an earlier blog post, I shared a small roadmap with quite a few different studio ideas. One of those ideas is already taking shape behind the scenes.
Studio 8 Product Reflection.
And this is one I’m going to take my time with.
I’ll admit that product photography is quite far outside my comfort zone. It’s a whole specialty of its own, and something I haven’t personally done much of. That means I have a lot to learn about how professional product photographers actually work, what they need and what makes a lighting setup useful to them.
I already have a very basic working version, and the fundamentals are straightforward enough. You place an object in a scene, add some lights and see what happens.
Proper product lighting goes much, much deeper than that, though. Reflections, highlights, materials, the shape and position of light sources, controlling how light travels across different surfaces. There’s an enormous amount involved, and a shiny bottle is very good at showing you every mistake you make.
What I really want is a studio where you can quickly experiment with how light falls on a product and build good lighting setups around its reflections. I also want to include a collection of professional-looking presets that you can study and recreate in your own studio. The goal is something that helps you on an actual shoot, and looking nice on a screen is only part of that.
That’s why I don’t want to rush this one. With the Set Builder, I decided to release a working foundation and expand it gradually over time, which suits that particular studio fine. For Product Reflection, I’d much rather take some extra time and release something that already feels complete and mature from day one.
I’m tentatively aiming for December, but please don’t hold me to that. If it needs more time, January is also a possibility. What matters is that development has started, the basic functionality is working, and I have a pretty clear idea of what I want it to become.
And as always, this won’t be a studio for everyone. Someone who mainly uses Lumen Tool for drawing references probably won’t have much use for a product photography studio. I’ve talked about this before: not every studio can be designed for every type of creative person. Some will be more useful to photographers, others to artists, illustrators or people working in completely different fields. I think that’s perfectly fine.
A slightly slower pace, but plenty to look forward to
For those of you who signed up right at the beginning, which is only about a month and a half ago now, you’ve probably noticed how quickly things have been moving. New studios, new features and updates have been arriving at a pretty ridiculous pace.
That’s going to slow down a little, simply because that pace isn’t sustainable forever. At least not if I also want to sleep occasionally.
My main goal during those first weeks was to give the earliest members as much value as possible. I wanted to launch with something substantial that people would enjoy using, instead of a handful of basic features and a promise. I feel I’ve reached that point now.
So for the coming month, polishing what’s already there is the priority. There will definitely be new studios in the future. Studio 8 is already on its way, after all.
As always, you can follow the latest changes through the Changelog, and I’ll share larger updates here on the blog.
Thanks for being part of Lumen Tool!
Franck