A photo, revealed by the light.
A lithophane is a thin plastic panel whose thickness follows a photo: in daylight it is a rippled white surface, in front of a light the whole picture appears. The photo is processed right in your browser and uploaded nowhere.
Choose a photo to begin.
Drag to orbit, scroll to zoom
Showing the sample picture — choose your own above.
Sharp photos with plenty of light and shade work best. Transparent PNG areas count as white.
How it works
Brightness becomes thickness, pixel by pixel.
The photo is sampled onto a grid at the detail you pick, each point taking its luminance. The darkest point is as thick as “Thickest”, the brightest as thin as “Thinnest”, and everything between is spread evenly by brightness. The frame is a band of full thickness round the picture, which stiffens the panel and gives it somewhere to hold.
The panel is built standing up, the way it should be printed: the thickness then runs across X/Y, where the printer places lines far more finely than its layer height, so the steps of light and shade come out smoother than printed flat. The front is smooth and the relief faces the light; seen from the front the picture reads the right way round. A curved panel bends the same picture round an arc whose centre sits behind it, so a lamp can go in the middle.
The grid is built straight into a closed solid, with no booleans: the back is the full grid, the smooth front only needs the columns, and four walls join the two. Checked across more than 400 random pictures and settings — flat, curved, with and without a frame and a foot — with the mesh checker /tools/model-check uses: no open edges, no degenerate faces, normals pointing out, and a volume that matches the thickness it was given.
What print settings suit a lithophane?
White PLA, printed standing as exported, 100% infill so light passes evenly, 0.12–0.16 mm layers and a slow speed. Add a brim if you leave off the foot. A panel printed flat is quicker but its thickness steps come out coarser.
What thicknesses should I pick?
The defaults of 0.8 mm for white and 3 mm for black suit most white filaments. Under 0.6 mm tends to print with gaps; beyond 3–3.5 mm a weak lamp will not get through the dark areas. Tinted or off-white filament wants a slightly thinner panel.
Why is the STL file so big?
Every grid point is a vertex, so a framed 100 × 75 mm picture at 0.3 mm detail is already close to two hundred thousand triangles. Pick “Fast” for a lighter file and “Fine” for a 0.2 mm nozzle or a very small picture. Going finer than the line width does not make the print any sharper.