DEMO

WHAT IS IT?

Light Paint Live is a webcam program that lets you paint with light!

This program is great for amateur and professional light-painters alike. Amateurs can use it to experiment with light painting without having to buy an expensive camera, and pros can use it as a heads-up display for their DSLR camera. It shows the picture developing in real-time!

Many people are unfamiliar with light painting, but it’s been around since the early 1900’s! Read more about the history at LightPaintingPhotography.com

For a more verbose description, see Joerg Miedza's post about realtime light-art.

FLAVORS

LPL MERCURY

Chrome app
Uses GPU processing for extremely fluid light-painting. It functions offline so you can shoot in remote locations! Try the alpha version for a taste of what you'll get in the app.

LPL INSTANT

Free demo of LPL Heavy
All you need is a computer and a webcam!

LPL HEAVY

Full-feature desktop version!

  • - Mac / Windows compatible
  • - Up to 1920x1080 resolution
  • - Undo / Redo controls
  • ...and lots more! (see below)

    • FEATURES

    1. MAIN CONTROLS

    Start / stop button will start or stop capturing a painting. Key-control: SPACEBAR.
    Light-sensitivity slider controls amount of light captured per frame - similar to ISO. Key-control: UP / DOWN ARROWS.

    2. EDIT CONTROLS

    Undo / redo buttons will do just that. Key-controls: CTRL+Z, CTRL+Y.
    New button makes a new painting. Key-control: CTRL+N.
    Save button will save an image or video to the users desktop. Key-control: CTRL+S.

    3. SCREEN CONTROLS

    Fullscreen button makes application go into fullscreen mode.
    Toggle preview button turns live preview on or off. Key-control: ENTER.

    4. PAINTING OPTIONS

    Countdown activates a slider that controls how long to delay capture after the start button is pressed.
    Video underlayer checkbox enables a live video preview underneath the light canvas.
    Light range checkbox activates sliders that control the range of light that is captured.
    Limit brightness checkbox prevents painting from exceeding natural light values. Also has a slider for increasing the threshold.
    Fade checkbox activates a slider that controls how fast the painting fades away.
    Color shift activates sliders that shift the red, green, and blue color channels.

    5. WEBCAM OPTIONS

    Camera selector lets user pick which webcam to use.
    Capture size selector determines the dimensions of the image.
    Target frame-rate slider determines the maximum rate of capture.

    6. RECORDING OPTIONS

    Recording options were experimental, and have been removed to improve speed

    7. VIEW OPTIONS

    Dim controls checkbox dims the controls during painting.

    TIPS

    LPL needs a lot of processing power to do its job. Consider this: a 1920 x 1080 image contains about two-million pixels. LPL’s default target frame-rate is 24fps, so the computer attempts to process about fifty-million pixels every second!!

    To improve LPL’s performance, you can do a couple of things.

    1. Close any other open programs.
    2. Use a lower resolution capture size. Less pixels means more speed!
    3. Buy a processor with a lot of cores.

    LPL uses Pixel Bender to process incoming frames. Pixel Bender splits the workload evenly between all available processor cores. The more cores your processor has, the smoother the painting will be!

    RESOURCES

    ExtraWebcam - Connect Canon live-view to LPL with this software.
    Macam - Various webcam drivers for Mac.
    Webcam Settings - webcam controller software for Mac.
    Split Cam - Play video files through the webcam.