What Is It

Photo Light Pro is software that I am honestly surprised hasn’t been created yet… It is a full 3D environment with accurate and realistic light mapping from various simulated light sources allowing you to simulate various different lighting scenarios without leaving the comfort of the couch.

Update: Just because it wasn’t clear before, the software is available for both Mac and Windows.

The website says:

The first virtual photography studio simulator

Photo Light Pro is a program designed by Seven Studio Team (Bogota – Colombia). We use the latest real time 3D processing techniques to provide Photographers and Filmakers with the most complete simulator of the studio lighting.

Photo Light Pro

If you’ve ever played with any 3D modelling software you have probably seen how you can move lights around the virtual environment and see their effects on the other objects you’ve placed. You’ve probably also noticed how… “challenging” (i.e.: bloody hard) it is to do anything useful without a PHD of splines and nodal points. Or something like that.

So these guys saw the potential of this for doing lighting setups if you can make it really, really easy.

Who Is It For?

This software is for people who are interested in experimenting with studio lighting for portraiture (and some other things, more about that in a minute). Imagine you could spend as much time as you wanted with a great looking model in a huge studio with a ton of different lights and options. Imagine if you were able to move all those lights around without actually running to them, moving them, taking a shot to see how it looks, moving again, tweaking, fiddling… all the stuff that real life models hate when we do.

If this appeals to you, then this is for you. Same if you want to shot other things, like cars, motorcycles, guitars… full body models, nude models, head and shoulders shots, or even to fully control the gestures of a model and get just the right mix of anger, sadness, and the perfect tilt of the head, all controlled from your computer.

Of course you should be doing this experimenting in real life. We all know this. But right now I’m sitting here in my living room, at almost midnight, without pants on, and I’ve been experimenting with three to five light setups for the last hour. No lugging of gear out from the basement, no realizing that the batteries in my third flash unit need recharging, no need to find a model to work with at midnight on a Monday night.

Honestly even if this only tickles your interest a tiny bit, it’s only seven dollars, which is a damn fine price even if you never use it.

Female model selection

How Does It Work?

How it works is how I mostly described already. It’s a 3D environment with a GUI that does an OK job of moving things around. I’m not going to lie, the UI here isn’t the best. The controls are non-standard and some details, like being able to have two flyout menus open at once that overlap each other, plus fairly un-intuitive controls, and and almost hidden ones (such as the lens zoom slider along the left hand side of the window) make some of the UI almost user hostile.

The short version is this.

• The first thing you do is choose from a selection of people or things. These come in the form of male and female figures, a head and shoulders model, a selection of cars, a motorbike and a guitar.
• You can turn up to five lights on and off, and for each of them choose intensity and colour (through RGB sliders instead of a more standard colour picker), type (soft box, bare flash head, umbrella or beauty dish) and a couple of other options.
• From there you can move the lights around in 3D space around the subject, moving from the view of the camera to a free floating view of the scene. Using various modifier keys you get to make adjustments to the lighting and your camera (and view) position. Through controls you can move the model around, change options such as colour and (if available) type (there are two male models, sixteen female models and six different vehicles).
• When things are setup you can save an image of the scene to your pictures folder. Note that clicking the ‘take’ button under the camera will give you what you see on the screen and not what the camera sees, so you have to move into the camera view mode before this if you want the “real” view.
• You can set a myriad of other options, everything from depth of field (which blurs out the background), an on-screen histogram, a black and white option, some camera processing controls (contrast, exposure, aperture), the type of studio, colour of backdrop, amount of ambient light…..

Whew… that’s a lot of options. And there’s a lot going on, and even after a bit of time using it I’m still discovering new things the program can do.

Annoyances and Room For Improvement

There are a couple of things about the software I don’t like. First of all is the look. It really feels out of place in either Mac or Windows, using some non-native set of widgets for buttons and sliders that feels a bit like the early days of Windows XP when there were a lot of experimenting in UI elements and completely re-skinning of apps, before people realized that there was a benefit to having a cohesive look to apps on your computer.  This contributes to some of the odd UI annoyances that are easy to ignore once you get used to them, but make it feel either un-polished, or the result of some weird sort of cross-platform app that doesn’t quite work right anywhere.

The second big one is that it appears to be activated by license. When you first run the software you have to activate it, and it says you are licensed for only one computer. While in a couple of paragraphs I will admonish anyone for being cheap (it is only $7), this is what I believe is an old software model, and this sticks out like a sore thumb in the current day and age of software that will run on any device you own. I did get it to run on two computers at once, so I’m not sure how strict this licensing is, but it was a “well damn” moment when I first ran the app. Update: Since I started this article I’ve had no issues with the software running on two separate computers… this may change in the future, however.

My buddy Rick was interested in simulating exact settings and gear, for example, modelling the power output of an SB900 at 1/4 power. While I agree, I think that this isn’t the main point of the software, and that concentrating on accurate modelling of the look of light is more important than showing someone what they could do exactly with their gear (not to mention the challenge of modelling the amount of gear out there today).

I’d love to see more modifiers. They hit the main ones, but missed reflective surfaces. I’ve got my fingers crossed for a future update including modifiers like a reflector, octobox, strip box, soft lighter, and others. For the target audience, they hit the main modifiers that most photographers experimenting with lighting will have though.

I appreciate the “DOF” toggle, but it doesn’t accurately model depth of field based on the simulated lens aperture (as far as I can tell), but simply blurs the background of the virtual studio.

Should You Buy It?

The short answer here is yes. If you meet the requirements of who the software is for, it’s $7. If you think it’ll be remotely useful to you, and you have at minimum thousands of dollars in camera and lighting gear, just pony up the $7 and don’t have a fancy coffee next week.

The team has told me on twitter that they are going to update with more features in the future, which brings me hope. For all my whining about the interface and non-standard controls, making the world of 3D modelling this simple and easy to use, and giving it a narrow focus that will appeal greatly to the photographers interested in experimenting with lighting, is a huge win.

@AlanBailward Hi, yes we are working on future updates to include more lights, models and more features.

— Photo Light PRO (@PhotoLightPro) May 8, 2014

If I have to give the software a rating I’d say a 6.5 / 10, with a “I’ve been playing around with it for the last 3 hours now” caveat.  Definitely worth the purchase and I’m very excited to see what the team does with this software in the future.

If you’re interested in purchasing the software, please use this link to head on over to the site to pick it up.