Is there a good lighting setup template for GIMP

djotaku · April 3, 2016, 2:02am

I have (or had at some point) a PSD file for creating jpegs of my lighting setups. It was a bunch of layers with symbols for umbrellas, soft boxes, models, etc. I tried googling one for GIMP, but wasn’t using the right keywords to find anything. Do you guys know of one of have one to share?

patdavid · April 3, 2016, 3:45am

I had actually started working on something like this a while back. I’ll post what I have on Monday to share. It was mostly in Inkscape.

lee · April 3, 2016, 2:08pm

It appears that Kevin Kertz, the person who posted the original .psd tool, has withdrawn permission to use it for published drawings. I found an alternate .psd set at Lighting Diagram Sheet G-1.x for Photoshop / Downloads / Home - Online Lighting Diagram Creator - Tools for photographers

Some other alternatives appear to have come and gone. The URL above is a download of the images used in an online tool, and the author (Nguyen Dinh Quoc-Huy?) says they were created in InkSkape [sic]. Terms of use are on the website and it appears to be a form of ‘donation ware’. Perhaps Pixls users could collaborate on an Inkscape .svg lighting image library under a creative commons license.

patdavid · April 3, 2016, 4:05pm

This is actually my intention starting with what I can find or create. I’ll push them into the github repo and we can probably get a pretty complete set created fairly quickly if everyone pitches in a little.

Morgan_Hardwood · April 3, 2016, 6:45pm

Infinitely lame, considering these icons would take roughly 60 seconds each to draw in Inkscape…

djotaku · April 4, 2016, 1:22am

Awesome idea. I find it helps so much when trying to convey how the shot was setup.

patdavid · April 4, 2016, 7:49pm

Ok, I’ve setup a GitHub repo under the PIXLS.US organization (feel free to join the organization if you’d like). You can find the repo here:

Also feel free to fork it and contribute some material!

At the moment, I dug up some real basic things I made a little while ago:

Person (top-down view, standing)
Softbox (+ grid)
Octabox (+ grid)
Camera (generic DSLR-looking)

There’s a bigger list (feel free to add to/amend) on the README:

github.com

pixlsus/pixls-lighting-diagram/blob/master/README.md

# Lighting-Diagram
Assets to generate lighting diagrams and setups like this one:

![example lighting setup](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/djotaku/pixls-lighting-diagram/master/examples/portrait_lighting_setup.png)

They can be used to plan a photoshoot ahead of time or to communicate your setup to other photographers. Here is an example of a professional photographer, Gavin Hooey, using lighting diagrams to show viewers how his lights are setup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUCQQ8Cp9h4 . 

## Assets Downloading

If you just want to grab the shapes to build your own lighting diagrams, you can just grab the [combined.svg][] file (Right-click, Save link as...).  It _should_ contain all of the assets.

[combined.svg]: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pixlsus/pixls-lighting-diagram/master/combined.svg

## Contributing

Would you like to contribute? See [Contributing.md](https://github.com/pixlsus/pixls-lighting-diagram/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md)

## Origin of This Lighting Diagram

There were no Free/Libre resources for creating photographic lighting diagrams available until this one came online in 2016. All of the assets hosted here are available under a [Creative Commons, Attribution-ShareAlike](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) license.

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lee · April 4, 2016, 11:34pm

Have you thought about using a basic scale of some sort? I know .svg is easily scalable, but it might be more convenient to encourage some sort of pixels/m or pixels/in standard so that items created by different people start out sized relatively correctly.

And thanks for the nice start. For those of us that are not great at drawing, Inkscape has a nice bitmap to path facility.

djotaku · April 5, 2016, 7:52pm

Thanks Dave, that’s awesome! I guess it goes to show - it never hurts to ask!

patdavid · April 5, 2016, 7:57pm

So I haven’t included a scale just yet. I originally was thinking of something along the lines of 1px = 1mm, but I’m not 100% sure that it makes sense. I guess I mostly just scaled objects based on the shoulder width of the person shape (approximately 18 inches (~450 mm) wide at the shoulders).

I do think this is something that should be revisited at some point.

rht · April 5, 2016, 9:31pm

For my part, I will be importing the images as eps files into groff at 72 points per inch. The overall lighting diagram may occupy the entire width of the printable area (540pt, 7.5in, 190.5mm) of an A4 page or a smaller width if I place the caption alongside rather than underneath.

However, I very much doubt if my lighting diagrams will be drawn (ie, placed) to scale.

Robert