How to use every tool on the site and how to get a great print out of it — start to finish
A lithophane is a 3D print that looks like a plain, pale panel in normal light — but reveals a detailed photo when you shine light through the back. It works because of thickness:
This tool converts every pixel's brightness into a height, so dark parts of your photo print thick and bright parts print thin, then exports a printable STL for your slicer (Cura, PrusaSlicer, Bambu/Orca Studio, etc.).
The photo matters more than any setting. Best results come from images that are:
If your photo is close but not quite there, the image editor below will crop it, straighten it and paint out whatever is spoiling it — before you make anything.
The Image Editor (under Tools) does the small fixes that make the difference, without sending you off to another program. It runs in your browser and your picture is never uploaded.
Leave brightness and contrast alone here. Every generator has its own image adjustments with a live brightness map beside them, and judging contrast against that map is far more reliable than judging it against the photo. Use the editor for what the generator cannot do — framing, rotation, and removing what should not be in the picture at all.
Tip: always click Preview after changing settings so the output reflects your latest choices.
Reading about a slider is slower than watching one move. Every lithophane generator, and several of the tools, has a Show me how button in the bottom-right corner: it walks you through one complete job inside the real tool, filling the fields in as it goes and explaining each one as it highlights it.
It is not a video. Nothing is simulated — it is driving the actual controls, so when it finishes you are holding a real result you can build and download. Press Skip at any point and everything it set stays where it is, ready for you to change.
It is on every lithophane generator — flat, cylinder and panel, cone, cube, lantern, globe, multi-photo and the lid & pedestal builder — and on QR Tag, Cookie Cutter and Image to STL.
If you have never used the site before, start with QR Tag: it needs no file from you, so it runs the whole way through by itself and you watch a finished tag appear. Where a step does need a picture, the walkthrough waits and the Next button lights up once you have chosen one.
The lid builder's walkthrough is worth doing before your first lid. It is built around printing a test ring first — five minutes that are the difference between a lid that fits and a four-hour one that does not.
A lithophane is only ever as good as its range of tones. The chart under your photo shows two things at once: the grey shape is your original photo, and the coloured shape is what your settings are actually doing to it. Drag brightness, contrast or gamma and the coloured shape moves while the grey one stays put, so you can see exactly what you are changing.
What you are looking for is a spread that reaches most of the way across without piling up hard against either end. Pushed up against the left, the dark parts have all merged into one solid black and no light will come through them. Piled against the right, the light parts have gone to plain white and the detail in them is simply gone — and no printer setting brings either back.
Optimise for lithophane does it for you: it reads the photo, then sets brightness, contrast and gamma to spread the tones across the range a lithophane can actually print. It is a good starting point on almost any photo, and you can carry on adjusting afterwards — it sets the sliders, it does not lock them.
Beyond a plain rectangle you can crop the lithophane to: Circle, Oval, Heart, Diamond, Hexagon, Octagon, Star, Rounded Rectangle, Arch, and Egg.
The exported STL matches the on-screen shape exactly, and the edges are watertight (closed) so they slice cleanly.
Tick Add hanging hole to punch a hole near the top — perfect for ornaments and keychains. Set the diameter and the distance from the top. Works with any shape except a plain Rectangle.
Tick Add raised frame to add a raised rim around the shape edge (shown as an orange dashed line on the preview).
On the Flat generator, tick 🎨 Two-colour print (filament change) to print the base in one colour and the photo in another on a single-extruder printer. It shows the exact Z height to add a colour change in your slicer (PrusaSlicer/Orca: right-click the layer; Cura: Pause at height / Filament change) — load colour 1 first, swap to colour 2 at the prompt, and print standing up. For truly separate colour bodies on an AMS/MMU, use Send to 3D Designer, add a coloured backplate and export 3MF.
On the photo generators (flat, cylinder, cone, cube, globe, lantern, multi) you'll see a Send to 3D Designer button next to Generate. It hands your finished lithophane straight into the in-browser 3D Designer so you can:
Every generator used to centre your photo automatically and crop whatever did not fit, which is fine until the subject is not in the middle. The Align photo panel lets you place it yourself: drag the picture inside the crop box, scroll to zoom in. The bright area is what gets printed.
If you make the same personalised product over and over, this is the part of the site that saves you the most time. Set a job up once — size, thickness, frame, text, base, and the photo framing — then press Save. Opening it later brings back the finished job, photo included.
For the next customer: open the project, press Replace photo, pick the new picture. Everything else stays exactly where it was, including the framing. Change the engraved name if there is one, and generate.
A place to keep the photos you use, so you can pick one again instead of finding the file each time. With it switched on, every generator gets a Gallery button beside the file box. This is your own private store of photos — not the public Gallery on the main menu, where members show what they have printed.
Who can see it: only you. The files are kept outside anything the web server will hand out, and every request for one checks that the picture belongs to the account asking. There is no address anybody can guess. This is the same arrangement project photos already use, for the same reason — these are usually pictures of people.
Click Save Settings (.txt) to download a text file listing every setting used (size, thickness, shape, hole, frame, image adjustments, etc.). Keep it next to your STL so you can reproduce or tweak a print later.
Everything here is free to use — every lithophane shape, every tool and the full 3D Designer. Building, previewing and editing are never limited. A free account is needed to download files, and there are a few downloads a day.
Every account has a referral link, on Your account. Send it to somebody who prints. When they register with it and confirm their email address:
Days are added on top of any Supporter time you already have — they extend it, never shorten it. The link carries the code for them, and there is a box on the registration form for anyone who was given a code on paper instead.
Nearly everything Supporter unlocks: unlimited lithophanes, unlimited tool and Designer exports. The one difference is the AI 3D model generator — Supporter time earned through referrals includes 2 AI generations in total, which is enough to see what it does. Paying for Supporter lifts that to 10 a day.
Why the difference: every AI generation costs us money to run, which is exactly the sort of thing that gets abused if it is handed out for signing people up. The rest costs nothing to give away, so it is not capped.
Your account page lists everyone who has joined on your link, the days you have earned, and how many of this month's 10 are used. If one did not count, it says so and gives the reason, rather than leaving you to guess where the days went.
The Gallery on the main menu is where members show what they have printed. Anyone can look, and clicking a picture shows it full size. Post your own from your account page: every post that is approved adds 1 day of Supporter to your account.
Your account page lists everything you have posted and where each one is: Waiting, In the gallery, or Not used with the reason if one was given. The public page shows your name next to a post, never your email address.
Your account — the gear icon at the top right once you are signed in — opens with where you stand: your plan, and if you are a Supporter, the date it runs to. Under that are four figures: Supporter days left, days earned from referrals, and how many of your gallery posts are in the gallery or waiting to be approved.
Everything else is in panels underneath: your referral link and who has joined on it, your payments, the media gallery switch, posting to the Gallery, the Wall of Supporters, and your password.
Accessories lists the bits that finish a lithophane off — LED bases, charging ports, stands and frames. It is a catalogue, not a shop: nothing is bought on this site, there is no basket to pay from and no card is ever asked for. Every price is an estimate in US dollars and excludes postage, because the real figure depends on size, material and where it is going.
Wanting something that is not listed — a different size, a finish, a quantity — is fine. Say so in the notes on either form below.
There are two ways to ask, and which you want depends on how many things you are asking about.
Enquire on any product opens a short form. No account needed. Give your name, email and where it would ship to, add anything useful in the notes, and it comes to us by email.
Add to quotation collects products into one request instead of sending a separate enquiry for each. Add as many as you like, set a quantity against each one, then send the lot together from the Quotation page.
Q260908-K4XP. Quote it
if you reply about the same request later.Both forms ask the same thing, and the country is required — postage cannot be worked out without it. Choose the country and the state or province list fills in for that country; choose a state and the city list fills in for that state. Countries that have no states in the list simply let you type it instead.
The city list holds towns and cities, not suburbs, so if yours is not there put it in the notes along with the postal code — that is the field couriers actually price on.
Image to STL traces the outline of a picture and pulls it up into a solid shape. Drop in a PNG, JPG, WebP or SVG and pick one of three styles:
Contrast is everything. A black-on-white logo traces perfectly; a photograph of a person does not, because there is no single brightness that separates them from the background. Photographs belong in the lithophane generators, which use every grey level instead of one cut. Transparent PNGs are the easiest input of all — the cut-out edge is already exact, so the threshold barely matters.
Text to STL turns typed text into a printable model: name plates, door signs, keyring tags, fridge magnets and spray stencils. It uses any font installed on your computer — pick from the list or type a font name — with bold, italic, letter spacing, multiple lines and alignment.
Sizes are measured on the letters themselves, not on the font's invisible box, so 20 mm tall means 20 mm tall whichever font you choose. With more than one line, that height covers the whole block.
Add a hanging hole for a keyring or hook and the plate grows to make room for it, so the border you set around the lettering stays exactly as you set it.
Engrave & Emboss puts a name, logo or picture onto a model you already have — cut into the surface, or raised out of it. Load an STL, choose text or a picture, pick which face it goes on, then drag it into place on an outline of your own model.
Print on Fabric makes lace cards — wedding invitations, place cards, RSVPs — by printing a pattern onto tulle, organza or chiffon. It gives the laser-cut look without a laser cutter, and without the connecting bridges a cut-out design normally needs.
The print runs in two halves. A few tenths of a millimetre go down first, the printer pauses and parks, you lay the fabric over the top and pull it taut, and then the rest prints over it. Plastic squeezes through the weave and welds to the plastic below, trapping the fabric in a sandwich.
Five lace patterns are built in and all of them are adjustable, or bring your own artwork and add names and a date. Expect to lose a couple while you find the right fabric tension — print a small place card first rather than a full invitation.
Gridfinity is an open storage standard: bins on a 42 mm grid that drop into matching baseplates, so a bin you print today sits in a plate you printed last year, or one somebody else made. It is the tidiest answer there is to a drawer full of loose parts.
Start with the space, not the bin. Measure the drawer, type the two figures into Have a space to fill? and press Fit. It rounds down to whole grid units and tells you what is left over — because a bin three millimetres too wide is no use to anyone.
The published standard asks for a hole at all four corners of every grid unit — all four, so the bin holds whichever way round you drop it in. Tick magnet holes for 6×2 mm discs, or screw holes for M3. There are two fits: glued in, or pressed in with a tighter bore and no glue — the press fit wants a printer that is in tune, so if a magnet will not go, print the glued size rather than forcing it.
A drawer that is not on any grid can have a plain box in exact millimetres instead. It is clearly labelled as leaving the standard, and it drops the foot — a foot that does not line up with the grid cannot sit in a baseplate, and a part that looks Gridfinity without being it would be worse than one that plainly is not.
A vase-mode bin is printed as one continuous spiral of a single wall: no layer changes, no infill, no retractions, the nozzle never stops moving. That is where the time saving comes from.
A spiral cannot change its outline's height partway round, which is exactly what the chamfered foot needs — so it comes as two files. The body is spiralled; the foot is printed normally and glued on. They are separate downloads because a slicer's spiral vase setting applies to the whole plate, and putting both on the bed together would print the foot hollow too. The file names tell you which is which.
A curved panel will not stand up on its own, and a cylinder lithophane over a lamp usually wants something on top. Lids, stands & frames makes all three.
Set the panel's width and thickness and the holder is built around them. Print with the slot facing up so it needs no supports.
Cookie & Clay Cutter turns a picture into a cutter. Feed it a bold silhouette — a leaf, a letter, a gingerbread man, a logo — and it builds a wall that follows the outline. The preview is a plan view: blue is the blade, tan is the biscuit you will actually cut.
QR Tag & Keyring turns a link into a printable tag — a menu, a wedding photo album, a business card, or a label on the back of a lithophane pointing at the pictures behind it. Add a line of raised text above or below, and either a round hole for a keyring or a keyhole hanger for a wall.
The geometry is the easy part. Two things decide whether a printed QR code actually scans, and the page checks both for you:
Scan the on-screen preview with your phone before you print. If it will not read on a screen, it will not read in plastic, and finding out there costs nothing.
The 3D Print Tools (under Tools in the menu) take any STL — not just lithophanes — and remove material from the inside, so it prints faster and uses far less filament. A solid model is usually mostly wasted plastic.
Two things worth knowing before you start:
Because it runs on your own machine, a very large or very detailed model needs a reasonably modern computer. If a setting would produce something too big to build, the tool says so and suggests what to change rather than freezing.
| Mode | What it does | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| Hollow shell | Keeps only the outer skin at a wall thickness you choose. | The biggest saving. Vases, statues, anything you never see inside. |
| Perforated | Hollow, then punches a pattern of round holes through the skin. | Lampshades and anything that should let light or air through. |
| Hex frame | Turns the skin into a honeycomb of hexagonal cells that follows the shape. | A strong, light, decorative cage. Looks hexagonal from every angle, not just one. |
| Lattice infill | Fills the inside with a gyroid, Schwarz-P or diamond lattice. | Parts that must stay stiff. Self-supporting, so it prints without supports. |
| Wireframe | Reduces the model to struts along its edges, with balls at the joints. | Sculptural, skeletal versions of a shape. The largest saving of all. |
Settings that matter most: wall thickness (1.2–2 mm suits most FDM prints — thinner walls warp), and a drain hole if you print in resin or SLS, so trapped material can escape. Higher resolution captures finer detail but uses more memory and time.
STL files carry no agreed "up" direction, so a model exported from some programs arrives lying on its side. Under the Original model preview you'll find Rotate model with X, Y and Z boxes, quick +90° buttons and a Reset.
The rotation is applied to the real file, not just the picture — so what you see in the preview is what gets converted or sliced. Orientation matters for printing too: see Orientation below.
The Print Doctor answers the question worth asking before you start a six-hour print: will this actually work? Load an STL, tell it your nozzle's limits, and it checks four things.
| Check | What it finds |
|---|---|
| Watertight | Holes in the surface, edges shared by more than two faces, faces pointing the wrong way, stray pieces and zero-area triangles. |
| Wall thickness | A colour map of everything too thin for your nozzle to print, measured with the largest sphere that fits inside the wall — so it is honest about thin diagonal ribs. |
| Overhangs | Every surface that will need support, shaded by how far it leans. Anything already resting on the plate is sensibly left out. |
| Orientation | Tries a few hundred ways up and shows the best three, with how much support each one saves. One click fills in the rotation boxes. |
There are two repairs. Quick fix removes junk triangles and makes every face agree which way is out — it moves no vertex, so sharp edges stay sharp. Rebuild re-creates the surface from scratch, which resolves tangled and overlapping geometry, at the cost of re-meshing everything.
The 3D Print Simulator slices an STL the way your printer would and shows you the result before you commit any filament. Walls are drawn in orange, infill in blue, and you can drag the slider or press play to watch it build up layer by layer.
Set your own layer height (0.2 mm is the usual default), nozzle diameter (0.4 mm on most printers), number of perimeters, infill percentage and bed size. It reports the estimated print time, filament length and weight, and warns you if the model does not fit your bed. You can download the G-code at the end.
Most printing problems are the printer, not the model. Calibration & Test Prints generates seventeen tuning models sized to your printer, with the values printed on them so you can read the result afterwards — no more counting bands to work out which floor was 210 °C. Each one also explains what a good result looks like and which setting to change.
New printer? Work down this list in order. Each test depends on the ones before it — a retraction test on a printer with a bad first layer is wasted filament.
The rest are for chasing a specific problem: overhang angles and bridging to find your printer's limits, clearance and hole size gauges for parts that have to fit together, thin walls and small features for how fine you can go, support gap for supports that snap off cleanly, plus a warping plate, a cooling spire, a text legibility ladder and the XYZ cube. Change one thing at a time, and print each test with the settings you actually use.
Two rolls of white PLA can be very different things. One lets light through at 2 mm; the other is still glowing at 4 mm. That is the single biggest reason a lithophane comes out muddy on one roll and washed out on the next, and no amount of adjusting the photo fixes it — because the fault is in the translation from tone to thickness, not in the photo.
Filament calibration measures it once, per roll:
The first two set the range — how thin is as bright as it gets, how thick is as dark. The middle-grey one is optional but it is the one that does most of the work: it bends the curve, so the mid-tones land where your eye expects instead of bunching towards black. Leave it out and the correction is a straight line between the two ends, which is better than nothing but not by as much.
From then on, every lithophane you generate with that profile selected is corrected for that filament. Mid greys land where your eye expects them instead of bunching towards black. Save one profile per roll — per colour and per brand — and switch between them.
Open the STL in your slicer. These settings make or break a lithophane:
| Setting | Recommended | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Layer height | 0.10 mm (0.08 mm best) | Thin layers = smooth tones and fine detail. |
| Line width | 0.4 mm | Matches the nozzle; crisp walls. |
| Infill | 100% | Any gaps let light leak unevenly. Must be solid. |
| Print speed | Slow — 30–40 mm/s | Cleaner walls, better detail. |
| Supports | Usually none | Upright panels and curved walls are self-supporting. |
| Cooling / fan | 100% | Good cooling sharpens fine relief. |
Many slicers include a "Lithophane" profile, but the table above is all you really need.
| Problem | Likely cause & fix |
|---|---|
| Washed out / low contrast | Increase Contrast and Max Thickness; pick a punchier photo; use whiter filament. |
| Too dark when lit | Lower Max Thickness or raise Brightness/Gamma; use a stronger backlight. |
| Light leaks / blotchy glow | Set infill to 100% — it isn't fully solid. |
| Visible layer banding | Smaller layer height (0.08–0.10 mm) and slower speed. |
| Image mirrored / back-to-front | Use Flip Horizontally, or flip in your slicer. |
| Generation slow / file huge | Lower Mesh Subdivision or use the Balanced/Fast preset. |
| Nothing happens on Generate | Click Preview first so a brightness map exists. |
| Won't stick / wobbles | Add a brim, clean the bed, check first-layer levelling — then print the first layer patches. |
| Slicer refuses the file, or fills the wrong bits | The mesh is probably not watertight. Run it through the Print Doctor, which will name the fault and often fix it. |
| Thin details or lettering missing from the print | They are narrower than your nozzle can draw, so the slicer drops them. The Print Doctor maps them in colour; scale the model up or thicken those parts. |
| Rough, droopy undersides | Overhangs printing without support. Check the angles in the Print Doctor and let it suggest a better orientation. |
| Stringy, blobby or brittle prints in general | Not the model — the printer needs tuning. Work down the calibration prints in order. |