About
About LightSchemes
LightSchemes is a lighting library. It exists because the answer to “how was that lit” is usually a forum reply with three guesses in it, and because a lighting diagram without the photograph beside it teaches nothing.
Who makes it
LightSchemes began as one person's project and is now made by a small team of photography enthusiasts who wanted one convenient place to learn everything connected to light. We started in Russia and now work from wherever we happen to be — Sri Lanka, Thailand, France, Germany. We build LightSchemes to share what we know with everyone who loves photographs, and to make the craft easier to learn than it was for us.
Write to us through support. Telegram works too — @lightschemes_bot reaches the same inbox. We read everything.
Why the library exists
Most lighting knowledge is trapped in three bad formats. A forum thread, where the answer is a guess and the picture has expired. A YouTube video, where the one thing you needed is at 14:32 and unsearchable. A diagram on a blog, drawn from memory, with no photograph to check it against.
None of them let you do the thing a photographer actually wants to do: see the result, see the geometry that made it, and change one thing.
So the library is built around that instead:
- The photograph leads. Every setup opens with the frame, because the frame is what you were looking for.
- The geometry is written down, not implied. Key position in degrees, height, distance, ratio, modifier, and what each light is actually doing. Numbers, not adjectives.
- A 2D diagram for every setup, drawn from the same authored data as the page — so the diagram cannot drift from the description.
- A 3D rig you can orbit, because “45 degrees” means two different things depending on whether you meant from the camera or from the subject.
- A relight studio where you can move the light and watch the shadow move, in the browser, with no login.
Everything is free to read, and there is no account requirement anywhere in the library.
What is honestly on this site, and what it is not
This is the section most sites leave out. We would rather you read it here than work it out later.
The photographs are generated educational assets, not documentary photographs. They are photoreal frames produced to demonstrate one specific, physically possible lighting setup. Every one of them is our own work; none of them is stock; none of them is a picture of a real person, a real product, or a real event. As of today, none of the 102 published setups is a documentary photograph of a real scene, and the site never claims otherwise. If a frame could not be made with real photographic tools — impossible catchlights, shadows going two ways, light with no source — it does not get published.
Some figures are measured renders, which are a different thing again. Those are first-party Blender frames from our own studio rig, published in a diagram slot with the key's position and the measured ratio printed beside them, and always labelled Rendered on the page. Nothing is measured unless the number is on the page next to it — a render whose numbers are not published is just a render, and we do not call it measured.
A measured render never gets promoted into a photograph slot. Not later, not disclosed, not ever.
The teaching is the real thing. The lighting relationships, the angles, the ratios, the modifier behaviour and the gear are not invented to fit a picture. When a frame and the setup it claims to show disagree, the page gets rewritten to match the frame — the picture is not adjusted to protect the description.
The full terms for using the pictures are on the image license page.
What we do not do here
- No advertising. No banners, no sponsored setups, no affiliate links dressed as recommendations.
- No paywall. The library is free and the parts of it you have already read are staying free.
- No mailing list you did not ask for. There is not one at all right now.
- No fake scale. No invented user counts, no “trusted by thousands”. If a number appears on this site, it came from somewhere real.
The site does run analytics, including session recording, and we would rather tell you that on this page than let you find it in a cookie table. What it collects and how to switch it off is in the cookie policy and the privacy policy.
Corrections
If a setup is wrong — a diagram that does not match its frame, an angle that cannot produce that shadow, a piece of gear described wrongly — tell us and we will fix it or take it down. Lighting people are usually right about this and we would rather be corrected than believed.