A new member is joining the ever expanding lighting diagram tools family. Sylights (which stands for Share Your Lights) is a Strobist oriented tool for sharing and creating lighting diagrams.
The tool was created by Paris based photographers Pierre-Jean Quilleré and Olivier Lance to encourage photographers to share their lighting diagrams. This would, in turn allow other photographer to learn more about lights.
The tool has been in development for about 7 month and is now offered for free in preview mode (and will remain free once it goes live too). This means that it is capable of producing diagrams, but more features are added and other polished, as time goes by. You can have a playing sandbox as a guest, and then your diagram will be deleted after 24 hours, or log in / facebook connect and your diagram will be stored for ever and ever.
One of the nice things about this tool is that it is based on HTM5 /CSS3 so it should be compatible with iPads and iPhones (and androids and others). This version loaded perfectly on my iPhone, but I could not use the tool as it requires right click which the iPhone could not provide, would be cool to see a double-click option for smartphone users. It is nice to see how the industry adopts to the new standards. Are we going away from flash? time will tell.
I did play a bit with it to create the diagram for the rim light image on this post, this is what I came up with, and this is how it looks like on the sylights site.
This tool is joining a respected family of diagram creation tools:
- New sylight
- good ol’ photoshop file by Kevin Kertz.
- The OnLine Diagram Creator (or OLDC)
- Flash based Photo Diagrams.
- and Strobox for the iPhone.
