Upload a photo to start.
High-contrast portraits and pets look best.
Upload a photo to start.High-contrast portraits and pets look best.
A lithophane is a thin printed panel whose thickness varies with the brightness of your photo. Where the picture is bright the panel is thin and light passes through; where it is dark the panel is thick and blocks the light. Lit from the front it looks like a blank white tile. Put a light behind it and the photograph appears.
That is the whole trick, and it is also the whole constraint: a lithophane only works backlit. Everything below follows from that.
This matters more than any setting. A lithophane has a narrow thickness range to express the entire tonal range of an image, so it compresses contrast hard.
| Works well | Works badly |
|---|---|
| High contrast, clear subject | Flat, evenly lit, low contrast |
| Simple or plain background | Busy background competing with the subject |
| Faces and pets, cropped tight | Wide landscapes with small detail |
| Silhouettes and strong shapes | Very dark photos, which go uniformly thick |
Crop before you upload. A face filling the frame reads far better than the same face at a quarter of the frame, because every millimetre of panel is then spent on detail you care about.
| Setting | Use | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Orientation | Vertical, standing up | Layer lines run across the image instead of along it, and no supports are needed |
| Layer height | 0.1 to 0.12 mm | Layer height is your tonal resolution here, not just surface finish |
| Infill | 100% | Any gap scatters light and shows as a grey haze |
| Line width | 0.4 mm | Keeps the thin bright areas solid |
| Material | White or natural PLA | Diffuses evenly. Avoid silk and sparkle filaments, which scatter unpredictably |
| Speed | Slower than usual | Thin walls printed fast under-extrude, which shows up as banding |
Almost always infill below 100%, or too small a thickness range so the darks never get properly dark. Print solid and widen the range. If the print is right, try a brighter backlight before reprinting: a dim light flattens even a good lithophane.
Under-extrusion on the thin sections, usually from printing too fast. Slow down and check the flow rate. Because a lithophane is nearly all thin wall, it exposes extrusion problems a normal print would hide.
Either the source photo was too small or too low contrast, or the layer height is too coarse. Layer height is the tonal resolution: at 0.2 mm you have half the tonal steps you would have at 0.1 mm.
A tall thin panel has a small footprint and a lot of leverage. Use a brim, keep the door shut and draughts away, and if it keeps happening add a small printed foot or print it in a frame.
You can, but it will look worse. Flat printing runs the layer lines along the image and needs the detail to be expressed in Z, where you have far fewer steps to work with. Vertical is the right default.
Upload any photo and Meshcast converts its brightness into a 3D-printable relief panel that reveals the image when backlit. Set the size and thickness, then download the STL or 3MF. Everything runs in your browser, no card.
Print flat-to-tall in white PLA at 0.1mm layer height with 100% infill and no top/bottom light gaps. Thinner areas pass more light, so keep the minimum thickness around 0.8mm and the maximum near 3mm.
Yes. The image is converted to brightness values, so color photos work but read as a monochrome relief. High-contrast portraits and landscapes give the strongest backlit result.
A lithophane is a thin printed panel whose thickness varies with the brightness of a photo. Held up to the light, the thin areas glow and the thick areas stay dark, so the picture appears. Lit from the front it looks like a plain white panel, which is why it only works backlit.
Yes. The photo is converted to a mesh in your browser, so the image never leaves your device, and a free weekly download allowance covers casual use.
High contrast, a clear subject and a simple background. Portraits, pets and silhouettes work best. Dark or busy photos lose detail because the thickness range available is small, so crop tight and raise contrast before uploading.
Usually infill below 100%, which leaves gaps that scatter light, or too thin a maximum thickness so the darks never get dark. Print solid and increase the thickness range. A dim backlight also flattens it, so try a brighter one before reprinting.
Yes. A curved lithophane wrapped around a light source reads from more angles than a flat panel. For a candle that glows the picture when lit, the photo candle mold tool wraps the image around a cylinder and then gives you a two-part mold to cast wax in.
A lithophane is one way to turn a picture into a physical object. These are the others here: