5 Photos You Should Never Turn Into a Lithophane

A lithophane is a brutally honest medium. A photo you have filtered on your phone will not fool it. Whatever is shallow in the original stays shallow in 3D printing too.

After a few hundred orders, we already know what spells disappointment in advance. Here are five categories of photos you should avoid.

A selfie taken in bad light. A phone's front camera under ceiling lighting produces flat portraits with no shadows. A lithophane needs contrast: a face lit evenly from above gets reduced to a white blob with two dots instead of eyes.

Group photos from a wedding. Five people standing in a row mean five small faces, each squeezed into a couple of tenths of a millimeter of thickness. On the wall, it looks like a crowd of anonymous heads.

An Instagram portrait with a filter. Filters like Clarendon or Valencia push skin tones into the midtones. Midtones are exactly what a lithophane renders worst: everything dissolves into gray.

Photos zoomed in from a distance. Digital zoom from 20 meters away brings no new detail, only bigger pixels. The lithophane then prints noise.

Dark photos from concerts and restaurants. If the whole background is black, the print creates a thick black layer that lets no light through, and the main subject disappears into it.

A simple rule applies. A photo that looks good in black and white also looks good as a lithophane. If you are not sure, write to us through the contact form and we will tell you for free, before printing, how it will turn out.