Free Lithophane Generator
Free lithophane maker: turn any photo into a backlit 3D printable panel in your browser, your photo never uploaded. Order it printed in NZ, or buy the file.
What It Does
Drop in a photo and this tool turns it into a printable lithophane: a thin panel whose local thickness varies with the brightness of the image, so that when it is lit from behind the picture appears. The conversion happens entirely on your own device using your browser's canvas, which matters here more than on our other tools, because the input is usually a photograph of someone you know. Your photo file never leaves your machine and is never sent to us; if you order the panel printed, what reaches us is the generated panel, not the original photograph. Designing here is free and there is no sign-up. Keeping the file is not: order the panel printed by us and the download comes with it, or buy a licence for the file on its own.
How a Lithophane Works
Every pixel of the source image becomes a small column of plastic. Dark pixels become thick columns that block light, bright pixels become thin ones that let it through, and the result looks like a plain white plaque until you put a light behind it. That is the one thing worth understanding before you print: a lithophane is not a picture, it is a filter, and it only exists when it is backlit. A window, a small LED panel or a candle-style lamp all work. On a shelf in ambient light it will look like a blank tile.
Choosing an Image
Contrast is everything. The best sources are close-cropped subjects against a plain background, with strong light and dark separation and the important detail large in the frame: a face filling the frame works, the same face at twenty metres does not. Because the tonal range gets compressed into a couple of millimetres of plastic, a flat grey photo turns into a flat grey panel. Crop before you import, boost contrast if the photo is soft, and be sceptical of anything with a busy background because every twig behind the subject becomes geometry competing for the same tonal range.
Thickness Range and Inversion
The minimum and maximum thickness set how much light gets through at the extremes. A typical panel runs from about 0.8 mm in the brightest highlights to 3 mm in the deepest shadows. Push the minimum too thin and the highlights become translucent and fragile; raise it too far and the whole image dims to nothing. Widen the range for high contrast and more depth, narrow it for a gentler, more even image. The invert option flips the mapping to produce a negative, which is what you want if the panel will be lit from the front or used as a mould rather than backlit.
Pixel Pitch and File Size
Pixel pitch is the millimetre spacing of the sample grid, and it controls both detail and the size of the generated mesh. Fine resolves the most detail and produces the heaviest file, standard is the sensible default for most photos, and draft is there for a quick proof before you commit four hours of print time. There is no benefit in sampling finer than your printer can print: with a 0.4 mm nozzle, detail below about 0.2 mm simply gets averaged away by the extrusion width, and all you gain is a slower slice. The live readout shows volume, estimated mass and the facet count, which is the number to watch if your slicer starts to struggle.
Print Settings That Actually Matter
Print the panel standing vertically on its short edge, not flat on the plate. Printing upright means each layer draws one horizontal line of the image and the layer lines run with the picture instead of across it, which is the difference between a lithophane that looks photographic and one that looks like a contour map. Use a 0.1 mm layer height or finer, 100 percent infill so there are no voids to show as bright spots, two or three perimeters, and a slow outer wall speed. Add a brim for stability, because a tall thin panel is easy to knock off the plate. The optional solid frame border makes the panel considerably more rigid and gives it something to stand in.
Materials and Backlighting
White PLA is the correct answer and it is not close. It has the light transmission and the neutral tone that lithophanes depend on, and it prints fine detail crisply. Natural or translucent PETG works but tends to look warmer and slightly muddier. Do not use dark, filled or carbon-loaded filaments: no light gets through, so there is no image. For lighting, a diffuse warm LED behind the panel beats a bright point source, which produces hotspots. Keep any light source cool and at a distance, because PLA softens at temperatures a hot bulb reaches easily.
Order It Printed or Buy the File
Lithophanes are slow prints at fine layer heights, which makes them a good candidate for handing over rather than tying up your own machine for an evening. Send the panel to our instant quote page and we will print it upright in white PLA at a fine layer height and ship it anywhere in New Zealand, with the file included in the order. Or buy a licence for the file on its own and print it yourself, if you would rather give the evening over to it. See the available materials for light transmission, or the FDM design guide for the layer height and minimum feature rules behind the settings above.