We have many reasons for that, the main one being that until recently Sylights was only a side-project we were working on during our spare time. But that time is over!
We’ve decided to give Sylights more attention and move forward to achieve our initial goal: producing a professional lighting diagrams app to help you in your daily photography work.
So, during the last year, we’ve all reorganized our lives and started our own company. It’s called Digital Cuisine, and it’ll allow us to continue working on Sylights and other projects.

You don’t quit your job and organize a new life to dedicate yourself to a project in two or three days, but that’s where we are now, and we hope you’ll like the outcome :)

We’ve just updated Sylights for iPhone and Sylights for iPad as a first step forward.
Here are the main points of this update:

• We’ve added a undo/redo feature in the lighting diagrams editor, so that you can make mistakes and forget about them quickly!

• We’ve fixed a few bugs and crashes to improve the apps performance and make them work under iOS 7.

• We’ve started working on a new design. It’s already there in the updated app, and we’ll try to migrate everything to the new look iteratively. I won’t say too much here, but it won’t only be about the look :)

• Finally, we’ve added a new “Support Sylights” screen.

Let’s talk about this last point. As I said above, we’re now in a situation where most of our time will be dedicated to improving Sylights and bringing the apps and website to the next level. Our main focus will be to make the apps and Sylights.com more tied together, so that you can browse lighting diagrams from the community and synchronize your own diagrams between the apps and the website.
Though there’s a lot of work to do and new infrastructures to invest in to support these improvements, we want to keep delivering our core services for free. Yep, for free!

You guessed it already, the new “Support Sylights” screen is a way for you to help us deliver.
For the moment, what you can do is remove the ads from the apps for $1.99. In exchange of that small fee, you get a nicer app free from these ugly ad banners and you help us improve Sylights!

Of course we’ll need all the help we can get, so we’ve also included a set of social media buttons. Use them to spread the word about Sylights and how it’ll become the greatest studio photography app thanks to your support!

Lastly, if you want to help us more significantly, we have set up donation buttons via PayPal. You can get us some coffee to keep us coding night after night using the $5/5€ buttons, or send us the amount of your choice using the “help us” button!

If you don’t feel like sending us some money, please consider talking about Sylights to your friends, coworkers, family… Share this article on Facebook (or like our page), Twitter (and follow us), G+, to let people know about us and what we have to offer. Please continue sending us suggestions on our feedback platform too.

Whatever you do, be sure that we highly appreciate the effort! We will do our best to live up to your expectations and make Sylights better and better.

Sylights is far from a finished product, we do have a lot of ideas to improve it, and it can only go faster and closer to what you’re looking for, thanks to you! :)

Starting from today, Sylights is the official lighting diagrams provider for the wonderful iPad magazine Light It, from KelbyTraining.com.

Should we present KelbyTraining.com?
Scott Kelby and Kelby Media Group, have created amazing places and services to learn about photography and everything creative (Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, web design, you name it…), and KelbyTraining.com is one of them. The NAPP, the Photoshop World conference and the Photoshop User magazine are other examples.

As is, of course, Light It. What’s wonderful about Light It, is that it’s all about learning photography lighting. Kinda like Sylights, don’t you think? :)
I highly recommend that you check it out! 

So we now are partners, meaning that you will find lighting diagrams in the next issues of the magazine, and you will also find those diagrams on sylights.com.
We have implemented a new feature to make it easy for you to check out photos and diagrams from our partners like Light It. Simply go to the top “Lighting diagrams” menu and click “User Groups” in the menu that unfolds (yep, that’s new too!):

From the page that opens, you can go to Light It group’s details and view the members involved in making this great magazine! And their photos/diagrams of course.

At Sylights, we are very happy to begin this adventure with Light It and KelbyTraining.com. We couldn’t dream better than a partner that is dedicated to producing quality learning material like they do. We hope you will like the outcomes of this partnership as much as we do.

Finally, before you can read the official press release that is attached below, please join us for a special thank you to Mike Mackenzie and Felix Nelson, respectively Managing Editor of Light It and Creative Director at Kelby Media Group. This partnership wouldn’t have been possible without them!

Download the press release

Sylights is reviewed on page 42 of the July-August issue, and lighting diagrams have also been used for a complete article on high-key lighting techniques.

Hi guys,

I’m happy to see it’s still possible to find a way down to here!
Sorry about being so silent during the past months… “We’ve all been very busy” is the common excuse and, well, it does apply here!

As you might know, we are working on Sylights on our free time and still have full-time jobs to attend to.
Which makes me think we should have a small post presenting ourselves some time…

Anyway! Things are going to get “serious” soon and I’ll tell you more about that later.

Today’s news is about an amazing photographer, and how we are partnering up with him on his project.

Von Wong Photography

Benjamin Von Wong is an awesome photographer from Montreal.
I don’t want to say too much about why I love his work because he’d just blush, so if you don’t know him already just check out his portfolio on Flickr!

However, Benjamin does more than just posting photos online; he also shares behind the scene videos, and has decided to go even further with his friend and videographer Erwan Cloarec.

“Von Wong does Europe”

Ben & Erwan are about to come to Europe, meet as many artists as possible and tell their stories. They’re going to write about them, to make photos of them and to make videos of them.
And because they believe in the power of sharing, they are also going to put together Behind The Scene videos of their photoshoots and photoshop retouching tutorials.

Their skills and creativity are not to be proven anymore, yet we hope they’ll push back their limits and venture out of their comfort zone: the outcome for us photographers can only be better!

“Von Wong does Europe” is more than just two jumping-to-the-ceiling guys coming out of their politically-correct country to discover people of the Old Continent :)
It’s about discovering talents, placing them in the spotlight of their creativity to make them shine, and then explaining to the world how they did it.

This, at Sylights, is a vision we really dig!
That’s why we have decided to back their project and become an official partner of Von Wong does Europe.

As a result, you can expect some updates about their trip, as well as lighting diagrams of wonderful photos of the artists they’ll meet to join your own wonderful photos on sylights.com!

Last but not least, just click here and help them make this happen! You don’t want to miss on the “perks” they’ve set up for their contributors!

Last weeks have been kind of crazy here, including a trip from France to the USA for an unexpected visit to NYC to attend the PDN PhotoPlus Expo!
… which was awesome, by the way!

During this time, photos were sent on Sylights from photographers who wanted to bring back those DIY Ring Flash babies home.

Well, two of them did!

Flavored Gins by Tilo Gockel

Julie by Romain Lechevalier

Tilo Gockel from Germany and Romain Lechevalier from France will soon receive a wonderful package containing:

• A DIY Ring Flash 
• It’s Ring Flash Bracket, which is the best solution to attach your flash to the ring flash
• A Double Flash Bracket, which we add as an apology gift for being late on announcing the results. This bracket will allow Tilo and Romain to shoot with more power when using their cobra flashes!

All these items are from DIY Lighting Kits, who we thank a lot for partnering up with us for this contest! You should have a look at their products, they’re a great way for anyone to get affordable modifiers and gear without sacrificing the quality of light!

And of course, thanks a lot to everybody who participated for our very first contest!
It was a modest beginning, but we’re very happy we’ve done it, and you should stay tuned ‘cause we are going to launch others :)

As a last word, you can check out participations to this contest by using this search request.

Today, we are launching our very first photography contest on Sylights!

This launch comes with the release of a new feature allowing you to accurately find what you want in the lighting diagrams gallery, but we’ll detail this soon in another post :)

The contest will be running for two weeks, from today (Tuesday 11th October) up to Tuesday 25th. At the end of those two weeks, thanks to DIY Photography and their DIY Lighting Kits, we are going to choose two winners who will each receive a DIY Ring Flash and its bracket.

This DIY Ring Flash is compatible with most speedlights and will provide you with a beautiful light for your next portraits. That’s not just me saying, check out what David Hobby thought about it too!

So if you want to win one of the two kits, go ahead and post your best shots on Sylights! There is no limits to the number of photos/diagrams you can post, but you’ll have to take care of a thing or two:

• Include this text in your diagrams’ description or title: [DIY Ring Flash Contest]
• Of course, we are looking for beautiful photos, so show us the work you’re proud of :)
• Make sure your diagrams are clear and complete, easy to understand
• Sylights is about sharing and learning, so be sure to include a description with shooting details and such. The more educational your description is, the better!
• Setup photos are more than welcome in addition to your shots

Also, you obviously need an account to post your photos, as we won’t be able to identify owners of “guest diagrams”. Check that you’re logged in before posting!

We will announce the winners during the first week of November here on the blog and we’ll contact them personnally to get the information we need to send the price over.

So that’s it! We’re now waiting for your lighting diagrams and photos!

Best of luck to all of you,
Sylights Team 

It’s finally here!

Sylights for iPad has been officially released yesterday, and is available on the AppStore for free!
Download it right now if you own an iPad and were using a scaled Sylights for iPhone (or patiently waiting ^^).

If you want to learn more, see the feature list after the jump.

Whether you are shooting in a studio, covering a wedding or doing any other on-location photography work, here’s what Sylights for iPad has to offer you:

• A full screen lighting diagram editor, featuring an unprecedented user interface to quickly place any gear you’re using on the screen: 
  • Resize and rotate items with intuitive two-finger gestures.
  • With our unique gear wheel, only a few taps are required to access any of the 60 items of our growing gear library.
  • Double-tap on any item to open its contextual menu, offering z-ordering and customizable properties.
  • Save your diagram at any time and come back later to edit it again and complete it.
• A collection of your diagrams giving you access to a wide range of features:
  • Diagram edition – just in case you had forgotten something, no need to do it all over again!
  • Attach photos to your diagrams: choose them from your photo library, or use your device’s built-in camera to take an instant shot of your setup before it’s taken apart.
  • Send by email: an easy and quick way to share diagrams. If it’s for your friends, send the diagram and its associated photos. If it’s for your assistant, include all the settings information as well!
  • Save the diagram to your photo library.

We took advantage of the iPad’s large screen to move buttons around and make them more easily accessible. Of course, the editor is larger as well and makes the app much more pleasant to use :)

We have more features in our roadmap and we’d like to precise we’ve taken many of your suggestions into account in this roadmap. Just give us some time to do everything right, we’re a small team working on Sylights ^^
Of course Sylights is far from perfect, and we want it to be the best lighting diagrams app for you, so please continue posting your suggestions on feedback.sylights.com, you all have grand ideas that are helping us make Sylights better :)

Also, you might have seen we’re calling Sylights the “most advanced lighting diagram tool” available as of today. If you share this feeling with us, please spread the word! We’ll need more and more people on Sylights as the sharing features will be released on both the website and the mobile apps!
You’ve got many ways to tell your fellow photographers about Sylights:

• Speak to them! (it’s not really a web 2.0 thing but we like talking =) )
• Become a fan on facebook and share the link to your contacts
• Follow us on Twitter and retweet one of our announcementts about the iPad app
• Use the widgets at the bottom of this article
• Talk about us on your blog…. and so on!

Thanks a lot for your support so far, you’ve been amazing and we’ll never be thankful enough!

Olivier, Pierre-Jean & Mathieu.
aka “The Sylights Team” :) 

we hope you’re enjoying our new version of Sylights.com. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s time!
Wonderful photos and their diagrams are posted every day by talented photographers who are waiting for more interaction with you! :)

There are three announcements inside this post, three exciting news that you’ll discover after the jump!

Welcome to Mathieu!

First of all, we are glad to officially welcome Mathieu in our team!
He has been with us for a long time already, as he is the one behind the gear you’re using in our lighting diagram creator. He has decided to fully and officially join us in our adventures, to relieve us from all the graphics-related work.
Thanks Mathieu, and welcome again!

Affiliate program with PhotoDeck.com

The second news is a way for you to help us on Sylights. Lastly, we’ve been approached by PhotoDeck, and have started an affiliate program with them. PhotoDeck is a powerful platform that provides professional websites to photographers, making it easy for any photographer to design his own website and distribute/sell photos online.

It is extremely simple and requires no knowledge in web development, but offers extensive design customization; it features exhaustive e-commerce capabilities as well as proofing & delivery facilities, including a messaging system to interact with your customers; it is suitable for stock photography to automate license sales, as well as for print sales.
Best of all: there’s no commission taken! Set your pricing model, and earn 100% of your sales.

All those features make PhotoDeck the “swiss-army knife” of photographers’ platforms, making us very proud to offer you a rebate on your first purchase with the following coupon code: 

K9PEJ5SL (10% off, valid until April 15 - don’t wait!)

If you need a website to show or sell your work online, head onto photodeck.com now and have a look at their example websites! You can try their service for free for 14 days, and then use our coupon to get 10% off your first subscription.

Sylights for iPhone update

Last but not least, our iPhone app Sylights for iPhone has just been updated on the AppStore!
So if you haven’t done it already, go grab this 1.2 version and enjoy some exciting new features:

• Attach images to your diagrams. Use images from your iPhone library or directly take a shot with your phone camera.
• You can now flip the items on your diagram, as  you can on sylights.com. This is particularly handy for the hair lights orientation.
• The double-tap menu on items has been updated, you can now access the locks more quickly.
• When you open a diagram, the editor zooms in or out automatically to show you the largest area of your diagram.

We are waiting for your feedback! :) 

Yes, we’ve put an update online. Yes, you have to check it out!
This is not just about the home page: we’ve packed a lot of new features and improvement in this one.
Learn more after the jump!

Sylights has been running for exactly 8 months today, and we are proud to take a new step toward a more complete sharing platform, dedicated to studio photography and lighting!
This update is not so much about diagrams, as others used to be. This is about starting the discussion and sharing knowledge. We’ve put up different features for this purpose:

A favoriting system that will let you show your interest in someone’s work. This is also the best way to build up a collection of the diagrams you like most, to be able to refer to them later.
Add a diagram to your favorites by clicking the “I light” button at the top of its page. The more a diagram is “lit”, the more popular it gets!
This is what the button looks like:

  

Commenting on a diagram is a bit smoother now, as the page won’t reload when you post your comment. Also, we have come up with a nicer design for comments, which includes favorites information.

Notifications are sent to you by email, when a lighting diagram you’ve commented on or favorited receives a new comment. It makes following a discussion way easier. You will also receive notifications when someones comments on one of your diagrams, or adds it to his favorites.
You can of course choose not to receive those emails, and that should be done in your user profile, under the “Notifications & Emails” tab.

The dashboard has been enhanced too. It still shows the list of your own diagrams but also your favorite ones, and an activity log so you can see what happened on your lighting diagrams of interest even if you opted out of email notifications.

So those are the means of communication you now get on Sylights to exchange with your fellow photographers.
But we did change some other things to, which are:

A new design that we hope you’ll like, because we love it! 
The most annoying thing about the former one, was that you could just see a list of colorless diagrams. Well we fixed that and made the lists colorful by showing your photos whenever it is possible (ie. whenever you’ve added one!). In your dashboard and on the main lighting diagrams gallery, hovering over the thumbnails with your mouse will show you different information and actions you can take on each diagram.

Note that if you are in a hurry, you can switch from photo to diagram on the main gallery by clicking the switch icon on the right of the popup bubble!

Upload! Talking about your photos. We know not every photographer has a Flickr account, or maybe do not use it to put all their work online. So Flickr import was definitely not the only option we wanted to give you to show off your art. That’s why, from now on, you can also upload your photos directly to Sylights on your lighting diagrams. Of course you keep all ownership on your work, and all files are deleted when you remove a photo or the diagram it was attached to.

OK, now that should be it for surprise number 2!
We have also worked on the internals of Sylights; it probably won’t be obvious for you, but it should have improved the overall stability of the website and we do hope you’ll find Sylights even more pleasant to use with all those new features in those conditions!

Last but not least, I’ll remind you of the multiple options you’ve got to contact us:

• Become a fan on Facebook and drop a message/comment 
• Send us a tweet
• Leave a message on our feedback forum
• Go to www.sylights.com and use the feedback tab on the left to contact us via email

We are really craving your feedback and impressions on this update, so don’t hesitate to choose whatever option you prefer and get in touch with us, we’ll be happy to talk!

Yeah we know it’s no big news and we’re actually a few days late. But still, we’d like to wish you a very joyful year 2011!
And we would also like to thank you for following us during those months since June 2010, when Sylights was officially born! This year has been great for us, thanks to your support, your feedback and of course your enthusiasm!

Although we try to stay active and keep in touch as much as possible, we know we’ve been quite silent recently, in terms of speech and updates. We are sorry for this. However, as an “apology” and to show you we haven’t stopped working, we have prepared some surprises that will come, one by one, during this promising year 2011!

The first one has been announced yesterday on diyphotography.net: a ring flash creator!

On an idea from DIY Photography, we’ve teamed up to develop this PDF generator. With a tiny measuring effort, you can have it draw a ring flash blueprint for you, which will perfectly fit your gear! Print it, cut everything out, assemble (instructions here), and you have it :)
The original drawings are from Diego Billi, who really made an excellent job and generously made them public!

We hope you’ll like this project and use it to craft your own ring flash!
And if you do, don’t forget to show us the result and share some diagrams :)

Happy New Year again, and stay tuned for the upcoming news.

Yesterday, a new website has come to the world of photography resources: post-traitement.com. It is a French site whose headline would translate to “Post-traitement.com - The place to learn photography post-processing”. English-speaking people, don’t turn away now, you might find something useful there too, or perhaps help with translation :)
Created by French student and photographer Nicolas Constant (Flickr, Twitter), post-traitement.com features many tutorials written by Nicolas around photography post-processing with the objective to teach from the basics to the more advanced topics in photography processing, using Photoshop (and other tools later on).

You’ll find after the jump a small interview we had with Nicolas to introduce his website:

Sylights – Can you tell us more about you. What are you doing, when was your passion for photography born, …?
Nicolas – I’m 23, French, and still a student. I’m actually preparing a double-degree in Mechanical Design (CAD, etc) and Computer Aided Engineering, quite far from photography as you can see. 
But I’ve discovered Photography in high school, using silver films and dark room, so even if I’ve only been practicing photography seriously for three years, I’ve been sensitized for more than 8 years now to post-prod and other techniques. And when I was studying in my French university (I now attend to a MSc program in UK) I did lead a photographic association, that was very interesting and I learned a lot when I was showing others how to do photographs and post-processing. 
 

Sylights – How did you get the idea of post-traitement.com?
Nicolas – In fact, it was a personal observation: if you want to learn post-prod on the internet, you just get some tutorials here and there, but nothing really linear starting from “no knowledge” and going to “good knowledge”. And I’ve also seen on many forums that many people didn’t understand the basics of some softwares, so couldn’t even try your little tips you were explaining.
Post-traitement.com is a response to this lack. 
 

Sylights – Who is your main target? What is the main goal of your website?
Nicolas – As explained, at first I’m talking to real beginners (because others could find how to do post-prod on tutorials that exist everywhere else). But, it’s still interesting for me to bring those beginners as high as I can do. So, I’m pretty sure that everyone will find something to learn on this website, and I hope to receive some proposals and feedback to improve myself too!
 

Sylights – As of today, the entire content is in French. Do you plan to translate your tutorials?
Nicolas – Of course. In fact, it was difficult for me to choose which language to use first. I have chosen my native one in order to go faster in the redaction of the tutorials. But it’s pretty sure that an English version will come one day. As soon as possible, in fact.
 

Sylights – If things go as you want them to, what kind of evolution can we expect on post-traitement.com?
Nicolas – First finishing the Photoshop tutorial! Then maybe opening a forum, if visitors want this kind of evolution: I don’t want to create yet another forum (there are already too much of them on the web) if people don’t think it will be useful. And maybe giving people some more tools to participate (submitting tutorials, tips, …). 
 

Sylights – Do you intend to include video tutorials?
Nicolas – No. IMHO video tutorials are less understandable than written one. But maybe it’s a feeling that differs a lot between people.
 

Sylights – Will you offer tutorials for other, more accessible softwares than Photoshop? (like The Gimp, Paint.net, Pixelmator, …)
Nicolas – I will for The Gimp when version 3.0 is released. Before that, I don’t consider it as a real valuable post-prod software: because it still doesn’t deal with 16bit color depth (it’s planned for the 3.0 version). For others, it’s quite the same observation.But for any other post-prod software that deals with 16bit color depth, they will be welcome to get their own tutorials.
 

Sylights – And what about photography-oriented softwares: Lightroom, Aperture, DxO Optics Pro, …?
Nicolas – Yes, mostly for Lightroom that I personally use along with Photoshop. So it’s the second tutorial you’ll see on the website. Then of course Aperture, DxO, Photomatix and others are welcome, and might be written by other people than me then.
 

Sylights – A last word?
Nicolas – Many thanks for this interview and for supporting this project, of course. 
Also, if one of your English-speaking visitor is fluent in French and wants to help translating, he is very welcome: it will allow everyone to get access to this more quickly. ;)

Thanks to you Nicolas for bringing this website to life and sharing your knowledge with the vast community of photographers that can benefit from it!

If you want to leave a comment to Nicolas, feel free to leave it here! 

Dear iPhone users,

our next update to Sylights for iPhone is currently being reviewed by Apple!
This one catches up with some of the last updates to sylights.com. Here is the change log posted on iTunes:

• 20 new items to create your diagrams
• 18 redesigned items
• Added an outline around the selected item
• Fixed a bug causing a crash on devices with iOS 3.2 or earlier
• Fixed various minor bugs

For the last ones of you still experiencing crashes on iOS 3.2 and earlier, this update should make it work fine. If you still have problems with this version, let us know here! See Pierre-Jean’s comment here for instructions to send us an iPhone crash report.

You’ll notice there is one tiny new feature, that was missing to a lot of you out there: a selection outline, showing more clearly which item is selected, and its bounds.

We hope it will make things easier when editing a diagram with many items. Thanks to Jason Lykins for reminding us this was missing!

The update has been in review for a few hours now, so you should expect it quite soon. Another update should follow quickly, and also a small surprise… so stay tuned! :)

We’ve added two subjects and five gears:

• A dog and a cat in a new “Animals” category, with all other “Subjects”
• A softbox on a boom and two octoboxes on booms (a small and a large one), in the “Hair Lights” category
• A medium format and a large format camera

You can check out these new items on the editor or have a quick look on the “diagram” below!

So, our gear “database” has grown up a bit now, but we’re still missing important objects… what are the most important to you? Tell us in the comments!

Today, we are pushing some new features and new diagram objects. It’s not a huge update, but it should help taking things to another level. I’ll let you judge after the jump :)

New diagram objects
Our gear and props base needs to grow, you’ve been numerous to ask for different additions. Here is what we are adding today:

• Color gels:  orange, green, blue, red and gray
• Monobloc variations: with grid, snoot, barn doors and bare bulb
• Speedlights: with grid and with snoot
• Subjects: added an “Objects” category with a sphere and a cube, for a kind of generic objects representation.

We have also updated some of the existing objects to change their look a bit.
Other objects are being designed and we hope to add them quickly, especially different cameras, softbox on boom, new subjects and props. 

“Mirror” function on the diagram editor
This is especially useful for booms: you can now mirror items in the diagram editor, to adjust for the real orientation you have used in your lighting setup. A new action icon has been added to the objects, close to the rotation one, to use this function:
 

Twitter and Facebook buttons
Share your diagrams or those you like on Twitter or on Facebook! We have added two buttons in the discussion part of each diagram, so you can easily share them to your friends and followers:
 

Edit your diagrams’ name and description “in place”
You’ve just created a diagram, and forgot to include a description of the setup? Is there a typo in your diagram name?
No problem! You can now edit your diagram’s title and description from its page. Just click the text you wan to modify, and there you go. Hit save to make the changes permanent:
In this screenshot, the description is being edited, while the title shows a pencil icon on the right, telling you edition is available. Text formatting is enabled while editing the description; refer to our help page for more information.

Edit your diagrams
Last but not least, you can now edit your diagrams! It’s as easy as creating one: you just have to go to one of your diagrams and click that new “Edit this diagram” link that appeared in the sidebar:

It will bring you to the diagram editor, in the state you left it when you last hit “save”. So if you want those new objects looks, if you need to add a missing light to your setup, that’s the way to go!
We are going to improve your dashboard in a future update to facilitate editing capabilities.

So, this is it. We hope you’re going to like these new features and we’d like to thank you for your feedback, which help us a lot in going forward!

Do you have an iPhone, an iPod Touch or an iPad?
Are you always joking on your drawing skills when showing your lighting diagrams to someone?
Well then, we’ve got what you need!

Sylights for iPhone is now available on the App Store! It’s got everything you need to design, document and share your diagrams.
We’ve made a small demo video to illustrate the main features:

Do you know what’s best about all this? It’s free! So go get your Sylights for iPhone copy on iTunes and give it a try!

We’ve put our efforts on designing an intuitive, easy to use interface so that you can draw diagrams on the go when preparing a session, edit it back if needed and share it by email. If you have some ideas to share to make it better, let us know on our feedback page!
If you do like the app, please help us spread the word about it! There are twitter and facebook buttons on our dedicated page that you can use for that purpose.

With the release of this first version of the iPhone app we are making a step forward towards our goal to provide photographers with handy tools to document their art, and we hope you are going to enjoy and use it!
We’d like to warmly thank you all for the support you showed us so far, it is really a great pleasure for us to get in touch and discover the work of so many talented photographers!
Special thanks to our beta team too!

Olivier & Pierre-Jean

PS. Please note that there’s no native iPad version of the app for the moment. Give us time (or an iPad!) and it’ll come :)

As the list of diagrams grows bigger and bigger (thanks to you!), having everything shown on a single page was beginning to feel overloaded… so we’ve added some pagination links to navigate more easily through the diagrams. Thirteen pages of diagrams are waiting for your comments! :)

The other update that’s been made is about comments and photos: it’s nice to know how many photos are attached to a diagram and how many comments have been posted, without having to load the page and check there. So, diagrams’ thumbnails now show those counters right from the browse/dashboard pages!
Quite basic, but pretty handy!

So now if you’ve already created some diagrams, you can go and check from your dashboard if they have received any comments… if they don’t, maybe you should add some pictures to them.
If you haven’t created any diagram yet, well, you know what to do!

What kept us busy for that time? First, our Sylights for iPhone application. The beta is currently running and we’ve had some really helpful comments and reports. Thanks to all the testers who are participating!
You should expect some news in a near future about this, so if you own an iPod Touch, an iPhone or an iPad, stay tuned!

A lot of work has also been done on sylights.com, and this is what we are going to address here. The short version is: Flickr photo import, comments, design improvements. The long version comes after the jump.

Until today, you and other photographers were using Sylights as an external tool to create diagrams, and then mainly publish them on blogs (as Westcott’s #Tog Tuesday or Capture-the-light). This is great, but our intent is to provide a platform where photogs can actually share about their lighting setups. Today’s update addresses this goal by adding some new features to sylights.com:

Import your photos from Flickr
One of the most important feature is to be able to share the results of your lighting setups along with your diagrams. But why upload your photos twice? If you have a Flickr account, you’ll now be able to connect to it and import any public photo from your photostream to Sylights.
Just go to your diagram page and click the “add photo” link next to the diagram’s thumbnail. You will first have to authorize us to connect to your Flickr account. This is a mandatory step to allow us to find your photos.
Back to Sylights, you’ll be presented with a list of your photo sets. Browse to the photo you’d like to add, click it and that’s it!

You can attach up to five photos to each of your diagrams. This should be enough for some setup shots and “actual” photos at the same time. When you’ve made them available on Flickr, we will display some EXIF data along with your photos. And of course, any photo you import to Sylights remains in your possession: we display the license you chose on Flickr for each photo to reflect your rights on the image.

If you don’t have a Flickr account, don’t worry: we are going to add support for other means of photo attachment. If you’d like us to interface with a specific service, don’t hesitate to mention it in the comments or on our feeback page.

Comment on other’s diagrams
You can now receive advice or answer questions on your diagrams! A comment thread is available for each diagram to enable communication between photographers. You have to be logged in to comment on a diagram.
And I guess that’s all there is to say! The comment system is a bit rudimentary for the moment, but we believe that enabling discussion is a major step to allow you to share knowledge and techniques about lighting.
Should you have suggestions to improve this comment system, please let us know!

Enhanced diagram page
We have dramatically changed the page presenting your diagrams. Our first version showed minimalistic information and a small diagram image that could be enlarged… as we were not happy with it, we made it all over again!
Diagrams are now displayed bigger and a sidebar provides additional information and actions:

• Basic author information
• A permalink field which can be copied to your clipboard with a dedicated button
• A download link to the higher resolution image of the diagram
• A deletion link if you’re the owner of the diagram
• EXIF and license information about the photo, if a photo is displayed

The sidebar also shows a toggle button that’s here to help you in your study of a diagram: when you are watching a photo, you may at some point wonder how a specific shadow, highlight or other effect is achieved. The big “Show Lighting Diagram” right above the EXIF frame toggles the view from the photo you’re watching to the lighting diagram. Have a quick look at it, and then click again to come back to the photo and continue studying it.

Format your texts
This is a small feature, but it can help being a bit more legible: you can now format your diagram descriptions and your comments with some patterns, which will transform to bold text, italic, superscript, hyperlink, and so on.
A “formatting tips” link is available close to the text boxes where formatting is enabled.

This is it! You can now begin to add photos to your diagrams and leave comments to your favorite ones.
We hope you are going to enjoy sharing your work on Sylights! We are eager to see the first photos coming in :)

As usual, don’t hesitate to react in the comments!
Are you planning to share more diagrams in the future? What’s still missing on Sylights for you to do so?

• A “permalink” link, to have a quick access to the diagram’s page URL
• A “download” link that will start downloading the full size diagram image to your local disk
• A “delete” link if you’d like to delete a diagram you no longer need. This one will of course be displayed on your own diagrams only, and guest diagrams won’t show it.

About guest diagrams, some feedbacks showed us it was not obvious for everybody that they would be destroyed after 24 hours of online presence. Guest diagrams are temporary diagrams, intended to let you try Sylights Diagram Editor without creating an account. Their lifetime is short because they won’t benefit from features built around diagram edition on Sylights, as they don’t really belong to anybody and those features generally need an identified owner to be effective (just like the delete “feature”).
To clarify this temporary nature of guest diagrams, we have added a specific message on their pages, indicating how much time is left before they are destroyed.

Below are two screenshots: the first one shows a guest diagrams that will be delete in 19 hours. The permalink and download link are located below the diagram image; the second screenshot shows one of my diagrams, which then have a “delete” link.