Photism in sixty seconds

FLASHING LIGHTS: READ THIS FIRST

Photism makes bright, fast, flashing visuals. A small number of people have photosensitive epilepsy and can have a seizure from flashing light or strong patterns, sometimes without ever knowing they were at risk.

If you are putting Photism in front of an audience, tell them there will be flashing lights before you start. If anyone watching feels dizzy or disoriented, or has altered vision, twitching, or confusion, stop the visuals and get medical help.

You can turn the intensity down at any time. HEAT controls bloom and flash, REACT controls how hard the music drives the picture, and BRIGHTNESS is exposure. Pulling those three down gives you a calm version of any scene. MANUAL.txt section 21 covers this in full.

INSTALL THE PLUGIN (60 SECONDS)

1. On a Mac, run the installer from your download page. It puts the VST3 and Audio Unit in /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins and Photism.app in Applications, and asks for your password once. On Windows, right-click the zip, choose Extract All, and copy the whole top-level Photism.vst3 folder, with its Contents folder inside it, into C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3.

2. Open your DAW and rescan plugins if Photism is not listed yet. Put Photism on any audio track as an effect. The master bus is the best default. Photism hears whatever the track hears and passes the audio through untouched.

3. Open the plugin window. That window is the visualizer. Play your track.

The plugin runs in any DAW that hosts VST3 or Audio Unit plugins: Ableton Live, Logic Pro, FL Studio, Bitwig, Reaper, Cubase, Studio One, GarageBand, and the rest. Pro Tools hosts AAX only, so run the standalone app beside it. The Pro Tools guide on photism.app/learn covers sending it the mix.

Photism needs macOS 11 or later (13.3 to export from the app, 14 for Syphon) or Windows 10 or 11.

THE STANDALONE APP (NO DAW)

Open Photism.app on a Mac. On Windows, extract the whole standalone zip first, keep Resources beside Photism.exe, and open Photism.exe.

Drop an mp3, wav, m4a, aiff, or flac on the window to play a song, draw automation lanes over it, and export the video. Or click audio in to pick your microphone or audio interface. To run it beside Spotify or a browser tab, open Audio Settings and tick "Listen to what's playing on this computer" (Windows, or macOS 14.2 and later). MANUAL.txt section 22 has the details.

Your rights to use Photism are in LICENSE.txt. Credits for the open-source parts Photism builds on are in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt. Both sit in this folder.

PLAY IT

Start with G. It opens the tuning panel, where the macros, looks, and presets live. Everything else plays from the keyboard.

In the plugin, hold shift with every letter, number, and Tab: shift+g, shift+r, shift+tab. Your DAW can read bare keys as notes, and shift keeps them clear. The arrow keys work as they are. The app uses the bare keys.

G

Tuning panel: macros, look, presets (start here)

Tab

Scene grid: every scene as a picture, click to jump

1 to 9, 0

Switch straight to the first ten scenes; Tab or the arrows reach the rest: sand, idol, oracle, anemone, forge, ingot, spacetime, pelt, wisp, grove, descent, visage, chorus, limitless 3d, vesica, locus, crystal, pearl

Left / Right

Cycle scenes

P

Palette card: every color set on one card

X

Shuffle: fresh scene and palette in one press

N

Roll the scene dice: new mode and dials, same picture

L

Roll the look dice: new macros and palette, same scene

B

Swap back to the look before this one

O

Open the projector output window

F

Fullscreen in the app and the output window (in the plugin, open the output window and press F there)

R

Record a clip, downloads an MP4 when you stop

S

Save a still (full-resolution PNG)

A

Frame: full, 16:9, 9:16, 1:1 (for reels and posts)

Drop any image onto the window. Opaque photos become a five-color palette (album art in, matching visuals out) and feed the limitless scene. Transparent logos become an emblem the engine refracts into the patterns. A photo or video shows as the picture on scene 4 (limitless) only. On any other scene it sets the colors, and the chip that appears offers SHOW IT to jump to limitless.

Drop a 3D model (.glb, .gltf, .fbx, .obj, .stl or .ply) and it opens in limitless 3d. The chip that appears offers USE AS EMBLEM INSTEAD, which turns the model into the emblem over whatever scene you were on.

AUTOMATE IT FROM YOUR DAW

In the plugin, the controls are plugin parameters with their own names: Scene, React, Chaos, Trails, Heat, Brightness, Palette, Mode, Lens, Lens Style, Preset Slot, and the rest. Your DAW lists them in the plugin's automation like any synth's knobs, so you draw lanes for the few that matter to a track and leave the rest.

In the standalone app, load a track and click + lane to draw a curve for a scene, preset, palette, macro, or fx control. The lanes play with the track and land in the exported video.

Five of them pick by name rather than by amount:

Scene, Palette

switch on the drop, flip at the bridge

Mode

the active scene's variant, 1 to 7: the first seven modes of the scene that is up. On limitless that is none, smear, droste, infinite, corridor, cube and planet. Seven scenes have modes: limitless, vesica, limitless 3d, signal, anemone, spacetime and descent

Lens Style

glass ribs, glass fan, anamorphic, melt, glitch, pixels, fly eye

Preset Slot

swap the whole saved look on a song section. The list comes pre-filled with the factory presets; pin your own to a slot (up to 128) with the # chip in the panel's preset browser, then pick it by name. The slot holds when you save or delete other presets. 0 is manual control.

Load a preset and every parameter follows it: scene, palette, mode, style and the dials all jump to the preset's values, and its name shows in the Preset Slot lane. Preset changes land the instant they arrive, tight enough to automate on a downbeat; the morph ms slider in the preset browser trades the cut for a glide of that length.

Hardware MIDI works too. In Photism Online in Chrome or Edge, and in the Windows app and VST, right-click any slider in the tuning panel, click midi learn, and turn a knob on your controller. The Mac app and the Mac plugin have no MIDI learn, so map the controller in your DAW instead: Learn Assignment in Logic, MIDI Map in Ableton. MANUAL.txt section 18 has the details.

PROJECTING LIVE

Shift+O in the plugin, or O in the app, opens the output window: visuals only, no menu, no overlays. Drag it to the second screen, then double-click it or press F. Esc leaves fullscreen. Keep tuning in the main window and the output follows.

Running Resolume, OBS, VDMX, MadMapper or TouchDesigner? Open the output window and turn on Syphon (Mac, macOS 14 or later) or Spout (Windows, beta) in its top bar. Pick the Photism source in your receiver and the visuals land there with no screen capture. Short on GPU? The preview chip next to o · output turns the main window down to low or off while the output keeps its full picture. MANUAL.txt section 16 has the details.

THE ONE RULE OF TUNING

Open the panel (G), move one slider at a time. Every control does something visible. If it does not, that is a bug, tell us. Double-click any slider to reset it. Save looks as presets. The plugin and the app share one preset library on your computer.

IF SOMETHING IS OFF

Photism missing from your DAW

rescan plugins. On Windows, check that Photism.vst3 sits in Common Files\VST3.

Keys do nothing

in the plugin, hold shift: shift+g, shift+r, shift+tab.

Blank plugin window

on Windows, install Microsoft Edge WebView2 from Microsoft and reopen the plugin.

A take stopped early

closing the plugin window ends a rolling take. Keep it open while you record. On a Mac, covering it with other windows is fine. On Windows, keep it uncovered and not minimized.

Windows SmartScreen

the app can pause there the first time. Click More info, then Run anyway.

Smart App Control

Windows blocks apps it has not seen. Turn it off in Windows Security, App & browser control, Smart App Control settings.

No mic or camera on

Settings, Privacy & security, Microphone (or

Windows

Camera): turn on "Let desktop apps access your microphone" (or camera).

Slow on Windows

Settings, System, Display, Graphics: set Photism.exe, or your DAW for the plugin, to High performance, then restart it.

"waiting for audio"

the track Photism sits on is not playing audio, or the plugin is bypassed. In the app, click audio in and pick an input.

Black screen after a GPU hiccup

the page reloads itself; give it a second.

Choppy recording

the record chip names the fix when the take saves: pick 1080p or 30 fps in the tuning panel's recording settings (G), or a smaller size in the output window. For a whole song, drop the track on the app or Photism Online and press export: it renders every frame.

Red take on macOS 12

on macOS 11 and 12, record and export at photism.app/online in Chrome.

MANUAL.txt section 20 has the full list.

Getting help

Anything that looks wrong, or any control that does nothing you can see, is worth reporting. Email hello@photism.app and name the control.

Photism will never email you asking for a payment, a password, or a command to run in a terminal. A message like that did not come from us, whatever address it appears to be from.