Photism turns your Ableton audio into live visuals. One device on a track, one browser window, nothing to set up.
Rather watch than read? The five minute walkthrough covers setup, scenes, palettes, dropping your own artwork in, and recording a clip:
For the full reference on every scene, control, and key, open MANUAL.txt in the same folder.
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 BRIGHT is exposure. Pulling those three down gives you a calm version of any scene. MANUAL.txt section 21 covers this in full.
INSTALL (60 SECONDS)
1. Unzip the Photism folder anywhere you like. Keep the folder together;
the device loads everything relative to itself.
2. In Ableton Live (Suite, or Standard with Max for Live), drag
Photism.amxd onto any audio track. The master bus is the best default. Photism hears whatever the track hears and passes the audio through untouched.
3. Click OPEN VISUALS on the device. The visualizer opens in its own
window, no tabs or address bar. (No Chromium-family browser installed? It opens as a regular browser tab instead; press f for fullscreen.) Play your track.
PLAY IT
Start with G. It opens the tuning panel, where the macros, looks, and presets live. Everything else plays from the keyboard:
- 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
- Left / Right
- Cycle scenes
- P
- Palette card: every color set on one card
- X
- Shuffle: fresh scene and palette in one press
- B
- Swap back to the look before this one
- O
- Open the projector output window
- F
- Fullscreen
- 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.
FEED IT CLEAN SIGNALS (OPTIONAL)
The folder has a second device, Photism Sidechain.amxd. Drop it on your kick track, flip the SIDECHAIN toggle on the main device, and the visual hits follow that track instead of being read off the whole mix. A menu on it picks what the track controls: hits, accents, bass, or brightness, with a one-line hint for each. Use as many as you like, one per role. The toggle ships off, so nothing changes until you flip it, and it switches back to mix listening any time. MANUAL.txt section 18 has the full story.
DRIVE IT FROM THE ARRANGEMENT
The device is sixteen macro knobs. Each maps to any control you pick, so you automate the few that matter to a track and leave the rest. Assign a macro two ways: right-click any slider in the tuning panel and choose a macro, or open the device macros folder in the panel and pick from the dropdown. The knob's caption shows what it drives and follows the scene, so a macro on the signal meters reads "ghost hold" there and "density" elsewhere. Each macro is a real Live parameter (MACRO 1 through 16), so you draw automation on it like any synth knob, and moving it in the panel moves its knob on the device.
The controls you can map onto a macro:
- REACT
- how hard the music moves the visuals
- CHAOS, TRAILS, HEAT
- turbulence, feedback tunnels, bloom and flash
- BRIGHT
- exposure
- INPUT GAIN
- source calibration
- SYMMETRY,
- kaleidoscope segments, wallpaper grid, radial vortex,
- TILES, TWIST, SLICE
- shear slabs (TWIST at center is off)
- LENS
- the optical material over everything
- SPIN, HUE
- rotation drift (center is off), palette drift, edge
- DRIFT, VIGNETTE darkening
- SPEED, SHAPE,
- the active scene's own controls, which change meaning
- COMPLEXITY,
- per scene (on the signal meters SHAPE is layout and
- DENSITY, FILL, CONTRAST
- DENSITY is ghost hold)
Beside the macros are five dropdowns you pick from by name, each automatable:
- SCENE, PALETTE
- switch on the drop, flip at the bridge
- MODE
- the active scene's variant (limitless: melt, smear, droste, shatter, prism, terrain, breathe; signal: analyzer, waterfall, scope, vector, lissajous; anemone: bloom, vortex, braid, veil; spacetime: forward, reverse)
- LENS STYLE
- glass ribs, glass fan, anamorphic, melt, glitch, pixels, fly eye
- PRESET
- 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 64) with the # chip in the panel's preset browser, then pick it by name. The slot holds when you save or delete other presets. "none" is manual control.
Load a preset and the device follows it: the macro knobs, scene, palette, mode and style all jump to the preset's values, and its name shows under the PRESET box. 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: right-click any slider in the tuning panel, click midi learn, turn a knob on your controller, done. MANUAL.txt section 17 has the details.
PROJECTING LIVE
Put localhost:7071/?output fullscreen on the projector or capture screen: visuals only, no menu, no overlays, cursor hides itself. Tune from the device in Live, or open plain localhost:7071 on your laptop screen. Both stay in sync with the output window.
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; they live in a file next to the device and travel with the folder.
IF SOMETHING IS OFF
- "waiting for audio"
- the track the device sits on is not playing audio, or the device is off.
- "device disconnected"
- reopen the browser page (the device's OPEN VISUALS button always points at the right address).
- Black screen after a
- the page reloads itself; give it a second.
- GPU hiccup
- Port conflicts
- Photism walks up from 7071 automatically; each device instance gets its own port.
Getting help
Anything that looks wrong, or any control that does nothing you can see, is worth reporting. Email [email protected] 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.