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 BRIGHT is exposure. Pulling those three down gives you a calm version of any scene. MANUAL.txt section 21 covers this in full.

RUNNING THE PLUGIN INSTEAD

Photism also ships as a VST3 and Audio Unit for any DAW, and as a standalone app that needs no DAW. Your download page has every format; the plugin zips carry their own INSTALL-PLUGIN.txt with the paths. The standalone also plays a track: drop one on its window to draw automation over the song and export the video (MANUAL.txt section 22). To run it beside Spotify or a browser tab, open Audio Settings in the standalone and tick "Listen to what's playing on this computer" (Windows, or macOS 14.2 and later). Everything below is the Ableton Max for Live device.

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, descent, visage, chorus, limitless 3d

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

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.

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.

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, TILES, TWIST, SLICE

kaleidoscope segments, wallpaper grid, radial vortex, shear slabs (TWIST at center is off)

LENS

the optical material over everything

SPIN, HUE DRIFT, VIGNETTE

rotation drift (center is off), palette drift, edge darkening

SPEED, SHAPE, COMPLEXITY, DENSITY, FILL, CONTRAST

the active scene's own controls, which change meaning per scene (on the signal meters SHAPE is layout and 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.

Running Resolume, OBS, VDMX, MadMapper or TouchDesigner? Open the output window (O in the app, Shift+O in the plugin) 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; 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 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.

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.