About
For the lamplit photographer.
Some photographers have a lighting truck. Most of us have a couple of speedlights, a hard drive that’s too full, and a Saturday wedding that needs delivering by Monday. Lamplit is for us — the culling tool that gets you from card to keepers at full speed, on your machine, with your eye making every pick. Pro-grade, honestly priced, built by a developer and his brother, a working photographer.
Who built it
Two people. One writes the software; one shoots for a living out of a studio in Seattle and has been the first and harshest user of every build. There is no team page here because there is no team, and pretending otherwise in a market this small would be both obvious and embarrassing.
That arrangement is the reason the app is shaped the way it is. Features get built because a real photographer hit a real wall on a real job, not because they filled a gap on a comparison chart. Capture-time sync across bodies exists because a second shooter’s camera clock was twenty minutes out. Byte-verified ingest exists because of the specific fear you feel formatting a card.
Why it exists
The tool that solved culling properly did so twenty years ago, and it is still the right answer for a lot of people — we say so plainly on thecomparison page, including the parts where it is still better. But it costs what an institution pays, and it looks and feels like the decade it was designed in.
Meanwhile the new generation of culling software mostly wants to make the picks for you. That is a real product for real people, and it is not this one. No AI picks. Your taste is the product. If a machine chooses your frames, the thing you are actually selling — judgement — stops being yours.
Lamplit is the third option: the same professional loop, at full speed, with a modern interface, at a price a working photographer does not have to think about.
What we won’t do
- Publish a speed number we haven’t measured. There is a benchmark harness in the codebase and no published results yet. When there are, they arrive with the method attached and you will be able to run it yourself.
- Write a testimonial nobody said. There are none on this site because there are none yet. The component is built and sitting unused until a beta user says something real, with their name on it.
- Claim a feature we don’t have. Every page here lists what is missing next to what isn’t — no collections, no histogram, no contact sheets, JPEG-only export.
- Describe a competitor from memory. Every factual claim about another product on this site was read off their own live site, carries the date we read it, and links back.
Photographers talk to each other constantly — you hire each other as second shooters and compare notes on every job. One caught overclaim would follow this brand around forever. Candour is not a virtue here so much as arithmetic.
Where it is right now
Closed beta. There is no public build and no way to pay us — no licensing, no checkout, no trial mechanism. Those are being built. Thedownload page has the honest status and thepricing page says what it will cost when there is something to sell.
If you shoot for a living and want in early, the waitlist is the whole of the process.
Photograph — the studio
Shot at the brother's Seattle studio. Dark room, navy night tones, one photographer at a desk, face lit by the screen. No stock imagery, no models.
Photograph — real work, credited
A frame from a real job, with the photographer's name and business on it. The photos inside every screenshot on this site should come from here too.
Come and break it on a real job.
The beta is small on purpose. If you shoot volume and have a card that nothing else handles well, you are exactly who we want.