# Lighting presets — the two-source console > **The wordings moved to the server (2026-09-14).** This file still decides > *which* preset to reach for — that judgement is the part that needs a reader. > What it no longer carries is the sentence each id compiles to: those were > tuned against real renders, and a prompt written from a remembered copy of > one renders worse than a prompt that pastes it. Pass the id to > `picsart_film_compile_prompt` and the server pastes the sentence. > > This is not a style rule. Measured on a real shipped run, every one of seven > shots had its size, angle and field of view reworded in exactly this way. The vocabulary behind every lighting decision in the pipeline: the shot list's `Light` control, the review board's orb, the retired shot designer's Lighting tab, and the text-choice fallback when no console is served. Compiles into the shot block and the scene picture's prompt when the user chose the light on the board (`PROMPT-BLOCKS.md`, Part 2, *The card's own picks*, 2026-09-10); the *Lighting block (10)* it used to fill was the fifteen-block template's, gone 2026-09-09. **There is no film-wide light.** The film-setup console does not carry one and deliberately never will (`../../film/references/PRESETS-LOOKS.md`) — a night exterior and a kitchen morning are not lit alike, and a light clause pasted into every prompt of a world contradicts this block on most of them. The block's law, from the pipeline: **one motivated source** (a second source only as described below), its direction named, which side of the face is dark, what is protected in exposure — and **never flat front light**. ## The seventeen setups **One vocabulary, three surfaces.** The shot list's `Light` control, the review board's orb and this table are the same seventeen presets — the board used to carry its own six, of which only `window` and `practicals` were also here, so a scene planned from this file arrived at a board offering different light. The merge kept both sides' real distinctions and collapsed only the duplicate: the board's `hard sun` and this file's `overhead fall` are one setup named twice (a hard source straight down), so `hard sun` is an alias. `overcast`, `work light` and `firelight` had no equivalent here and are now presets in their own right. **The last six are exterior, and they were added because the first eleven were not.** `window` is a thing you stand inside and look out of; `practicals`, `night practical`, `work light` and `firelight` are all somebody switching something on. A day exterior could honestly reach only for `overcast` — which this file itself calls what a shot looks like when the lighting was never decided — and the two backlight setups. A scene on a street at six in the evening had no id for the light it was obviously in. Each addition had to survive the same question the merge asked, *is this an existing preset under a new name*; the answers are in `picsart-video-plugin/lighting-preview/_control/control-blocks.txt`, along with what was rejected and why — `headlights` is `night practical` with its placeholder resolved, `neon` is named inside `practicals`, and fog and storm are atmosphere rather than a source with a direction. **Ids:** `auto` · `window` · `practicals` · `night practical` · `work light` · `firelight` · `silhouette` · `contre-jour` · `overhead fall` · `soft cross` · `overcast` · `golden hour` · `blue hour` · `open shade` · `dappled shade` · `street light` · `moonlight` *(The sentence each id compiles to now lives server-side. Pass the id to `picsart_film_compile_prompt` and it pastes the tuned wording; never write that sentence yourself.)* **`overcast` is the one setup with no dark side, and it is deliberate.** The block's law below is that the shadow side is always named; overcast has none to name, because a fully diffused sky wraps evenly. That makes it the one preset that must be *chosen* rather than arrived at — it is the honest description of a white-sky day, and it is also exactly what a shot looks like when the lighting was never decided. Pick it on purpose or pick something else. `blue hour` is now its nearest neighbour and is not the same thing: it is soft and has no HARD shadow, but the sky is brighter where the sun set, so there is still a side to name. Overcast keeps the exception on its own. Five take no parameters from the grid below — `auto`, `overcast`, `blue hour`, `open shade` and `street light`, the last three because the sky overhead, the shade you are standing in and a lamp straight up have no direction left to choose. Everything else has one worth naming. ## Inside, outside, and the ones that do both Not a rule, a way of finding one. Several work in either place — `firelight` is a hearth or a campfire, `practicals` is a table lamp or a shopfront. - **Daylight** — `window` (inside, looking out) · `overcast` · `open shade` · `golden hour` · `dappled shade` · `blue hour` - **Night and artificial** — `practicals` · `night practical` · `street light` · `work light` · `firelight` · `moonlight` - **Into the light** — `silhouette` · `contre-jour` - **Placed, not found** — `overhead fall` · `soft cross`. `hard sun` aliases to `overhead fall`, so noon sun lands here: it is the same picture as a hard unit straight down. ## The two-source parameter grid When the preset is tuned (console dials, or one follow-up question), each source is described with three parameters, written into the same block sentence: | Parameter | Values | Written as | |---|---|---| | direction | clock positions around the subject, camera at 6 o'clock | `key from 9 o'clock` (side), `from 12` (back), `from 4–5` (near-frontal — avoid) | | intensity | low / medium / hard | `low: shaping only` · `medium: clearly directional` · `hard: cast shadows with edges` | | temperature | warm / neutral / cool | `warm tungsten character` · `neutral daylight` · `cool blue-hour character` — **and the Kelvin behind it** (below) | Second source is always subordinate: `fill one stop under the key` or `rim only, separating from the background`. If a request would make the two sources equal and frontal, say why not (flat front light is the one ban) and offer soft cross instead. ### Temperature carries a Kelvin, and the Kelvin is per SCENE Three words are three buckets, and the look lives on a continuum inside them — but worse, a word cannot hold still: `warm` written into eight shots of one room is eight independent guesses at how warm, and the room changes temperature across its own cuts. So the block states a number as well as the character: | Word | Kelvin | Reads as | |---|---|---| | warm | 3200 K | tungsten, candle, practical lamps | | warm-neutral | 4000 K | mixed interior, late afternoon through glass | | neutral | 5200 K | clean daylight, overcast noon | | cool | 5600 K | open shade, north light | | cold | 8500 K | blue hour, moonlight, deep shade | **Resolve it once per scene and paste the same number into every shot of that scene**, alongside the character phrase — `warm tungsten character, 3200 K`. Where a scene genuinely mixes sources (a tungsten interior with a cold window), each source carries its own number and the contrast is the point; that is the one case the two values differ inside one block. **This never becomes a board pill.** The user picked a photograph of a lighting setup; 5200 versus 5600 is not a choice anyone can judge from a chip, and adding it would turn the console into a form. The word is the user's decision, the Kelvin is yours — derived from the word, the location, and the time of day, and written into the shot block and the scene picture's prompt when the user chose the light on the board (`PROMPT-BLOCKS.md`, Part 2, *The card's own picks*, 2026-09-10); a light nobody chose writes nothing. ## Which side is dark — always stated Except for `overcast` and `auto`, which have no side to name, the block always ends by naming the shadow side relative to camera: `camera-left of the face lit, camera-right falling dark` (or the reverse). **Three of the exterior setups have a dark that is not a side, and they name it anyway.** Where the source is overhead — `open shade`, `street light`, and `overhead fall` before them — the dark runs DOWNWARD and the block says so: `brow, under the nose and under the jaw in shadow, no side dark`. And `dappled shade` is the one setup in the vocabulary whose shadow is a shape rather than a direction, so it names where the shape falls: `a hot patch across the camera-left cheek, the mouth in a gap`. The law is that you can never leave the dark unstated; it was never that the dark is always lateral. Between shots of the same scene this line only flips when the camera crosses to the other side of the subject per the location map — light direction is continuity, and a join where the dark side jumps reads as a different room. ## Retired ids that still resolve The shot list carried its own six-preset version of this table. An alias is read and never written back — a plan approved under an old id still lands on the right setup, and what goes into the next payload is the canonical one. | Old id | Where from | Resolves to | |---|---|---| | `hard sun` | shot list · review | `overhead fall` | `window`, `practicals`, `overcast`, `work light` and `firelight` kept their ids through the merge, so only the one genuine duplicate needed an alias. ## What the user is choosing from Sixteen of the seventeen setups carry a **generated photograph** in the shot list's `Light` panel and the review board's orb — one girl, one wardrobe, one framing, relit sixteen times, so the library differs in nothing but the light. `auto` has none and never will: it compiles to the location's own sources, so it names no light to photograph. There are two control plates, not one, and the reason is worth knowing: the ten interior setups are relit from a girl in a plain room, and the six exterior ones from the same girl moved outdoors, generated image-to-image from the first plate so the library is one casting throughout. Indoors the probe instruction is "change only the light"; outdoors it cannot be, because the sky IS the source — golden hour without an orange sky is not golden hour. So the exterior six move the light and the sky together and hold everything else. This matters for how a chosen id is handled. **The user picked a picture of a sentence, and that sentence is the row above.** So when `light` comes back from a console, its fragment is not a starting point to reword — it is the thing the user agreed to. Look it up, resolve its placeholders from the scene, and paste it into the scene picture's prompt unchanged. Writing your own lighting line instead is how a shot ends up lit differently from the tile the user chose it by. **The placeholders, all five, and where each is resolved from:** | Placeholder | In | Resolved from | |---|---|---| | `` | window | where the window is in the location asset, named relative to camera — `camera-right` | | `` | night practical | the source the scene actually contains — `a single table lamp`, `the car's headlights`, `the vending machine` | | `` | silhouette | the bright thing behind the subject — `the doorway`, `the window`, `the sky` | | `` | soft cross, golden hour, moonlight | a clock position from the grid above, camera at 6 — `9 o'clock`, `high at 2 o'clock and behind her` | | `` | dappled shade | what is breaking the sun in this location — `the leaves of a plane tree`, `a slatted canopy`, `a fire escape` | A placeholder left unresolved reaches the model as literal angle brackets, and a placeholder resolved to something the location does not contain is a shot lit by a lamp that is not in the scene. Both are worse than the id alone. **The six exterior setups carry the sky with them.** Indoors the Lighting block can name a source and stop; outdoors the sky IS the source, so the block also says what the sky is doing — `deep amber low where the sun is, cooling to blue overhead` for golden hour, `flat black, nothing in it` for street light. This is not decoration. It is the same fact as the light, and a golden hour prompt that does not say the sky is gold gets a shot lit at noon. The probes, prompts and verdicts are in `picsart-video-plugin/lighting-preview`. ## Without boards One question per shot at most: offer the 3 setups that fit the scene's location asset and time of day (preview = the fragment, and now the still). The scene's default comes from the location descriptor's light line; only shots that deviate need asking at all. **Seventeen setups do not mean a longer question.** It is still three, and the grouping above is how you get to three: an INT. scene is not offered `golden hour`, and a night exterior is choosing between `street light`, `moonlight` and `practicals`, not between all seventeen. Read the location asset's own light line first — it usually names the group, and often the setup.