Tools
Luminance Encoding
Pictures that carry their own data in light.
Two tools that hide data in the light of an ordinary image. Lumiglyph packs text, a spoken voice, a 3D point-cloud hologram, and a recorded face into one lossless PNG; LumiCode makes scannable codes you can hide inside a photo and read back with a phone.
I kept wanting a picture to be more than a picture; a keepsake that carries its own voice, its own depth, its own words, with no sidecar file and no server.
The payload has to come back out byte-exact, and a camera is a hostile reader; glare, angle, compression. Hiding data in luminance means the image has to survive as an image while every bit survives underneath it.
Two tools, one idea. Lumiglyph writes the payload into the light of a lossless PNG, with a Compose mode and a Read mode; LumiCode is the scannable tier, three encoders and one reader that pulls the message back out with a phone camera.
Both live: lumiglyph.quiettools.dev and lumicode.quiettools.dev. A recorded face travels inside its own picture and speaks; the code tier reads from files and screenshots today, with the camera path proven on a real iPhone.
Devlog
live from git- Magenta finders: hue-keyed detection kills false positives
- Home page at index: a gallery of all three formats
- Mirror the iOS camera-capture fix into photo.html and index.html
- Fix iOS camera capture: clamp canvas below the iOS ceiling (+ orientation, live path, diagnostics)
- Lumiscan: full tonal depth via brightness-driven erasures, and a survey
- Lumiscan: finer grid and more contrast, at the measured frontier
- Lumiscan: mosaic mode; brightness draws the picture, hue is the code
- Lumiscan v0: a Lumiglyph you can photograph
- Trim the brief to one read
- RESUME.md - session brief
- Hologram: depth was inverted, and everything was framed too tight
- Add .nojekyll; skip Jekyll on Pages (static site; faster, avoids build hangs)
- DitherCode: the payload hides in the photo's own grain; read from light, not colour
- PhotoCode: keep the photo, data in bold colour dots calibrated to a swatch
- Scan tab: plain "upload an image" path (no capture) to isolate codec from camera
- Starfall rhythm is a choice: banded or organic
If you have a format problem; something that has to survive a hostile round trip, or carry more than it looks like it carries; that is the kind of puzzle I like most.