Changelog

✨ New

• Variables & Values: Name a value once in the new Values tab and reference it from any property. Rename it and every linked property updates together. Values can be typed, renamed, or detached from a property whenever you want a one-off.
• Expressions: Drive any property with an expression written right in the property input. Flip into expression mode for live previews and autocomplete, and expressions now understand strings, vectors, and colors. "Made with " + brand, (10, 20) * 2, or mix(color, color, t) all work.
• Image fills: Shapes can now be filled with images instead of just colors. Control how the image maps onto the shape with fit (cover, contain, stretch, or natural size), position, repeat, and crop, all from a unified fill picker.
• LumiDSL docs: The scene language now has a public home at lumidsl.com with readable reference docs, live examples, and a playground to try LumiDSL right in the browser.
• Code view: The DSL code editor is now available and comes with syntax highlighting and autocomplete driven by the language schema.

🛠 Improvements

• Expression errors: A broken formula now keeps the last good value and surfaces diagnostics instead of failing silently.
• Expression persistence: Incomplete expressions survive save and reload exactly as you left them, instead of being mangled into plain text.
• Player power-saving: Embedded players automatically pause when the tab is hidden or the canvas scrolls out of view, saving CPU and battery.

🐛 Fixes

• Fixed image fills on text rendering transparent.
• Linked values now live-update their properties without spamming undo history.

✨ New

• Frames: Frames make it practical to keep a whole sequence in one scene. Each frame has its own clipped canvas, timeline, playback rate, and export. Keep several variations or moments together while you work, then render the one you need. Existing sized scenes migrate automatically when opened; after saving in the new v3 format, older versions of Lumiere cannot open them.
• Vignette and Sharpen: New controls for a little more focus and a little more clarity: tintable vignettes and adjustable sharpening.
• Timeline stagger: Stagger selected timeline rows from either end with new selection handles.
• Public roadmap: The new roadmap page tracks what is planned, in progress, and shipped alongside the changelog.

🛠 Improvements

• Lens Distortion: Chromatic Aberration has grown into Lens Distortion, with barrel and pincushion warp, an adjustable curve, and anamorphic squeeze. Existing settings carry over automatically.
• Timeline controls: Hide animation tracks and preset bars while trying an option, then turn them back on without deleting anything.
• Effect previews: Live looping previews show how an effect moves before it is applied.
• Vector font rendering: Text now renders fully as vectors. It stays sharp and accurate at any zoom, and performs better in type-heavy scenes.
• Visual snapping: Snapping now ignores hidden layers and shows guides and markers at the exact snap point.
• Canvas navigation: Panning and zooming feel more immediate.
• Large lists: Scene and font lists stay responsive in larger projects.

🐛 Fixes

• File renaming: The Files panel now stays in sync when a scene is renamed, including after undo or redo.
• Font loading: Fonts now load reliably under the editor security policy, and the font picker reopens on the correct tab.
• Selection bounds: Selection and marquee bounds now include stroke widths.

✨ New

• Timeline marquee selection: drag on the timeline to select multiple keyframes at once — works across tracks, and holding shift adds to your selection.
• Search the timeline: the new filter field on the axis finds instances and blueprints by name, so big scenes stay navigable.
• Retime bar: each instance now shows a global retime bar, and groups are color-coded by instance type so you can read your scene at a glance.
• Font preview on hover: hover a font in the picker and see it applied live before you commit.
• Real font weights: uploaded fonts now keep their true family and weight instead of being guessed, so a Regular and a Bold file group under one family and render correctly.
• Searchable font picker: find fonts by name, and pick family + weight in one step.
• Editor state retention: reopen a project and your camera, zoom, and playhead come back exactly where you left them. Timeline scroll, zoom, and collapsed groups are remembered too.
• Animated preset previews: the presets browser now plays a live animation preview for each preset.
• Indie licenses: activate your paid license right in the editor — works offline too.

🛠 Improvements

• Timeline virtualization: only the visible keyframes render, so large scenes scroll and zoom smoothly instead of slowing down.
• Reworked inspector: properties are grouped into labeled sections with icons, and the active tab is remembered between sessions.
• Clearer export tab: export cards show format, resolution, and fps at a glance, with a more focused export inspector.
• Organized effects: effects are grouped into sub-categories, and each effect's parameters are laid out in labeled sections.
• Fresh design system: new toggle, radio, checkbox, select, and search field components, plus reworked sliders, easing picker, and panels — the editor and landing site share one consistent look.
• Landing refresh: new typography and a reworked hero, header, footer, and pricing page.

🐛 Fixes

• Fixed the timeline loop preview not respecting the selected region.
• Fixed "fit to zoom" not centering correctly on some scenes.

🚀 It's time!

Lumiere is now open to everyone. No waitlist, no account, just open the editor and enjoy!

I also shipped four effects I'm genuinely excited about. I wanted to be able to replicate old school visuals for a while and they are quite needed for that. ASCII is the wild card, just for fun!

Next on the list: per-letter text animation and a Repeater for procedural shape generation. Both are in the works.

✨ New

• ASCII Effect: Turns your composition into animated ASCII art. Configurable font size and color mode.
• Kuwahara Effect: Painterly rendering that makes footage and motion graphics look like an oil painting. Good for stylized intros and abstract sequences.
• Glare Effect: Directional lens glare on bright elements. Useful for light sources, product highlights, and adding cinematic weight to a composition.
• Halation Effect: Light bleeding at high-contrast edges, the way film does it. Subtle, but it's what makes motion graphics feel genuinely cinematic.
• Privacy Policy & Terms of Service: Legal pages are now live. Required before going public. Boring but needed.

🛠 Improvements

• New theme: Editor theme has changed to be a bit more pleasing to the eye.
• Lumiere is now public: The alpha gate is gone. Open the editor at lumiere.graphics, no account, no waitlist.

✨ New

• Mini Inspector: A compact context-aware toolbar now sits inline in the editor, showing the most-used properties for whatever you've selected — fill, stroke, border radius, opacity and more — without having to open the full panel. The controls shown adapt by object type, and sub-panels give quick access to secondary properties through a small popover. Effects and animation presets are one click away from the same bar.

🛠 Improvements

• Effect anchoring per object: Effects like chromatic aberration and lens distortion now use each instance's own bounding box as their reference frame instead of the whole canvas. Radial centres, distortion pivots, and dispersion directions now work relative to the object itself, which is what you'd actually expect.
• Chromatic aberration alpha: Alpha is now averaged across all spectral samples rather than copied from the centre sample. Transparency fringing on partially-transparent edges is now correct — no more opaque halos.
• Chromatic aberration clipping: Added automatic bounds expansion proportional to the dispersion and distortion strength, so high-amount settings no longer clip at the object's edges.
• Shape stroke defaults: New shapes start with a transparent stroke instead of a solid black one, so you get a clean white fill with no unexpected outline.

🐛 Fixes

• Fixed spacebar pan not activating when a button had keyboard focus — the tool shortcut now intercepts the event before the button can consume it.
• Fixed invisible, fully-transparent, and zero-size objects being accidentally selectable on click and in drag selections.

✨ New

• Animation Presets: Apply ready-made animations to any element in one click — Fade In/Out, Slide In/Out, Scale In/Out, Twist In/Out, Pulse, Float, and Shake. Each preset has a small set of controls (delay, duration, easing, playback) and can be stacked freely on the same element without conflicts.
• Chromatic Aberration Effect: A new post-processing effect that splits color channels to simulate lens distortion.
• Dither Effect: Applies ordered dithering to any element or the full scene. Useful for stylized, retro, or low-color aesthetics.
• Timeline Loop Region: You can now define a loop region directly on the timeline — drag to set in/out points and preview just that section on repeat.
• Parametric & Conditional Defines: The runtime now supports defines with typed parameters and conditionals, which is what powers the presets system.

🛠 Improvements

• Timeline overhaul: Drag interactions were rewritten from scratch — scrubbing, keyframe moving, and loop region dragging are all noticeably smoother. Easing curve handles are easier to grab and now show a cleaner preview.
• Expression animations: Expression-based property values (e.g. looping or reactive values) are now properly driven by the animation clock, not just evaluated once at parse time.
• Effects browser: Effects and presets now live in separate tabs in the inspector, making it easier to find what you're looking for.

🐛 Fixes

• Fixed keyframe commands not correctly tracking undo state in some drag scenarios.
• Fixed the asset picker breaking when navigating between asset types quickly.

👋😁🧀

This week was super busy! I'm ready for the Private Alpha, Lumiere has now a very solid foundation. Subscribe if you're interested!

Next few weeks, the goal is presets and templates. Presets are meant to quickly animate existing objects or assets, while templates are meant to quickly bootstrap a scene from scratch. It has mulitple purposes, show what Lumiere is capable and battle test the editor and the renderer. This works because Lumiere is built like Lego; fully composable pieces that you assemble and customize freely!

The UI will also change a lot. I realized it's hard for non-motion designer to navigate or understand it, so templates and presets are the opportunity to make a beginner-friendly interface!

By the way, if you want to support Lumiere, I set up a Ko-Fi page.

See you next time!

✨ New

• Stroke Support: Shapes now have a stroke (outline) with configurable width and color. Renderer was largely rewritten to support it properly, so it works correctly with every shape type.
• Anchor Point: Each shape now has an anchor point that controls the pivot for rotation and scaling. Set it from the inspector or drag it directly in the canvas via the gizmo.
• Border Radius: Per-corner border radius for rect shapes. A new dedicated input in the inspector lets you set all corners together or each one independently.
• New Shape Tools: Ellipse and star shapes are now available directly from the toolbar. Drawing them works the same way as rect — click and drag on the canvas.
• Dynamic .lumi Imports: A .lumi scene can now import blueprints from another .lumi file in your project and instantiate them directly. Useful for building shared component libraries across scenes.
• Automatic Migration: When you open a project made with an older version of Lumiere, a migration dialog appears and updates the file format automatically before loading.

🛠 Improvements

• Editor UI Redesign: New side panel system, flexible workspace layout, redesigned inspector and file system headers, and a new tooltip component across all controls. The layout is now more composable and handles edge cases better.
• Gizmo & Selection: Improved gizmo interaction — more stable drag behavior, better origin overlay positioning, and more accurate bounding box calculation for all shape types.
• Zoom & Viewport: Zoom handling was refactored to be more predictable when using trackpad gestures and keyboard shortcuts together.
• Animation Engine: Significant internal cleanup of the animation loop for more consistent timing across frame rates.
• Export: Several edge cases in the export pipeline were fixed, including issues with text rendering and SVG paths during frame capture.

🐛 Fixes

• Fixed a crash when duplicating a blueprint that had nested instances referencing each other.
• Fixed stroke and fill rendering order being swapped on SVG shapes.
• Fixed the inspector not refreshing after undoing a transform operation.
• Fixed scene list not updating correctly after renaming a scene.
• Fixed file system state getting out of sync when switching projects rapidly.

✨ New

• Glow effect: Beautiful glow with customizable parameters like threshold, intensity, radius, softness, saturation, and chromatic aberration.
• Visual snap guides: See alignment lines when dragging objects. Separate grid and instance snapping with independent toggle controls.
• Image asset picker: Select images directly for fills, strokes, and backgrounds. The editor detects image properties and shows thumbnails from your project assets.
• Feedback form: Submit feedback from the editor with optional email for replies and scene file attachment.
• Math expressions in number inputs: Type calculations directly into number fields. Enter "100 + 50", "5 * 3.14", or any math expression and get the result instantly.

🛠 Improvements

• File management: Better dialogs for new projects and file opening with clearer error messages. Failed file loads won't replace your current work. Corrupted files prompt feedback submission with the file attached.
• Snapping controls: Toggle grid snapping (position grid, rotation angles, scale) and instance snapping (alignment with edges/centers) separately in settings.
• Inspector tabs: Replaced icon-only tabs with labeled buttons for better clarity.
• Input styling: Standardized form input appearance across the editor for consistency.

🐛 Fixes

• Fixed enum property dropdowns incorrectly converting values between strings and numbers
• Fixed timeline animation events not matching blueprint and instance IDs correctly
• Fixed group positioning to use bounding box center instead of average position

Hello hello ! 👋

Last week, I released the changelog which allows you to track the development of Lumiere. This is also a great way to communicate with you for broader stuff like the vision and the roadmap.

For example, I can say that Lumiere will release this month its Private Alpha. The goal is to give access to selected people so they can battle test it and share feedbacks.

We can also talk about the recent announcements like Adobe Animate, which will stop updating in March. This is a shame and very sad to see, Lumiere is a direct legacy of Flash. Animate was the last bit we had.

While Lumiere right now is very different from Flash, the goal on the long run is to give at least the same amount of power than Animate did, but with a modern approach and way more flexibility. I've been eager for years to work on a frame-by-frame brush engine, so that's definitely something that will come to Lumiere!

✨ New

• Pixelate Effect: Apply pixelation to layers with control over grid size and sampling. Useful for stylized retro looks or privacy masking.
• Halftone Effect: Create print-style halftone patterns with customizable dot size, angle, and colors. Works great for vintage poster aesthetics.
• Batch Export: Export multiple scenes in one go instead of rendering them one at a time. Set up all your exports and let them run.
• Alpha Channel in Fills: Fill properties now support alpha transparency. Makes it easier to work with semi-transparent colors throughout the editor.

🛠 Improvements

• Anti-Aliasing Options: Added FXAA, SMAA, and SSAA anti-aliasing strategies. You can now choose the quality/performance balance that works for your project.
• Effects Performance: Rewrote parts of the effect rendering pipeline for better performance. Effects render faster and use GPU resources more efficiently.
• Blueprint System Rewrite: Switched from instance-based to blueprint-based property handling. This fixes several duplication bugs and makes component instances more reliable.
• Color Picker Improvements: Reworked the color picker with better alpha channel support and cleaner color value utilities.

🐛 Fixes

• Fixed properties not duplicating correctly when copying objects with component instances
• Fixed nested blueprint animations not propagating changes correctly to instances
• Fixed issues with reparenting objects that use blueprints

✨ New

• Effects Browser: New panel to browse and add effects to layers without hunting through dropdowns. Add blur, color adjustments, and other effects in a few clicks.
• Clipping Support: Layers can now clip their children, with proper stencil-based rendering for clean masking.

🛠 Improvements

• Better Blur: Rewrote blur effect using dual Kawase algorithm for higher quality and faster rendering.
• Render Performance: Added scissor test optimization for clipping, reducing unnecessary pixel processing.
• Effects Pipeline: Effects now support separate render passes for more complex compositing.
• Asset Picker Component: New reusable asset picker component in the design system for consistent file selection across the app.
• Cleaner Landing Page: Simplified CSS reduces page weight and improves load times.

🐛 Fixes

• Fixed render order issues with effects and z-ordering
• Fixed visibility handling for groups and their children
• Fixed export rendering with proper frame overlay calculations
• Fixed effect uniforms not duplicating correctly when copying layers
• Fixed inspector layout issues in the effects panel

✨ New

• Easing Picker: Visual easing curve editor directly in the timeline. Edit bezier curves, choose from presets, and copy/paste easings between keyframes.
• Timeline Easing Curves: See easing curves drawn between keyframes on the timeline for better animation visualization.
• Font Picker Component: Browse and select fonts with a proper picker interface instead of dropdown menus.
• License Management: Added license activation system with Indie tier limits and feature gating.

🛠 Improvements

• Smart Keyframing: Keyframes are automatically created when editing animated properties. Edit any frame and the animation updates intelligently.
• Pixel Perfect Editing: Snap position, rotation, and scale values to whole pixels. Resize shapes precisely without sub-pixel jitter.
• Timeline Snapping: Playhead and keyframes snap to frame boundaries based on your FPS setting for cleaner animations.
• Dynamic Timeline Zoom: Timeline now zooms dynamically to show more detail when you need it.
• Better Text Editing: Improved text overlay with better selection, editing flow, and property controls.

🐛 Fixes

• Fixed SVG import and rendering issues
• Fixed back easing curve calculations
• Fixed time formatting in timeline for better readability
• Fixed number input precision issues when resizing shapes

✨ New

• Custom Scene Sizes: Create scenes with any dimensions you need, not just presets. Includes infinite canvas option for freeform work.
• Color Picker: Full-featured color picker with RGB, HSL, HSB, and CMYK values. Visual palette and hex input for precise color selection.
• Color Palette Component: Save and organize colors in palettes for consistent branding across projects.
• Quick File Switcher: Jump between project files without clicking through menus.
• Animation Blend Modes: Choose how animations combine when multiple animations affect the same property.

🛠 Improvements

• Export Color Space: Renders now use linear color space internally and output proper sRGB. Better color accuracy in exports.
• 16-bit Float Precision: Canvas rendering upgraded to 16-bit float for higher quality gradients and effects.
• Inspector Keyframes: Add and edit keyframes directly in the inspector. See which properties are animated at a glance.
• Custom Property Layouts: Inspector adapts layout based on property type for cleaner editing.
• Effect Property Animation: Animate effect parameters like blur radius or color adjustment values.
• Better Dropdown Alignment: Dropdowns position themselves smarter to stay on screen.

🐛 Fixes

• Fixed alpha premultiply issues in exports
• Fixed linear filter rendering artifacts
• Fixed deleting keyframes from timeline
• Fixed text property layout spacing
• Fixed background export settings overwriting project defaults

✨ New

• Parametric Defines: Runtime API for parametric definitions. Create dynamic shapes and effects with configurable parameters.
• Expression System: New expression evaluation for property values, enabling calculated animations and relationships between properties.

🛠 Improvements

• Color Normalization: Improved color handling across the rendering pipeline for consistent color representation.
• Runtime Refactoring: Cleaner runtime architecture with better separation of concerns and improved performance.
• Garbage Collection: Better memory management with optimized garbage collection for long-running animations.

🐛 Fixes

• Fixed parametric defines evaluation in complex scenarios
• Fixed runtime animation timing issues