Value Mirror

Value Mirror is a value study tool for painters and drawing artists. Convert any photo or live camera feed to grayscale, group tones into clear tonal masses, and read light and shadow structure without color getting in the way.

Inspired by the Claude glass — a black mirror used by painters for centuries to compress tonal range — Value Mirror brings the same technique to any image, instantly.

What artists use it for:

Simplifying reference photos into 2–10 tonal masses before painting

Squinting digitally — blur away detail to see only the big shapes

Notan studies — reduce any image to pure light and dark groupings

Checking light and shadow grouping across a composition

Identifying lost and found edges

Proportion checking with instant horizontal and vertical flip

Grayscale reference for oil, watercolor, and digital painting

Key features:

Value massing — group your image into 2 to 10 tones

Squint mode — progressive blur reveals major value shapes

Edge detection — find structural boundaries

Value isolation — highlight one tone at a time

Compare mode — measure lighter or darker between two points

Grid overlay — proportion reference

Plumb lines — horizontal and vertical alignment guides

Live camera — analyze your subject in real time

Save studies as high-resolution images

Works offline — installable PWA

Who it's for:

Painters, illustrators, and drawing students who work from life or photo reference and want to read tonal structure accurately. Especially useful for anyone practicing Notan, value massing, or classical atelier methods.

chiaroscuro, plein air painting tool, value scale, grayscale painting reference, art grid overlay, colour value analysis