Engineering & Insights
Deep dives into computer vision research, product updates, and the engineering decisions behind Orlume's local-first AI editor.
How We Built a Real-Time 3D Relighting Engine in the Browser
A technical deep-dive into Orlume's flagship feature: real-time 3D relighting powered by monocular depth estimation, surface normal computation, and physically-based rendering. We explain how we achieve 60fps PBR shading using WebGPU compute shaders and the Depth Anything V2 model running locally via ONNX Runtime Web, without sending a single pixel to any server.
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Perceptual Color Grading: Building a Professional 8-Channel HSL Mixer
How we implemented an 8-channel HSL color mixer that gives you Lightroom-level control entirely in WebGL2 fragment shaders. This article covers our approach to perceptually linear color spaces, smooth channel crossfade, and real-time histogram computation on the GPU.
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Client-Side AI at Scale: Our WebGPU + ONNX Runtime Architecture
An architectural overview of how Orlume runs multiple deep learning models (depth estimation, semantic segmentation, background removal) entirely in the browser. We discuss model quantization strategies, IndexedDB caching, Web Worker threading, and how we achieve sub-second inference on consumer hardware without any cloud API dependency.
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From Monocular Depth to Surface Normals: The Relighting Pipeline Explained
A step-by-step breakdown of our relighting pipeline: we start with a single 2D photograph, estimate a dense depth map using a Vision Transformer model, compute surface normals via screen-space derivatives, and apply real-time Blinn-Phong and Cook-Torrance shading with user-controllable light sources. All of it runs at 60fps on your GPU.
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Zero-Upload Background Removal: How Our Segmentation Model Works
Most "free" background removers upload your photos to a cloud server. Orlume doesn't. This article explains our local semantic segmentation pipeline using a SegFormer model running in TensorFlow.js, how we handle edge refinement with guided filtering, and why privacy-first design decisions lead to a fundamentally better product.
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Introducing Orlume: Professional AI Photo Editing, Free and Open Source
Today we are launching Orlume, a free, open-source AI photo editor that runs entirely in your browser. We built it because we believe professional-grade creative tools should be accessible to everyone, not locked behind $10/month subscriptions. This post explains our mission, our architecture, and our roadmap.
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