Quick Tip: Get Better Exposure Results with Luxi Light Meter

October 16^th, 2019

Quick Tip: Get Better Exposure Results with Luxi Light Meter

by Olaf von VossOctober 16^th, 2019

A light meter as a standalone device. Do you even need it nowadays? And if yes, do you have to spend a rather high three-digit figure in dollars? The Luxi For All might be the first step into these waters. It utilizes your existing phone and therefore it’s cheap, it’s very easy to use and you can expand its capabilities by using third-party apps. Pretty neat, I’d say.

The Luxi For All light meter is not a new product, far from it. Originally, it started as a Kickstarter campaign, back in May 2014. It is the successor of the original Luxi (Kickstarter campaign) but with an upgraded mechanism for attaching it to virtually any mobile devices – that’s why it’s called Luxi For All.

Luxi For All

This device is really nothing fancy but maybe that’s the beauty of it. It’s just a clip that holds a translucent dome. The whole thing can be clipped on to your phone so that the dome covers your front-facing camera. That’s it, the magic is being applied via software.

So what’s the advantage of this over your average camera? Well, the camera measures the brightness of a particular scene by the intensity of light reflected from objects within the frame. However, a dedicated light meter detects and measures the incident light before it hits a surface, known as incident light measurement. This gives you far better control over what precisely you measure.

You can use a professional, fully-featured light meter, like a Sekonic, and you’ll get what you pay for. But maybe you don’t really need all the features of such a device but you still want to get better readings. That’s where a cheap device like the Luxi For All comes in. It certainly isn’t the best tool out there but in order to get started that little thing is all you need, really. The accompanying app is basic but gets the job done. If you want to upgrade on features a little bit, other (third-party) apps work with the Luxi, too. Cine Meter II by Adam Witt would be a possibility here (iOS only, available on the App Store). For android users, Lux Light Meter by Doggo Apps could be worth a closer look (Google Play Store).

The original Luxi app is also available for both iOS and Android.

Price

The Luxi For All is a mere $25 US. Whether it’s worth it is a question that you can only answer for yourself. I think it’s a great product and a door opener for beginners who want to get better results when exposing a scene, or just to learn a little bit about lighting. Contrast ratios, dynamic range, grey cards, you name it. Another good starting point is this article by Attila Kun of ExposureGuide.com.

Alternatives

I personally used to use a Sekonic L-758c but I sold it since I barely used it anymore. What I do use a lot is the Lumu Power light meter (see our article). It’s iOS only since it sports a lighting connector for attaching to your iPhone. There’s a version 2 but I haven’t upgraded to that one since the original Lumu Power works just fine for me.

If your phone’s camera delivers more accurate readings with the Luxi attached I don’t know but since the Luxi depends on 1) the build-in camera of its host phone and 2) on the software running the measurements, there’s no real way to define its performance. But, and this is key, it enables you to take a real incident light reading, and that alone is a good thing to do.