Lighting Designer User Reviews

Customer Experience

Positive experience45.2% of reviews
Neutral20.5% of reviews
Negative experience34.2% of reviews

~ Based on 73 written reviews from the US App Store.

Is Lighting Designer Safe?

Lighting Designer appears mostly safe based on user ratings. AppsHunter Safety Score for Lighting Designer is 79/100.

This assessment is based on 145 user ratings, with an App Store average of 4/5.

Safety Analysis

74.5% of ratings point to a safe experience
6.2% of ratings suggest some concerns
19.3% of ratings point to a risky experience

~ Based on 145 App Store ratings for Lighting Designer.

Is Lighting Designer Legit?

Lighting Designer appears legitimate, with a few gaps. AppsHunter Legitimacy Score for Lighting Designer is 78/100.

Based on 78 of 100 points across 7 verification signals from App Store and developer data.

Top reviews

Crashes too much…. I really want it to work!

There is so much to like about this app. The. Layout, user interface, simplicity of design.
I’ve used it for over 5 years on and off, and I would use it more but it crashes too often for me to trust it for all my work. If it were more stable I would use it on every job.

Crashes

This app keeps crashing just like others have stated

Response from developer

Try our new platform, Scenario. It’s incredibly stable on any device!

Do NOT waste your money

App barely works. Yes the idea is great but the interface is fiddly, whole thing is buggy, and it crashes when you do basically anything. Can’t even render a simple lighting plot. App just keeps crashing every couple things I do. Paid way too much for an app that I can’t even use.

Response from developer

Try out our new platform, Scenario. Everything you’ve described here is the reason we’ve built it from the ground up to be more stable and flexible!

Crashes when trying to render large plots

The app crashes when rendering plots larger than 36 pieces on my iPhone 12. Not a good choice for event lighting design if you’re trying to draw plans to scale.

Love the app and its potential but it’s BUGGY

I’ve used the app on and off for a few years. Unfortunately each time I give it a shot the crashes and frozen screens put me off and a number of times, I resorted back to hand-drawn lighting diagrams rather than dealing with the issues of this app.

While it offers so many possibilities, I’d love for it to be more stable.
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It’s great

Makes camera positioning easy

Great App In Theory

This app is really cool in the sense that I can create really organized lighting plots for my crew. However, it crashes so frequently that it becomes borderline un-usable. If the developer fixes the bugs this app would make a great tool, however it has a long way to go.

Response from developer

Typically I’d ask you to reach out over email to get more details, but I see you already have! Thanks!

Crashes

This App could really be fantastic, there’s a lot of useful features and I found it reasonably simple to work out. The crashing gets ridiculous though. Once I’d reached a certain point in putting together quite a simple plan, it started closing itself down literally every five minutes. The result is that it’s really too slow to be of much use, even on an ipad pro with pencil.
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Clunky

Really regret wasting my cash on this app. It’s incredibly clunky and counter intuitive. Having to link things (like a gel) to a light by going into another menu as opposed to just writing it in a box is insane. Why can we select a 12x12 solid, for example, but if we want to show a 12x12 grid we need to “attach” another object?
Where are the reports of total units and total watts/amps?

It also seems the units are not to scale
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Response from developer

Adrian, thanks for your feedback. You can reach out over email if you want to discuss more improvements! In the meantime: there are various ways of adding Gels, and one of them actually IS writing it in a box (in the Patch table). I also agree that adding frames could be a smoother process, and I’m planning to add electrical distribution and calculation in a future update. You can get total fixture counts using the Truck feature and in the equipment list. The units are to manufacturer’s specifications. What are you comparing them against? If it’s a floor plan image, that might be what’s not to scale. You can use the “Calculate Image Size” feature to fix that. If you have more ideas, please email me and we’ll talk!

Buggy to the point of being unusable

Yup that’s it

Response from developer

I’d love to hear more about these bugs so I can get them fixed! Please email me at lightingdesigner.app@gmail.com, or use the “Email Developer” feature in the app, so we can track them down.

Keeps crashing while naming fixtures

K

Mac

This app could be great if it didn’t crash as often and I would love to be able to import scale drawings and just have to add the lighting also the ability to use it on my Mac as well as my iPad would make it amassing

Crashes all the time

Running on a iPad Pro, latest OS. Crashes all the time, awful. Feel robbed.

Excellent but still doesn’t have all of the basics

I love this for making plots super quick BUT, it is limited to 4 universes. When rigs now have way beyond that. So I cannot do this for larger rigs or even distributed rigs. Such a bummer I had to put this app on the back burner for now.

Response from developer

Not to worry; starting with v3.6.0, the app allows you to address fixtures up to 48 universes and 9999 channels. Let me know if you want more!

Continuous crashing and overpriced

This IS a great app and app idea. There is some intuitiveness to it although without a user guide accessible on iPhone (it’s there just a blank screen though) within the app you already have to have some familiarity with draft and design. The price tag is not justifiable due to crashes as I can’t even generate a test plot without losing my mind! Maybe it’s better on iPad but if I had an Ipad out I may as well have had a computer out and plotted that way.
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Idea

I think having some templates or demo shows might help make it easier to understand at first

Response from developer

Thanks! I’ll think about the best way to make that happen! Some video tutorials are certainly long overdue, but I’m sure anyone working in film/tv/theater will understand the laughability of finding the “free time” to do it :)

Great program, very helpful

Just started using this program and thus far, I’m a huge fan. I feel like a laptop version is critical, but small steps...

I really appreciate the level of control and the density of the functionality and detail you can add and manipulate. Clearly a lot of time and thought went into this. Haven’t gotten deep enough to add truck/ crews / contact info but am looking forward to seeing how that works.

Having done my plots and layouts by hand previously this is a huge help.

Bry Thomas Sanders
Director of Photography
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Potentially great but buggy

I love the app for doing my overheads. Would however love desktop / laptop support and synchronization so I’m not stuck with only using my iPad.

Also the recent update is extremely buggy, ‘LD’ is constantly asking for permission to let others look me up my email and when I say don’t allow or allow it just pops up over and over again. This forced me to restart my iPad multiple times and im extremely concerned if I have to reinstall the app if it keeps happening, would I potentially lose my plots ?!
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Response from developer

Interesting thing about the repeated attempts. I would recommend just allowing it; the only reason it asks is so it can determine whether or not you’re signed into an iCloud account, which is how it knows whether or not to allow the option to sync your Plots. The email thing is just its weird way of asking. None of your personal details are ever sent to Apple or to me automatically, and there’s no LD function to look people up by their email. Update: in v3.5.2, the app should only ask you once and then leave it alone. I still recommend accepting, but if you don’t, it won’t affect the functionality of the app in any important way.

Nearly there but...

This works well but has some quirks with resizing the plan and naming objects that I’m sure will be solved soon. The main reason for not giving 5 stars is the lack of export functions. It really needs at a minimum vector based PDF export so you can fine tune what you hand out. More export and import functions would be fantastic, like dxf, and svg as well.

Not being able to import your own fixture graphics is annoying but not a show stopper as the inbuilt library is reasonable and you can rename as required.

The email output is ok, but hard to get the image dimensions right, and not really very configurable. I found I had to mail it to myself, edit the output to get it the way I wanted it.

Overall, a good app and worth the price.
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I life the potential of this app.

I do like the potential that this app has but one thing that i feel is missing, maybe i just cant figure it out, is the ability to type in room measurements instead of dragging. For instance when adding a rectangle shape it would be nice in the measurement bubble to type in the measurement when i tap it.
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Response from developer

If you create a shape, then tap the “Shapes” button to open the detail table, you can enter the dimensions of the shape as numbers. You can do this with any object, with some variations for what type of object it is. Please email me if you have any other questions! Edit: for v3.6.0, there's a "Shape Sizing" tool for images, which means you can define the length of a certain segment of an image and the image will automatically size itself. Enjoy!