The trick to printing a good lithophane is all in the preparation. It’s important to pick an image that looks good in greyscale, as this is not a process that reproduces color in any way.

A backlit lithophane showing a magnified butterfly scale. Jordan Koone and Bryan Shaw The lithophanes created for this study included a microscope image of the scales on a butterfly wing.

The basic concept is to take a 2D image of the lunar surface, and then use it to generate a height mapped sphere for 3D printing. When lit from within, the sphere will appear as per the surface of ...

Baylor University chemist Bryan F. Shaw shows a tactile lithophane codex of a butterfly, which high-school students from the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired used as the base image ...

Imperceptible in the light, only when illuminated by flame in the dark is a 19th-century lithophane image revealed. A series of photographs demonstrating this often overlooked imaging process ...

Although the lithophane is an ancient artistic medium, ... for example, the stunning images coming out from the new Webb telescope -- are inaccessible to people who are blind.

To convert visual images like graphs into tactile aids, the researchers turned them into lithophanes. These are thin, semi-transparent etchings that depict images when backlit by a light source.

Lithophane is a European decorative art form dating to the early- and mid-19th century in which images are carved into wax with thin porcelain added.