Lumen
Your webcam looks flat and hazy because the camera never lets the shadows go dark. Lumen puts the black point back where it belongs, grades the picture on the GPU, and hands the corrected image to every app that takes a camera.
Coming to the Mac App Store. Requires macOS 14 or later.
What it does
- Five live controls — exposure in stops, black point, contrast, saturation and temperature. Black point is separate on purpose: pivoting contrast around mid-grey crushes the highlights while you try to rescue the shadows.
- Fifteen built-in looks — Corrective, Film, Stylised and Monochrome. Generated on the spot, no files to download.
- Your own LUTs. Load any .cube 3D LUT with a strength slider. Lumen warns you when a LUT expects log footage, which is why most film packs make a webcam look worse.
- A live preview with Graded, Original and Split modes, so you judge the result instead of guessing.
- Lives in the menu bar. No window, no Dock icon. Every app that opens a camera afterwards sees the graded version.
- No network at all. Nothing recorded, nothing uploaded, no accounts.
Support
Get in touch
Email [email protected] with what you saw and what you expected. Say which macOS version you are on and which app the camera misbehaved in. One person answers, usually within a couple of days.
Lumen does not appear in my video app
Two things cause this. First, macOS blocks the camera extension until a human approves it: open System Settings ▸ General ▸ Login Items & Extensions and allow Lumen. Second, most apps read the camera list once at launch, so quit the app completely and reopen it after the extension is approved.
Installing the extension failed
Lumen has to be in /Applications for macOS to accept the install. If you dragged it somewhere else, move it there, reopen it and install again.
A LUT made the picture worse
Most LUT packs sold for film work expect log footage, which a webcam does not produce: they lift the black floor further and the image goes grey. Lumen detects those and says so. Lower the strength slider, or use one of the built-in Corrective looks instead.
My camera has no brightness or exposure control
That is the camera, not Lumen. The Studio Display camera exposes no hardware brightness, gain, gamma or exposure-level control over USB, which is the reason Lumen grades the image after capture rather than configuring the camera.
Privacy Policy
Lumen collects nothing, sends nothing, and stores nothing about you. No analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting, no advertising, no accounts.
Your video. Lumen reads your camera, corrects the image on your Mac's GPU, and hands the result to whichever app asked for a camera. Frames exist in memory for as long as it takes to grade them and are then gone. Nothing is recorded, no stills are saved, no frames are transmitted.
No network. Neither the app nor its camera extension requests the network entitlements, so the sandbox would refuse a connection even if one were attempted. Every release build is checked for this mechanically rather than merely promising it here.
What is stored on your Mac, inside Lumen's own container and nowhere else: your grade settings and selected look, a copy of any .cube LUT you load (the extension runs in its own sandbox and cannot read the file you picked), and your source-camera choice. Removing Lumen removes all of it.
Permissions. Camera access, to read the image it grades, revocable at System Settings ▸ Privacy & Security ▸ Camera. A one-time system extension approval, to register the virtual camera. Read-only access to a LUT file, only when you pick one.
Third parties. There are none: no SDKs, no frameworks beyond Apple's own, no service behind the app.
Children. Lumen is not directed at children, and collects no data from anyone regardless of age.
Changes. If this policy changes, the effective date below changes with it.
Questions? Email [email protected].
Effective 18 August 2026.