The studio-grade technique, without the studio.

Leafwork gets there with photometric stereo: the same leaf, lit from a few different directions, reveals its shape in how the brightness shifts between shots. A small reflective sphere in frame tells the app exactly where each light sat. The capture guide covers the whole setup.

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  Albedo

  The leaf's base colour with the capture lighting solved back out — the colour input every material needs.

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  Normal

  Per-pixel surface direction — veins and ridges that catch light without adding a single extra polygon.

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  Height

  Relative surface depth, integrated from the normal map, for parallax or displacement.

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  Opacity

  The leaf's silhouette, for a cut-out edge with no matte fringe.

Real Leafwork output from the oak-leaf photos on the homepage — not renders or mock-ups. Albedo and opacity come through clean; normal and height reflect a four-light-direction capture, so read them as genuine tool output, not lab-measured precision. More light directions in your own capture give the solver more to work with.