Composing the shot before you press render.

Installing ProFrame

1. 1Open Blender, then go to Edit › Preferences › Add-ons.
2. 2Click the dropdown in the top-right and choose Install from Disk…, then select proframe.py.
3. 3Enable the checkbox next to ProFrame in the add-on list.
4. 4In the 3D Viewport, press N to open the sidebar, then click the ProFrame tab on the right edge.

Interface Tour

Every ProFrame feature lives in one collapsible panel, opened and closed section by section so you only see what you're using. The master switch is the ProFrame ON/OFF toggle at the very top — turning it off hides every overlay instantly without losing any of your settings.

Camera

Quick camera controls so you rarely need to leave the viewport:

• Cam to View — locks the active camera to your current viewport angle, so orbiting the view moves the camera live (same as Blender's own "Lock Camera to View", surfaced here for convenience).
• Render Region — toggles Blender's render border; Draw lets you drag a new one directly.
• Set Selected as Camera / the Scene Cameras list — jump between multiple cameras in one click.
• Direct access to Focal Length, Sensor Width, Clip Start/End, Passepartout, and Depth of Field (focus object/distance, f-stop) without opening the Object Data Properties tab.

Guides

Twenty-one composition guides across seven categories. Click an icon to toggle a guide on — its settings appear below under "Active Guide Settings." Every guide has its own colour, opacity, and transform (rotation, offset, scale, invert), independent of the others.

Line Style

The Line Style dropdown next to Line Width, at the top of the panel, sets a global default — Solid, Dashed, or Dotted — that every guide follows unless overridden. Each guide's own settings (under "Active Guide Settings") have their own Line Style dropdown too, defaulting to Use Global; switch it to Solid/Dashed/Dotted instead to make just that one guide differ — a dotted Custom Grid alongside solid Thirds, for example.

Per-Camera Guides

By default every camera in the scene shares one guide setup. Turn on Per-Camera Guides (the toggle at the top of this section) to give each camera its own — every guide's on/off state, colour, opacity, transform, and Line Style, stored separately per camera. Switching the active camera automatically swaps in that camera's own guide setup, and a label under the toggle shows which camera you're currently editing.

Categories

Perspective Guides, in detail

These are the guides most worth understanding fully, since real vanishing points don't behave like the other symmetric overlays.

Guide Presets

Save the exact state of every guide — on/off, colour, opacity, transform, and every sub-setting — under a name, and recall it instantly later. Useful for switching between shoot types ("Product Shot," "Portrait Setup") without re-toggling everything by hand.

• Type a name in the field under Presets and click + to save the current setup.
• Pick a saved preset from the dropdown, then click the ↓ (import) icon to load it, or the trash icon to delete it.
• Presets are stored per-user (not per-file), so they follow you across every .blend you open.

Built-in presets

Export & Import

Click Export (next to the Presets fields) to save every preset you've made to one .json file — handy for backing them up or sharing your setup with someone else. Import loads presets from a file the same way; presets with a matching name are overwritten, everything else is added alongside what you already have. Both buttons are also available in Edit › Preferences › Add-ons › ProFrame, in case that's easier to reach.

3D Guidelines

Unlike the 2D overlays above, this is a real object placed in your scene. Click Add to spawn two small sphere empties (A at the world origin, B offset); move either one in 3D space to define a guide line that projects correctly onto the camera view from any angle. Give each its own colour. Clear All removes every 3D guideline at once, or delete a single one from its list entry.

Each guideline in the list also gets its own Hide toggle (the eye icon) and Line Style button. Hide switches a guideline off without deleting it — its empties stay in the scene, ready to bring back later — and the Style button cycles Use Global → Solid → Dashed → Dotted for that one guideline, independent of every other guide's Line Style.

3D Grid

A real, camera-facing grid mesh (built with geometry nodes) you can position and scale like any other object. Set columns, rows, width and height before adding; existing grids keep whatever settings they were created with.

Drawing Tool

Freehand annotation directly on the camera view — for sketching a pose, marking a crop, or roughing out a layout before you shoot.

Toggle Drawing Mode on, then click in the viewport to draw with the selected tool — a cursor circle shows you're active.

The Line Style dropdown (Use Global / Solid / Dashed / Dotted, same as every other guide) seeds the next shape you draw — but since there's no way to select an individual shape afterward, changing it also retroactively restyles every shape already drawn on the current camera. Reach for it to switch your whole sketch from solid to dashed at once, not just what you draw from that point on.

Platform Overlays

Shows exactly what will be cropped, cut off by UI, or safely visible when your image lands on a specific platform. Choose a Mode — Social Media, E-Commerce, or Custom — from the Platform section.

Social Media

11 platforms, 23 formats.

Each format also carries its own safe-zone/headroom margins — shown as a dashed inner box so you can see what stays clear of UI overlap before you export. (YouTube's Channel Banner uses the platform's real "safe area" spec — the box shows exactly what survives cropping on TV, desktop, and mobile.)

E-Commerce

3 platforms, 15 formats.

A Official Guidelines button links straight to each platform's own image-spec page.

Custom Formats

Any format not listed above — set Platform Mode to Custom, then:

1. 1Enter a Name, Width, Height, Safe Margin %, and Headroom %.
2. 2Click Save — it's added to the dropdown above and drawn as a distinct violet overlay.
3. 3Select any saved format from the dropdown to switch to it instantly; Delete Selected removes it.

Advanced Margins

By default, Safe Margin % applies to both top and bottom, and Headroom % to both left and right. Toggle Advanced Margins to set all four edges independently instead — useful when a platform's real UI isn't symmetric (a bottom navigation bar taller than the top status bar, for example). Whatever you're editing updates the viewport overlay immediately, whether or not the format has been saved yet; Save just persists the current live values under a name.

The same Export / Import pattern as Guide Presets applies here — one .json file holds every custom format you've saved, shareable or backed up the same way, and also reachable from Add-on Preferences.

Custom formats are stored per-user, the same way presets are, so they persist across projects.

Reference Layout

Drop in a screenshot of the real app UI you're targeting — Instagram's post composer, a client's storefront, whatever the shot needs to sit inside — as a reference overlay on the camera itself, so you can compose against exactly how it'll look once it lands there. This is Blender's own camera background-image system; ProFrame just surfaces Scale, Rotation, Offset, and Opacity directly in the panel instead of Object Data Properties.

Remove clears both the image and Blender's background-image toggle in one click, so it won't linger visibly in the viewport after you're done with it.

Render Settings

Common render setup in one place, applied directly to the scene: Focal Length presets (24/35/50/85/135mm), Resolution presets (from HD up through 8K, plus vertical/square/Amazon/Shopify presets), Frame Rate, and output Format (PNG, JPEG, WebP, EXR, TIFF).

Scale References

Drop a correctly-proportioned silhouette into the scene so viewers get an instant sense of real-world scale next to your product:

Clear Refs removes every scale reference at once.

Export Guidelines

Exports exactly what's visible in camera view — guide overlays and all — as a standalone image, without needing a full scene render. Set an Output Path, choose Format (PNG/JPEG/WebP) and whether resolution should Match Render Settings or use a Custom width/height, then click Export.

Compositor

A light post-processing pipeline built from Blender's own compositor nodes — automatically wired up behind the scenes when you click any of the buttons below. Requires Use Nodes enabled in a Compositing workspace (ProFrame will prompt you if it isn't).

Quick Filters & Custom LUT

30 built-in color-grade presets, grouped below by character. Pick one from the dropdown and click Apply Filter.

Filters and a Custom LUT (a .cube file, with adjustable strength) are mutually exclusive — applying one clears the other. Guide Overlay bakes your current guides into the compositor as a static image layer, useful for a final render that includes them.

Watermark

Two modes, switchable at any time:

• Image — load a PNG/logo file.
• Text — type a string directly (e.g. © Your Studio); rendered with your chosen font size and colour, no external image needed.

Both share Position (9-point grid: corners, edges, centre), Scale, and Opacity — all of which update live as you drag them, no need to re-click Add. Position is calculated from the watermark's actual rendered size, so it always stays fully inside the frame regardless of text length or scale.

The small ↩ button next to Add / Remove resets position, scale, opacity, font size and colour back to defaults — without touching your chosen type or content.

Flash-Hide Hotkey

Hold \ anywhere in the 3D Viewport to instantly hide every guide overlay — release to bring them back exactly as they were. Useful for checking the clean shot without losing your setup.

To use a different key: go to Edit › Preferences › Add-ons › ProFrame, click the key field under Flash Hide Guides Hotkey, then press whatever key (with any modifiers) you'd rather use.

Frequently Asked Questions