Golden Hour & Shadow Map
Plan Better Shoots with the Golden Hour & Shadow Map Planner
Finding the perfect light shouldn’t require guesswork. CineFlo’s Golden Hour & Shadow Map Planner helps filmmakers, photographers, and content creators visualize exactly how sunlight and shadows will fall at virtually any location before arriving on set. Simply drop a pin on the map, choose a date, and scrub through the time of day to see the sun’s position, shadow direction, and shadow length update in real time. Whether you’re planning a feature film, commercial, music video, or portrait session, you can confidently choose the best time to shoot.
Unlike a basic sunrise and sunset calculator, the Golden Hour & Shadow Map Planner simulates how natural light interacts with buildings, terrain, and the surrounding environment. Preview realistic shadows throughout the day, identify when key areas fall into shade, and determine when your subject will receive direct or indirect light. This makes it easier to plan camera placement, actor blocking, scene timing, and lens direction while avoiding unwanted backlighting or harsh midday sun.
The planner is an invaluable tool during location scouting and pre-production. Explore multiple shooting locations without leaving your desk, compare lighting conditions across different dates and seasons, and understand how the changing position of the sun will affect every scene. By knowing exactly when the lighting is right, you can build more accurate shot lists, production schedules, and call sheets while minimizing delays on set.
Designed specifically for filmmakers, the Golden Hour & Shadow Map Planner goes beyond traditional sun tracking. Use it to identify the ideal window for golden hour, blue hour, sunrise, and sunset, visualize long or short shadows, and coordinate scenes that depend on precise lighting conditions. Whether you’re capturing a dramatic silhouette, matching continuity between shooting days, or scheduling exterior scenes around available daylight, the planner helps you make creative decisions before production begins.
The Golden Hour & Shadow Map Planner is part of CineFlo’s growing collection of free filmmaking tools built to simplify every stage of production. Pair it with our shot list app, location scouting tools, production budgeting software, call sheet creator, and cinematography calculators to create a faster, more organized workflow from prep through wrap. Spend less time guessing where the light will be and more time creating exceptional images.
See Your Light Before You Shoot
FAQs
Common Questions
Everything you need to know about planning your shoot around natural light.
Golden hour is the period shortly after sunrise and before sunset when sunlight is low, soft, and warm-toned, producing flattering skin tones, long dramatic shadows, and reduced contrast compared to midday sun. It's one of the most sought-after lighting conditions for exteriors because it minimizes harsh shadows and blown-out skies while adding a cinematic warmth that's difficult to replicate artificially.
Golden hour times shift based on latitude, longitude, date, and season, so a generic "golden hour is around 6pm" rule doesn't hold up in real scouting. Drop a pin on your exact shooting location in the planner above and select your shoot date. The tool calculates precise sunrise, sunset, golden hour, and blue hour windows for that specific spot rather than a citywide estimate.
Golden hour happens right after sunrise and right before sunset, when the sun is low but still visible, casting warm, directional light. Blue hour follows sunset (or precedes sunrise) once the sun has dropped below the horizon, leaving a cooler, softer, more even light with deep blue tones in the sky. Both are popular for exteriors, but they call for different color grading and mood.
Sun calculations work anywhere on Earth, on any date, with times shown automatically in your pin's local time — including polar locations, where midnight sun and polar night are reported correctly rather than faked into a sunrise. The 3D buildings depend on Overture Maps coverage, which is global but uneven: major cities are densely mapped with many surveyed heights, while smaller towns and rural areas have fewer or none. Where buildings are missing the tool says so plainly, and you'll still get every sun time, light window, shadow length and direction — those come from the sun's position and don't depend on the map at all. Recently completed buildings may be absent until the open data catches up.
The sun maths is exact — solar position comes from SunCalc for your pin's precise coordinates and date, so shadow direction is as accurate as astronomy allows, and length follows the exact trigonometry of height ÷ tangent of the sun's altitude. What varies is building height data, which arrives from Overture Maps in three tiers — surveyed heights, estimates by building type, and a local-median fallback — and the line beneath the timeline tells you the breakdown for whatever you're looking at. It deliberately doesn't model terrain slope (shadows are computed on a flat plane) or anything unmapped, including most trees and temporary structures. If a shot hinges on one building's shadow edge and that building is in an estimated tier, verify it on the ground.
Yes. You can drop a pin at any location, check its lighting across different dates and seasons, then repeat the process for other candidate locations before committing to one. This makes it easy to compare how golden hour timing and shadow behavior differ between two potential shooting spots without visiting either in person first.
No. The Golden Hour & Shadow Map Planner is free to use directly in your browser with no sign-up required. It's part of a broader set of free tools CineFlo offers alongside the full shot list and production planning app for filmmakers who want to manage scheduling, call sheets, and shot lists in one place.
How Our Shadow Map Tool Compares
| Capability | CineFlo Golden Hour & Shadow Map Planner | Shadowmap | SunCalc.org | Sun Surveyor / PhotoPills |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free, no account | Free tier; paid Pro | Free | Paid apps |
| Where it runs | Any browser, desktop or phone | Browser and apps | Any browser | iOS / Android |
| Sun times & light windows | ✓Golden, blue, daylight, night | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| 3D buildings casting shadows | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Shadows falling on building facades | ✓Real-time, per-pixel | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Shows how reliable its building heights are | ✓Surveyed vs estimated, per view | — | n/a | n/a |
| “Shootable light” windows for the day | ✓Named and timed | — | — | ✓ |
| How long a specific spot stays in shade | ✓ | Pro feature | ✗ | ✗ |
| Full-day timelapse with orbit | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | — |
| Sun path & shadow-direction overlay | ✓Toggleable | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Shareable link that restores the exact setup | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| Print / PDF sheet for a call sheet | ✓ | — | ✗ | — |
| AR viewfinder on location | ✗ | — | ✗ | ✓ |
| Works offline | ✗ | Apps only | ✗ | ✓ |
| Built for | Film & photo production | Property, solar, architecture | General sun reference | Photographers |
✓ yes · ✗ no · — varies by version — check the current release. Comparison last reviewed July 2026.
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