Heightmap

Heightmap takes any photo and estimates, locally on your Mac, how near or far each pixel sits. From that it builds a 16-bit height map — a greyscale image where brightness stands for height — ready to hand off to UV printers, laser engravers, CNC mills and 3D slicers. For makers that means a portrait or motif becomes a tangible relief template, with no detour through a cloud.

Sliders for smoothing, detail, outlier compression and skin areas make the depth finer or coarser; the background can be flattened by segmentation and textured with patterns. A 3D preview shows the relief before you export, and the output leaves as a height map or an STL mesh in millimetre dimensions. The depth estimation runs entirely on the device — no upload, no account.

Heightmap costs $2.99 as a one-time purchase and downloads directly from a small site of its own — no subscription, no in-app purchases, no ads. An app by Kindler Dev.

Why no subscription? Turning a photo into a height map is a job that is done once — the finished file then belongs to you and your machine. Charging for that every month would make no sense: pay once, use forever.