E-ink display mockups that look like e-ink
Most mockups treat every screen as a glowing rectangle. E-ink is paper under glass, and we photograph it and tune it as such, checked against the devices we use every day.
Almost every device mockup on the market is a phone or a laptop, and almost every one treats the screen the same way: a bright rectangle with a bit of gloss on top. That is roughly right for an LCD. It is wrong for e-ink, and it is why most reMarkable and Kindle mockups look like a tablet with a white wallpaper.
Paper, not light
An e-ink panel does not emit light. It reflects the room, like paper. So its white is never white: it is the grey-white of the light falling on it, darker in the corners the way the desk around it is darker, warmer under a lamp, cooler by a window. Drop a pure white page export onto a photo of the device and it glows, and anyone who owns one sees it immediately.
Our e-ink scenes keep the panel's own shading from the photograph and let a controlled amount of it show through your page. The result takes the tone of the room. Text stays crisp, the page stays paper.
Reflections that were actually there
The glass on a reMarkable or a Kindle is matte, so its reflections are soft, broad and faint, nothing like the hard highlights on a phone. We do not paint them. Each scene's reflection layer is the real light that was on that glass when the photo was taken, lifted from the frame and laid back over your page. It is subtle because it was subtle.
Checked against the device on the desk
We use these devices daily. The reMarkable scene was built by someone who reads and writes on a Paper Pure every day, and every tuning decision, how much panel shows through, how strong the reflection sits, where the focus falls, was made with the real device next to the screen, in the same light, until the render and the object agreed. That is slow, and it is the part nobody can shortcut.
Depth of field
A device photographed at an angle is not sharp from edge to edge, and the design placed on it should not be either. Our scenes carry the photo's own plane of focus, so the far edge of your page softens exactly where the far edge of the device does. It is a small thing that separates a photo from a paste-up.
Why e-ink
E-ink is a small corner of the mockup world, which is exactly why we are giving it proper attention. The people who sell planners, templates and books for these devices deserve images that look like the thing their customers hold, and almost nobody makes them. More e-ink scenes will follow, photographed and checked the same way.
All of this runs in the free mockup tool. Drop your page export in and see.
Try the mockup tool, free, in your browser.