Conquer the Glaze Dragon With INSIGHT Glaze Chemistry Software
The PDF Manual.
Modified: November 20, 2021

Desktop Insight is now free!

Download it from the Files panel in your Insight-live.com account or from the home page at https://digitalfire.com (current downloads only include the program file, manual, starter recipe, materials - overrides data is built in).

Desktop Insight is legacy, we had to move on-line

We moved functionality to a private account at Insight-Live.com - because people now expect to get at their data from any device anywhere. And for our survival. Ceramic lab work is much bigger than glaze chemistry, it is a physical world where testing, observation, record-keeping are vital. Insight-Live is about maintaining that data. Its recipes share pictures, they have firing schedules, notes, development history, testing data, links, they belong to projects. And they accumulate into the thousands and are easy to find and compare.

Importing Desktop Insight recipes into your Insight-Live.com account

Desktop Insight, by default, opens and saves recipes to its INSIGHTDATA.DB recipe database file (that file is in your documents/insight folder, it can be uploaded and imported into Insight-live). If Desktop Insight does not find the INSIGHTDATA.DB file on startup, it imports, into its database, all the recipe files (e.g. RCP, RCX) it finds in your documents/insight/recipe folder (it does not erase the original files, but no longer uses them). From then on, when you choose File -> Open (not File -> Open File System) you open recipes from its database (using the Recipe Database Window). When you Save you save to the database. See page 94 of the manual for more information.

Why is Insight-Live so much different to use than Desktop Insight?

Because you have to be able to compare ten recipes side-by-side. For physics as well as chemistry. And people need to be able to find thousands on any device from anywhere.

Desktop Insight focusses solely on glaze chemistry

Insight FAQ

There is a direct relationship between the way ceramic glazes fire and their chemistry. Insight is a calculation tool anyone can use to learn and harness the power of glaze chemistry.

Without glaze chemistry you'll never really have control and you could be a slave to your suppliers or the trafficing in recipes that never work.

Overwhelmed by glaze chemistry? Try starting here.

What People Have Said

"FYI I got you web site information from Ferro. I had called them about some frits and they put me on to a tech guy who put me on to you. Thought you'd like to know that."

"Thanks for the new toy. Am going to have my weekend full of INSIGHT and no class for 2 weeks to learn it."

"I am a teacher at a university in Germany. Glazes are my love. I spend 30 years in glaze research mainly about the question how to adjust glaze-recepies to my raw materials, my clay and my kiln with the help of Insight. Now I have a very good unterstanding about handling the Seger-Formular with a special view on eutectic mixtures."

"Thanks for your email, great software and amazing site. Install was very easy and I spent a few minutes last evening checking Insight's elements. Very solid! I found your site many years ago and was really impressed with its content. "

"I will be formulating glasses to match a 104 COE. Thanks so much for your help, I am looking forward to using the program successfully to get the glass I am looking for. One real nice benefit for me is that you have frit compositions for my calculations as bases I will use - this alone is worth the price."

"Now that I have purchased the software, I am finding all of this information and so many of my questions are being answered as I watch and digest the videos you made. Let me just say that what you have provided is amazing - and the way you provide the information is so digestible even for someone like me who has absolutely no understanding chemistry or what is involved in making glazes. I understand so much more, I can't even believe that I got a grasp of the Batch & Formula recipe sections on the videos. I will be working the lessons plans you provide too to become better at this. The software provides a lot more than meets the eye.... INSIGHT is worth every penny! "


Click here to see all 412