The best raw image processing tool I know is called “RawTherapee”. It was developed by one or more absolute colour science geeks, it is CLI-scriptable, its companion RawPedia is a treasure trove of information (I learned many basics there, including how to create DCP profiles for calibration, dark frames, flat fields, etc.), and not to make a dig (fine, to make a bit of a dig) you can see the expertise starting with how it capitalizes “raw” in its name (which is, of course, not at all an acronym, though like with “WASM” it is a common mistake).<p>Beware though that it tends to not abstract away a lot of technicalities, if you dig deep enough you may encounter exotic terms like “illuminant”, “demosaicing method”, “green equilibration”, “CAM16”, “PU”, “nit” and so on, but I personally love it for that even while I am still learning what half of it all means.<p>I’d say the only major lacking feature of RT is support for HDR output, which hopefully will be coming by way of PNG v3 and Rec. 2100 support.
IME in photo post-processing, good UX, smooth multi-photo workflow and intuitive controls beat technical details every time.<p>RawTherapee is better than Darktable. But that’s a pretty low bar to clear. There are reasons people pay for Lightroom.
Partner is getting into photography and I don't have the stomach to purchase some software.<p>I threw darktable and rawtherapee on the table but without technical grit you get nowhere really fast.<p>It's no my wheelhouse so they are mostly in there own.
I've been getting into photography lately too and running into the same question. There's no way I'm getting an adobe subscription. But I'm not sure what tools do I want to pick up instead. Apple Photos has gotten me pretty far, but I'm hitting the limits of what it can do. And my photo library is getting pretty big now - big enough that I want some software to manage where my photos live as well.
> <i>But I'm not sure what tools do I want to pick up instead. Apple Photos has gotten me pretty far, but I'm hitting the limits of what it can do.</i><p>Be sure to take a close look at Nitro, created by a former Apple lead of Apple's Aperture, iPhoto, RAW Camera and Core Image engineering teams: <a href="https://www.gentlemencoders.com/nitro-for-macos/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.gentlemencoders.com/nitro-for-macos/index.html</a>
Played with Nitro this morning and compared my edits to those that came out of Lightroom and my camper manufacture’s RAW software and am very happy with the results. It has a user friendly interface, which I prefer to Lightroom’s, and I love that it’s a one time purchase. Thanks for the recommendation
Arrrr, you be a pirate
Capture one?
Firstly it's a matter of reliably storing image files. I just make a new folder in the file system — each-time I transfer image files from camera to computer — named as the transfer-date YYYYMMDD. I wrote a 10-line script to give those image files unique-sequence-names YYYYMMDD-00N.ext.<p>So when I mistakenly copy into the wrong folder, it's obvious which image files don't belong. So I don't need to delay while I think of the best descriptive folder name. So I don't need to sort yesterdays photos into a different folder than todays photos.<p>Secondly it's a matter of deleting image files. I take a look with some viewer app and use the file system to delete whatever doesn't seem worth any more attention.<p>Thirdly whatever trial photo software is available is probably good enough to start learning.
Pixelmator pro is nice on the Mac, and it's a one time purchase, not even expensive. And CameraBag was not bad last time I tried it, also a one time purchase.
IME GUI is mainly important when you craft a new profile. In many workflows, you don’t do it very often. I create a profile once and then apply it to hundreds of frames without launching the GUI at all or mostly using it just to preview how the profile works with a particular frame and make a couple of minor tweaks.
I used RawTherapee a ton, but changed to Lightroom because the denoising is so much better. (I’m sure a more expensive camera would also help here, but I have what I have.) Now that I’m used to Lightroom it will be hard to switch back.
Yeah, LR's denoising is <i>chef's kiss</i>. It's much better than what Canon's own raw processor can do, for example.<p>Another thing I noticed with RawTherapee after LR was the sloooowness. Lightroom has been super optimized to show all edits (or their preview versions anyway) in real time.
Because those open-source editors are made by coders, not photographers.<p>Those tools you really need for properly edit raws are hidden in blated features (multiple demosaic algorithms) or completely missing (AI masking). And UI is not user friendly.
They are made by and for photographers. This software is designed for many use cases, not just creative photography - hence multiple demosaicing algorithms. AI masking is missing exactly because it's made by photographers - they don't have the required expertise. UI is not intuitive because a) it's designed by photographers' committee, not UI designers, and b) you are familiar with a completely different workflow.
Most photographers don't know how develop software at all.<p>Please explain why photographers need 20 differnet sharpening methods, 5 demosaicing algorithms, many colour corrections that are almost useles if AI masking is not present?<p>Coders often lost in all kind of geeky features that missing actual usability by targeted audience. Bloated software is not what I would expect from alternative to commercially used proprietary software.
Because it's not necessarily about creative/artistic photography, it's also for things like e.g. microscopy or negative or scan processing, and it's not an alternative to Lightroom which does "magic" unacceptable in many technical use cases.<p>You can ignore features that aren't made for you, and actually I think they're mostly hidden by default in DT (make a preset if you don't like the default tool selection). All these features were added because somebody needed them at some point, the DT/RT/ART communities are chaotic and lack vision but they're actually using their stuff.<p><i>>Coders</i><p>As I said, this is not software made by coders for coders. This is exactly how the software made by photographers would look if they lacked organization, focus, and UX skills. If it was made by coders (and UI designers), it would probably have looked like Lightroom and had AI selection.
<i>You can ignore features that aren't made for you</i><p>Another terrible design in darktable is default settings. I have no problem with options, but then you need carefully choose defaults that are selected questionable here - pure exhibitionism right after opening software.<p>I don't agree with your statement about developing by photographers. If so, there is higher probability that they would focus on UI with more aesthetic care than coders would do.<p>Lack of AI masking is too expensive to use by professionals. You simply cannot afford to mask manually bunch of images. Wider adoption among photographers is simply impossible.
why can't they be both photographer and coder?
I mostly prefer RawTherapee's processing, with one exception: Darktable's stupidly good "filmic" emulation can beautifully recover overexposed raws that I thought were trash. It manages to make it easy to shift the entire scene one or two stops darker with just a few clicks (yes, there is data up there in raws).<p>I have not found an equivalent mechanism in RawTherapee. Does anyone know if it has an equivalent tool?
Local adjustments are really difficult though, as it only supports the good ole "Nik u point" tech. For this reason only I use darktable instead.<p>Would really like to be able to use RawTherapee's dual-illuminant DCPs (not available in darktable).
<a href="https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel">https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel</a> there's also a fork to play with
I can see that it would not work well for cases like painting over parts of the image, which Lightroom et al. allow with ease. If you try to be “holistic” in your raw treatment and like me at most do a graduated filter or mask by colour, RT works well enough (the latest versions improved it a lot, too).
ART (Another RawTherapee) has a more Lightroom-like approach to masking that you might like better.
RawTherapee is great in most ways, except that all of the curves for adjusting anything have absolutely catastrophically bad handling. It's so amazing having access to the Lab colour adjustments but the sliders are abysmal, impossible to make any kind of precise adjustments, impossible to reset an individual slider/point back to it's default placement, impossible to undo the last action without resetting the entire widget to its default state. It's unusable, and I'm convinced that the popularity of it would skyrocket if they'd finally just sit down and address that it's miserable to use. I would drop lightroom in a heartbeat if they made them even a little bit better.<p>I know it's a different space, but as a counterexample, FabFilter makes audio plugins that are the gold standard for that kind of interface and it isn't even close. Anybody making an interface for interacting with points on a curve should sit down with the free demo of FabFilters Pro-Q3 for just a few minutes to experience what's actually possible and how it should feel.
> impossible to make any kind of precise adjustments<p>That claim does not match my experience in any way.<p>For example, Control Cage curves have node value adjustment to 1/1000th.<p><a href="https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/General_Comments_About_Some_Toolbox_Widgets#Control_Point_In/Out_Values" rel="nofollow">https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/General_Comments_About_Some...</a>
I think control cage or parametric curves can be quite precise…
<a href="https://github.com/RawTherapee/RawTherapee">https://github.com/RawTherapee/RawTherapee</a>
> you can see the expertise starting with how it capitalizes “raw” in its name (which is, of course, not at all an acronym, though like with “WASM” it is a common mistake).<p>Language pedantry has nothing to to with photographic image processing expertise and if anything this would be a sign that the developers care more about being "right" than what users want.
I like this one its simple and easy to use
HDR output is present in ART, which is a fork of RawTherapee. But it is not really usable, as the preview will show the beyond-SDR areas as pure white or something like that. I.e., you will be working blind.
Hey congrats on the app! This is just what I'm looking for :)<p>Just installed it on my m1 mac and opened a folder of RAW files.
The initial loading lagged my whole macbook. Couldn't even open the dock.
Once the thumbnails all loaded it's better but not as buttery smooth as I would have hoped! Would love to know what other commercial apps do that make them not lag. Is it just that they're written natively?
I mean, it's making 720px width jpg thumbnails using the CPU <a href="https://github.com/CyberTimon/RapidRAW/blob/fc21ede729b45d9787e175035fa46ebde1961e75/src-tauri/src/file_management.rs#L24">https://github.com/CyberTimon/RapidRAW/blob/fc21ede729b45d97...</a><p>And then it's sending these thumbnails back from rust to javascript as base64 encoded strings, not using a shared buffer: <a href="https://github.com/CyberTimon/RapidRAW/blob/fc21ede729b45d9787e175035fa46ebde1961e75/src-tauri/src/file_management.rs#L280">https://github.com/CyberTimon/RapidRAW/blob/fc21ede729b45d97...</a><p>This is the sorta stuff that native apps mostly don't do. They don't base64 an image just to send it to a different app (react) to base64 decode it (via a third app, webkit) via a slow ipc mechanism (tauri) from itself to itself, allocating 6x the chunks of memory along the way for one bit of data (the 6x are: raw data in rust, base64 data in rust, json encoded base64 in rust for tauri ipc, json encoded base64 in javascript, base64 in javascript, raw image data in webkit to finally view).
Yes you are completely right. This part is definitely not optimal yet. I haven't had lots of Tauri / Rust experience before this project.. it's on my todo list to improve. While trying to use the asset localhost protocol I ran into a lot of permission issues.
6x sounds bad. Might be a sign of vibe coding?
>React and Rust, with the support from Google Gemini<p>>immensely grateful for Google's Gemini<p>>AI Studio's free tier
na, electron/tauri/"the web" has done this long before GPT happened.
I didn’t know the developer is 18. No snark intended. Great work. Slow or suboptimal code is common nowadays, and often it’s better to get it working before worrying about speed.
Thanks for trying out RapidRAW and for the feedback. Currently I optimized the app to load small-medium sized folders (e.g. 1-300 images). Its expected that the app lags for folders with more images.<p>Its a high priority to optimize the loading speed of large folders and you can expect an improvement in the coming days.<p>Kind regards,
Timon
If you haven’t tried ansel: <a href="https://ansel.photos/en/" rel="nofollow">https://ansel.photos/en/</a> or darktable: <a href="https://www.darktable.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.darktable.org/</a> I’d recommend trying them out - they are the current open source raw editing apps that perform well that are out there. It could be that this app is competitive with them, but I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet - but both ansel and darktable run well on my M1.
While certainly an impressive effort, it's not even close to competitive yet. As is pointed out in a comment on [1] and as can be seen from the rat piss yellow in the sky, the algorithms are very much on the naive/simple side of things.<p>[1] <a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=7QymsCRNRHE" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/watch?v=7QymsCRNRHE</a>
Capture One I always thought was highly underrated and still easy to use. And I've never used of their PhaseOne cameras
Will def keep an eye on things. If theres one 'must have' feature I can request, luminosity masking? Its hard to go back to raw editors that dont have it.
Its not the end all or be all to masking (ie color, saturation masking, etc) but is def one the most useful to have access to without having to bust open PS or similar.<p>Already having a workflow for AI based subject masking is def nice to see.
I'm glad there are an abundance of visual overviews in the readme. Too many readmes about GUI programs lack them (or they'll point to a site which still lacks a clear indication of how it behaves).<p>That said, they're all GIFs and each ~10-22MB. Making loading the readme larger than the program size itself. Embedding some video would be snappier.
In my opinion, a web based UI for something like an image editor is a bad idea. It will be slow and resource intensive.
Check out color.io for reference. It is a color grading focused app but nevertheless has bells and whistles for many workflows regarding raw photos. The thing is that it is offline, runs on browser, and is much faster than Rawtherapee or Darktable on my aging PC.
It’s not "web" in a way you mean that, it uses rust and gpu processing very heavily, up to the point where it just launched by web browser and that’s it
I couldn't immediately find information about how the metadata is stored? Is it one shadow file per RAW file, as I've seen in other OSS RAW editors?<p>I'm not sure what the perfect solution is, but it is hard to sync a ton of shadow files to cloud storage, versus one big catalog file.<p>Is the metadata in an open format, so I can take the edits to other programs?<p>I am glad there's alternatives to having to shell out for Light Room every month. I only need to edit RAW files after holidays!
Neat.<p>We need an easy to use RAW editor. For a long time I used Darktable, with default settings I would get images that where close to the camera jpeg. I just had to change in what artistic direction I wanted to go. With update after update I had to fight to even get decent skin colors.<p>Currently on a pirated copy of CaptureOne, but would rather use something open source (Or buy something affordable)<p>Do you have default camera and lens profiles build in?
Wild, I was literally just today looking at this repository to see how I could do raw image thumbnailing in Rust. Coincidences...
> a personal challenge at the age of 18 ... with the support from Google Gemini<p>I'm no AI fanboy, but it's neat to see some dreams come true because of it.
He's no doubt a talented young man as well. Google Gemini would be much less helpful in many other people's hands; kudos to him. That said, at some point the people so dismissive about the capabilities of current AI systems, will have to admit that they're quite powerful indeed, even with their limitations.
I found it unnecessary to highlight their age.
Running it on Windows 10 / AMD RX 6900 XT, and the app is extremely slow, dragging the window, adjusting any sliders takes considerable amount of time with 6000x4000 DNG files...
Looks very interesting. How much work would it be to get this code signed for the Mac?
Not much, but you might want to donate to help the author offset the Apple Developer account cost :^)
I think it's pretty simple. I'm just focused on the core features right now but I definitely plan to sign it in the next 1-2 weeks. Thanks :)
I wouldn't make the Apple Developer dance a priority unless you intend to sell a commercial signed version.<p>Few reasons.<p>1. It's 100$ a year, which isn't pocket change when it's making you no revenue.<p>2. Apple likes to randomly deny developer accounts.<p>3. They have no issue with outright rejecting apps with vague reasoning.<p>4. Plenty of high quality raw editing apps already exist for OSX.<p>If someone really wants to use it on OSX you've provided clear instructions.
I find it absolutely bizarre that people post about stuff they are seemingly have no idea about. Like, code signing & notarization provides clear quality of life improvement for many users. And your reasons are just plain wrong.<p>1. 100$ is a pocket change for many people. Depending where you live. I think it is enough of a barrier to force a thoughtful action. Also, to compare, cheapest certificates for signing windows software are like 450$/year. Microsoft has a hosted service now for $15/year, but that is still in beta. Both of those options are significantly more expensive than 99$/year Apple charges.<p>2. No, Apple does not deny randomly access to developer accounts. Also, this is quite besides the poin.<p>3. Code Signing has absolutely nothing to do with submitting your app to app store, or anything Apple has to approve of. Like, why even write about something you have no idea about?<p>4. True. Not sure how it is relevant.
100$ a year is a lot of money if you aren't planning I'm selling anything. The instructions to build from scratch or run it without signing aren't difficult.<p>I've literally had to argue with Apple for months to get my account approved.<p>It was not a fun process, eventually they did grant me an account, but then just keep up an old hobbyist game I was wasting that 100$ a month.<p>I ended up just recompiling for WebGL and uploading to itch.<p>Going through the hoops for code signing and getting account doesn't make sense if OP isn't going to sell it on the app store.<p>Finally, it's not like this is the only raw editor.<p>How many people.<p>A: Will pick an open source feature lite raw editor which isn't going to be as good as Darktable or Lightroom.<p>And<p>B: Aren't willing to build from source or literally run a single terminal command to run the unsigned version.<p>Now, if OP wants to sell it on the app store then I'm completely wrong. But otherwise it's not a good use of time.<p>You're free to reach out to OP and offer them 100$ + another 300$ for time spent having to apply for a Developer account.
Is there a System Requirements page? What's the minimum OS version required?
What is the difference between RAW and Bitmap. I thought Bitmap had no compression
They are different lossless image formats. What is called "raw" is quite a few different formats from different manufacturers, and they contain lossless image data from the camera sensor without significant postprocessing. They usually need some postprocessing to look "good". A "bitmap" is just pixel data, not a file format, but .bmp is a file format, which does support some compression, and usually won't contain raw camera sensor data but something ready to be displayed on a screen.
No an expert here but RAW is the data generated by the sensor and requires some heavy processing before you can show it on screen. A bitmap is an image format (assuming you mean the BMP files).
A big difference is bit depth. BMP normally is 8bits per pixel per channel (colour). RAW is often more bits (say 10 or 12 or even more). This means you can adjust lighting without introducing banding and so on.
most importantly a RAW file hasn't been demosaiced, ie instead of pixels of colors, it's a grid of scalar sensor measurements that, depending on the pattern (eg Bayer) each represent either red, green or blue intensity. since we only know one for each position in the image, the other two have to be interpolated (which is demosaicing)
Very nice, I will probably join your efforts on the project.
Why the decision to store edits in sidecar instead of the app’s library? I’m sure there’s pros/cons that were considered, so curious how the pros won out.
Sidecar files (like XMP) are the industry standard for non-destructive RAW editing - they maintain file portability between different apps and preserve your original files. Library-based approaches offer better performance and organization but create vendor lock-in and complicate backups.
Aren't edits app-specific anyway? Last I tried (a month or so ago) sharing edits between darktable and lightroom didn't exactly work.
Great, so if I use an app that creates XMP files, this app is going to create a second sidecar called rrdata. So I guess I could have amended that to the original question on why create a different sidecar than the images’ default.
That's why I love DNGs. No Sidecar file to lose! Just one file, and still non-destructive.
Its pretty simple to explain:
Imagine you have your images in a folder and you rename this folder, without RapidRAW knowing this. It would fail to associate the edits with the image. Lightroom does it the same way.
Or imagine you‘re editing on your computer and want to move to your laptop to continue editing - the edits would only be saved on the computer, if it‘s only saved in the app library.
My folders do not have a series of sidecars written by Lightroom. The edits are stored within Lightroom’s library. I have other programs that use sidecar files, but Lightroom does not. Maybe it’s a preference, but I’ve never looked. If I move/rename a folder Lightroom was looking at, it asks me to relink it when I next open Lightroom. It’s not an earth shattering situation to fix.