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).
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.
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.
Sharlin · 29m ago
IME in photo post-processing, good UX, smooth multi-photo workflow and intuitive controls beat technical details every time.
RawTherapee is better than Darktable. But that’s a pretty low bar to clear. There are reasons people pay for Lightroom.
strogonoff · 19m ago
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.
mikae1 · 1h ago
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.
Would really like to be able to use RawTherapee's dual-illuminant DCPs (not available in darktable).
strogonoff · 1h ago
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).
mikae1 · 10m ago
I do a lot of mild re-lighting. If RawTherapee had the path masks from darktable I'd be more than happy.
strogonoff · 38s ago
One way could be exporting lossless 16-bit TIFF or PNG from RT, in some wide colour space and without sharpening, and then doing relighting + final processing steps in another tool, but that would compromise scriptability and simplicity.
donatzsky · 39m ago
ART (Another RawTherapee) has a more Lightroom-like approach to masking that you might like better.
babuloseo · 1h ago
I like this one its simple and easy to use
strogonoff · 44m ago
May I ask why choose to shoot raw given simplicity and ease of use are priorities?
Sharlin · 24m ago
Those are certainly not mutually exclusive! The point of shooting raw is not to painstakingly tweak super-technical details, it’s to get processing latitude to make photos the way you want. Often that involves simple adjustment of shadows, highlights, saturation and so on, applied to a large number of photos in bulk.
strogonoff · 13m ago
The priorities are mutually exclusive: delegating scene data conversion to in-camera engine grants you the most simplicity and ease of use at the expense of control; the territory of technical details grants you the most ability to make the photos looks the way you want at the expense of simplicity. You dial one up, you dial the other down.
For example, your choice of demosaicing method can make a tangible difference in finer details: some methods would make them less noisy (better for some styles), others would better preserve finer details (better for other styles). Abstracting it behind one “more detail—less detail” slider isn’t going to work because “detail” can mean a multitude of things, of which sometimes you want one and not the other, and inventing new sliders with user-friendly but inscrutable labels a la “brilliance”, “texture”, and so on, can only get you so far.
There are shades between simplicity vs. control, of course, and so I am curious to know the answer from the horse’s mouth so to speak: to what end they choose to compromise simplicity.
inferiorhuman · 23m ago
There's no inherent usability issue with shooting RAW. My experience has been that none of the open source tools can hold a candle to the proprietary ones.
RawTherapee I uninstalled almost immediately because it crashed a few times and the UI didn't seem to jive with what I wanted to do.
Despite DarkTable's horrific interface and hostile developers I keep it around because I can often beat it into submission (but what a chore that is). And that's the thing. Even if I were shooting JPEGs DT's interface would still be a problem.
mikae1 · 15m ago
I fought darktable for two years before feeling right at home. I had used Lightroom since it's inception. I'm happy now I invested the time. I much prefer the control darktable gives me now.
strogonoff · 11m ago
It’s just “raw”, it’s not an acronym.
dxroshan · 27m ago
In my opinion, a web based UI for something like an image editor is a bad idea. It will be slow and resource intensive.
pvdebbe · 11m ago
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.
brcmthrowaway · 6m ago
What is the difference between RAW and Bitmap. I thought Bitmap had no compression
polishdude20 · 2h ago
Hey congrats on the app! This is just what I'm looking for :)
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?
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).
cybertimom · 30m ago
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.
rossant · 1h ago
6x sounds bad. Might be a sign of vibe coding?
ImGonnaVibeCode · 1h ago
>React and Rust, with the support from Google Gemini
>immensely grateful for Google's Gemini
>AI Studio's free tier
cybertimom · 2h ago
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.
Its a high priority to optimize the loading speed of large folders and you can expect an improvement in the coming days.
Kind regards,
Timon
kamranjon · 2h ago
If you haven’t tried ansel: https://ansel.photos/en/ or darktable: https://www.darktable.org/ 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.
donatzsky · 35m ago
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.
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).
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.
miladyincontrol · 2h ago
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.
Already having a workflow for AI based subject masking is def nice to see.
Xevion · 3h ago
Wild, I was literally just today looking at this repository to see how I could do raw image thumbnailing in Rust. Coincidences...
mrbluecoat · 3h ago
> a personal challenge at the age of 18 ... with the support from Google Gemini
I'm no AI fanboy, but it's neat to see some dreams come true because of it.
tux1968 · 2h ago
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.
cybertimom · 27m ago
Thank you for the feedback. Yes - Gemini was a big help but as I also work / train LLM's I know very well how to use them and their limitations. With this, I can use them much more efficiently.
kookamamie · 2h ago
I found it unnecessary to highlight their age.
bjelkeman-again · 2h ago
Looks very interesting. How much work would it be to get this code signed for the Mac?
notpushkin · 2h ago
Not much, but you might want to donate to help the author offset the Apple Developer account cost :^)
cybertimom · 28m ago
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 :)
dylan604 · 3h ago
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.
ethan_smith · 2h ago
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.
vladvasiliu · 53m ago
Aren't edits app-specific anyway? Last I tried (a month or so ago) sharing edits between darktable and lightroom didn't exactly work.
cybertimom · 2h ago
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.
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.
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.
RawTherapee is better than Darktable. But that’s a pretty low bar to clear. There are reasons people pay for Lightroom.
Would really like to be able to use RawTherapee's dual-illuminant DCPs (not available in darktable).
For example, your choice of demosaicing method can make a tangible difference in finer details: some methods would make them less noisy (better for some styles), others would better preserve finer details (better for other styles). Abstracting it behind one “more detail—less detail” slider isn’t going to work because “detail” can mean a multitude of things, of which sometimes you want one and not the other, and inventing new sliders with user-friendly but inscrutable labels a la “brilliance”, “texture”, and so on, can only get you so far.
There are shades between simplicity vs. control, of course, and so I am curious to know the answer from the horse’s mouth so to speak: to what end they choose to compromise simplicity.
RawTherapee I uninstalled almost immediately because it crashed a few times and the UI didn't seem to jive with what I wanted to do.
Despite DarkTable's horrific interface and hostile developers I keep it around because I can often beat it into submission (but what a chore that is). And that's the thing. Even if I were shooting JPEGs DT's interface would still be a problem.
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?
And then it's sending these thumbnails back from rust to javascript as base64 encoded strings, not using a shared buffer: https://github.com/CyberTimon/RapidRAW/blob/fc21ede729b45d97...
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).
>immensely grateful for Google's Gemini
>AI Studio's free tier
Its a high priority to optimize the loading speed of large folders and you can expect an improvement in the coming days.
Kind regards, Timon
[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=7QymsCRNRHE
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.
Already having a workflow for AI based subject masking is def nice to see.
I'm no AI fanboy, but it's neat to see some dreams come true because of it.