RapidRAW - Open Source Lightroom Alternative for Mac, Windows & Linux

[CAcreeks]

I saw this today:

RapidRAW - An Open Source Lightroom Alternative for Mac, Windows & Linux

There's a brand new open source RAW editor on the scene. It goes by the name of RapidRAW and it's the work of a young developer who's keen to turn it into a capable and free photo editor for all photographers.

https://github.com/CyberTimon/RapidRAW

Initial support is very essential for these young projects. I just donated a few coffees to him, and I hope he can get this project going on.

Good for you. Have you installed and tried editing some Raw images?

Based on Andy Hutchison's video, it looks like it is the FastStone of Raw editors, in the sense that it has a very high capability to ease-of-use ratio.

Looks like the user interface is written in JSX, a JavaScript extension made for React, while the image processing is written in Rust. Very promising.

 

[bakubo]

I saw this today:

RapidRAW - An Open Source Lightroom Alternative for Mac, Windows & Linux

There's a brand new open source RAW editor on the scene. It goes by the name of RapidRAW and it's the work of a young developer who's keen to turn it into a capable and free photo editor for all photographers.

https://github.com/CyberTimon/RapidRAW

I just went back and checked the github page and there are several updates to it reflecting his ongoing work. And a few hours ago version 1.2.2 was released.

Version 1.2.1 was also released since I started this thread 4 days ago.

He is rapidly working on it. 1.2.3 released today.

I wish him luck and it is great to have this young guy enthusiastic about creating a new open source app.

I don't know if he has any plans to integrate a DAM.

I wonder if he could leverage off the open source darktable code?

When I was playing around with darktable last year I was happily surprised that the DAM seemed to have all the features of the LrC DAM -- my recollection is that I found nothing missing and it all worked well. The UI for the darktable DAM is somewhat different, but after you learn it then it did everything. One difference I noticed though was a slight improvement over the LrC DAM. LrC allows only 1 color label on a photo, but darktable allows multiple color labels. There have been a few times in the past in LrC I wished I could assign more than one color label to photos.

Anthony Morganti: The New FREE Lightroom Clone Everybody is Talking About – RapidRAW

In this tutorial, I demonstrate how to use RapidRAW, a free and open-source photo editing application.

I see that 1.2.4 has been released. Still plenty of work left to be done, but he is working hard on it.

 

[Annie Ng]

I saw this today:

RapidRAW - An Open Source Lightroom Alternative for Mac, Windows & Linux

There's a brand new open source RAW editor on the scene. It goes by the name of RapidRAW and it's the work of a young developer who's keen to turn it into a capable and free photo editor for all photographers.

https://github.com/CyberTimon/RapidRAW

Initial support is very essential for these young projects. I just donated a few coffees to him, and I hope he can get this project going on.

Good for you. Have you installed and tried editing some Raw images?

Based on Andy Hutchison's video, it looks like it is the FastStone of Raw editors, in the sense that it has a very high capability to ease-of-use ratio.

Looks like the user interface is written in JSX, a JavaScript extension made for React, while the image processing is written in Rust. Very promising.

I tried the tool in my Xubuntu VM. It was offered as a ".deb" package and installed properly on Xubuntu. It could see my RAW photos (OM Systems OM-1 Mark II).

At the moment, it just offers basic editing, like exposure and contrast and some effects. It seems it does not even come with an "Auto" mode as a suggested starting point. And because it runs inside a VM without GPU acceleration, it runs very slowly.

However, I think this could shape up to be viable alternative of darktable or Rawtherapee, which in my opinion, is essential because I would like to see some user-friendly RAW developers in the Linux world.

--
Annie
https://smallpotato.photography/

 

[CAcreeks]

I tried the tool in my Xubuntu VM. It was offered as a ".deb" package and installed properly on Xubuntu. It could see my RAW photos (OM Systems OM-1 Mark II).

Smart! Hard for it to do any harm in a Linux VM.

At the moment, it just offers basic editing, like exposure and contrast and some effects. It seems it does not even come with an "Auto" mode as a suggested starting point. And because it runs inside a VM without GPU acceleration, it runs very slowly.

Thanks for your observations.

Darktable has two starting points in my brief experience: filmic rgb, and tone curves with it off. For me colors are often better than the initial defaults of PhotoLab, oddly enough.

However, I think this could shape up to be viable alternative of darktable or Rawtherapee, which in my opinion, is essential because I would like to see some user-friendly RAW developers in the Linux world.

I liked Darktable on Linux, but on MacOS it seems weird to have very little in the menu bar. True, it has so many controls that it could not be called "user-friendly" for most people. Andy Hutchison's video compared it to an airplane cockpit.

 

[bastibe]

Darktable has two starting points in my brief experience: filmic rgb, and tone curves with it off. For me colors are often better than the initial defaults of PhotoLab, oddly enough.

It now has a third, actually, which will become the default in the next version: Sigmoid. The general consensus is that Sigmoid is easier to use than filmic, while retaining most of its flexibility.

In particular, Sigmoid gives you a neat slider to choose what happens with oversaturated highlights: hue-shift them (like Capture One), or desaturate them (like DxO), or a mixture of both (like Lightroom, in most profiles).

This is one of the many fascinating details that Darktable gives you control over, while they're often hidden in other raw developers. I hope that RapidRAW will eventually give us a good level of control, too, in due time.

 

[John McCormack]

RapidRAW looks good for being only a few weeks old, but it had issues with opening my older RAW files from the Fujifilm XQ2 and Sony HX99. Maybe the XQ-2 XTrans files are too old and unreadable. And even DXO PL 7 doesn't support the HX99 RAW files, but most other programs do, e.g., FastStone, ACDsee, RawTherapee, etc. Export to JPEG is very slow.

 

[ggbutcher]

RapidRAW looks good for being only a few weeks old, but it had issues with opening my older RAW files from the Fujifilm XQ2 and Sony HX99. Maybe the XQ-2 XTrans files are too old and unreadable. And even DXO PL 7 doesn't support the HX99 RAW files, but most other programs do, e.g., FastStone, ACDsee, RawTherapee, etc. Export to JPEG is very slow.

Supporting raw formats is the main bugaboo with FOSS software. Herculean effort is required to reverse-engineer the plethora of formats. I predict he'll eventually move to libraw, where those reverse-engineering chops are most-focused these days.

Of note, rapidraw's entire processing pipeline is in the GPU. This is the way forward for image processing; piecemeal "per-operation" implementation does too much marshalling in/out of GPU memory. A few rapidraw "evaluators" at pixls.us identified some image degradation, that might be to using lower bit-depth data formats to accommodate less-performant GPUs, just a guess on my part.

Anyway, early days for what I think is a promising software.

 

[bakubo]

I saw this today:

RapidRAW - An Open Source Lightroom Alternative for Mac, Windows & Linux

There's a brand new open source RAW editor on the scene. It goes by the name of RapidRAW and it's the work of a young developer who's keen to turn it into a capable and free photo editor for all photographers.

https://github.com/CyberTimon/RapidRAW

Just thought I would mention that 1.2.10 was released today. So 10 updates since I started this thread. He is working hard on improving it.

 

[s_grins]

I saw this today:

RapidRAW - An Open Source Lightroom Alternative for Mac, Windows & Linux

There's a brand new open source RAW editor on the scene. It goes by the name of RapidRAW and it's the work of a young developer who's keen to turn it into a capable and free photo editor for all photographers.

https://github.com/CyberTimon/RapidRAW

Just thought I would mention that 1.2.10 was released today. So 10 updates since I started this thread. He is working hard on improving it.

Did you try it?

How it is different from v. 1.2.2?

every few days I check current status, but because I haven't found real changes first time, I obstain to install another newest version.

--
If you want to be equal, you have to be better...

 

[bakubo]

How it is different from v. 1.2.2?

every few days I check current status, but because I haven't found real changes first time, I obstain to install another newest version.

You can see all the changes for each release here:

Releases · CyberTimon/RapidRAW

A beautiful, non-destructive, and GPU-accelerated RAW image editor built with performance in mind. - CyberTimon/RapidRAW

github.com

 

[Chris Dubea]

I saw this today:

RapidRAW - An Open Source Lightroom Alternative for Mac, Windows & Linux

There's a brand new open source RAW editor on the scene. It goes by the name of RapidRAW and it's the work of a young developer who's keen to turn it into a capable and free photo editor for all photographers.

https://github.com/CyberTimon/RapidRAW

You might want to get listed on https://pixls.us/.

It's the GOTO resource for folks dabbling in open source image manipulation.

 

[John McCormack]

Gotta love the developer who's giving us a FREE, simple and effective RAW converter/editor without all the hassles of DT, RT, LRc, DXO.

See the updates here: https://github.com/CyberTimon/RapidRAW/releases

In case you missed Andy Hutchinson's review here's his YouTube video when RR first came out:

 

[bakubo]

I see that he is still making steady progress on it. Version 1.3.12 recently released:

GitHub - CyberTimon/RapidRAW: A beautiful, non-destructive, and GPU-accelerated RAW image editor built with performance in mind.

A beautiful, non-destructive, and GPU-accelerated RAW image editor built with performance in mind. - CyberTimon/RapidRAW

github.com

 

[Adam2]

It is pretty impressive how much work and effort he is putting into this project and leveraging all of the open source AI tools as well. Kudos to him!

 

[CAcreeks]

I see that he is still making steady progress on it. Version 1.3.12 recently released:

https://github.com/CyberTimon/RapidRAW

Thanks for the reminder. It certainly is Rapid! Starts up fast, reads folders quickly, etc.

The installer gives you the option of replacing or keeping the old one.

For Apple users, don't forget to run xattr -dr, otherwise MacOS claims the file is damaged.

 

[John McCormack]

Noise reduction doesn't work on my Win 11 PC.

 

[Boris22]

I have not been able to get rapidraw to run on my linux mint 21.3 machine so i am reluctant to try it on my win 11 computer which is a major PITA to reinstall. The linux machine no big deal. I am wary of funky programs that don't install properly the first time.It's not worth messing with any longer than I already have as I don't need it. just hoping for something new to play with.

 

[CAcreeks]

Noise reduction doesn't work on my Win 11 PC.

Yes, the Luminance and Color (Chroma) sliders move, but with little or no effect.

Darktable noise reduction isn't very effective, but some change is visible. Actually GIMP noise reduction often works better, applied after Raw conversion.

P.S. for Boris: the download page says Ubuntu 22.04 or 24.04, not 21.

 

[bakubo]

I have not checked his website for awhile so today I took a look. He is now on 1.4.3.

I see that 1.4.2 was a big improvement where he worked on the Exposure and Highlights controls and made them much better. The earlier versions didn't work so well.

And 1.4.1 was a big performance improvement release.

He is making very good, steady progress.

Releases · CyberTimon/RapidRAW

A beautiful, non-destructive, and GPU-accelerated RAW image editor built with performance in mind. - CyberTimon/RapidRAW

github.com