RapidRAW: A non-destructive and GPU-accelerated RAW image editor
78 comments
·July 9, 2025strogonoff
Sharlin
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.
t0bia_s
Because those open-source editors are made by coders, not photographers.
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.
orbital-decay
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.
simonmales
Partner is getting into photography and I don't have the stomach to purchase some software.
I threw darktable and rawtherapee on the table but without technical grit you get nowhere really fast.
It's no my wheelhouse so they are mostly in there own.
josephg
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.
dsego
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.
strogonoff
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
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
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
I do a lot of mild re-lighting. If RawTherapee had the path masks from darktable I'd be more than happy.
actionfromafar
https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel there's also a fork to play with
donatzsky
ART (Another RawTherapee) has a more Lightroom-like approach to masking that you might like better.
account42
> 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).
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.
babuloseo
I like this one its simple and easy to use
strogonoff
May I ask why choose to shoot raw given simplicity and ease of use are priorities?
Sharlin
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.
Mashimo
I have the same approach. I really like "easy to use, hard to master" tools in general.
If you look at CaptureOne you can see how easy it is to edit a raw image. Most of the time it looks like the camera jpeg without having to tune anything. But then you have the options to go in depth.
Sometimes I have a photo session where everything is to my liking, just a bit of exposure and crop. Other times I shoot in night clubs with no flash and I have multiple layers of masks for a single photo.
A UI with decent defaults goes a long way into making a complex app easy to use.
inferiorhuman
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.
polishdude20
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?
TheDong
I mean, it's making 720px width jpg thumbnails using the CPU https://github.com/CyberTimon/RapidRAW/blob/fc21ede729b45d97...
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).
cybertimom
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
6x sounds bad. Might be a sign of vibe coding?
ImGonnaVibeCode
>React and Rust, with the support from Google Gemini
>immensely grateful for Google's Gemini
>AI Studio's free tier
maverwa
na, electron/tauri/"the web" has done this long before GPT happened.
cybertimom
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
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
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.
miladyincontrol
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.
Mashimo
Neat.
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.
Currently on a pirated copy of CaptureOne, but would rather use something open source (Or buy something affordable)
Do you have default camera and lens profiles build in?
dxroshan
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
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.
zero_bias
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
Springtime
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.
Xevion
Wild, I was literally just today looking at this repository to see how I could do raw image thumbnailing in Rust. Coincidences...
ioma8
Very nice, I will probably join your efforts on the project.
rkagerer
Is there a System Requirements page? What's the minimum OS version required?
bjelkeman-again
Looks very interesting. How much work would it be to get this code signed for the Mac?
notpushkin
Not much, but you might want to donate to help the author offset the Apple Developer account cost :^)
cybertimom
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 :)
mrbluecoat
> 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
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
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
I found it unnecessary to highlight their age.
brcmthrowaway
What is the difference between RAW and Bitmap. I thought Bitmap had no compression
mkl
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.
cfn
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).
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.