# RapidRaw RapidRaw (stylized RapidRAW) is a free and open source **RAW photo editor**. It's non-destructive, GPU-accelerated, and weighs less than 20 MB. The goal is clear: a fast, lightweight alternative to [[Adobe Lightroom]], without the subscription. It's created by Timon Käch, a developer and photographer from Lucerne, Switzerland, who started the project at 18 as a personal challenge: build a faster editing tool for his own photography, and learn image processing, [[Rust]], and GPU programming along the way. The project has more than 10,000 stars on GitHub. ## Why it's interesting Photo editing has long been dominated by subscription software. The open source alternatives (darktable, RawTherapee) are powerful but famously intimidating. RapidRaw takes a different path: speed and a clean UI first, instead of matching every feature of the big players. The developer is open about the fact that it's still maturing. ## Features **Editing** - Real-time, GPU-accelerated adjustments - Non-destructive: edits live in `.rrdata` sidecar files, and your originals are never touched - Basic, color, curves, detail, and effects panels: tone curves, HSL mixer, color grading wheels, clarity, sharpening, AgX tone mapping, film emulations - Crop, guided perspective correction, lens correction (Lensfun database) - Retouching: clone, heal, liquify, skin smoothing - Layered masks: brush, gradients, and AI-based subject, sky, foreground, and depth masks **Library** - Recursive folders, virtual copies, star ratings, color labels, tags - Culling, presets, copy/paste settings, batch editing and export - Customizable workspaces, with editing directly from the library grid - Camera tethering (macOS and Linux) with live view and remote controls **AI, your way** - Built-in and local (free): AI masking, automatic tagging with a CLIP model, basic generative replace - Self-hosted: connect your own [[ComfyUI]] server through the RapidRAW-AI-Connector to run custom diffusion workflows - Cloud: an optional subscription is planned for people who don't want to set up anything I really like that tiered approach. It's a good example of [[Bring your own model (BYOM)]]: local by default, your own infrastructure if you want more, and a paid cloud only as a convenience. **Formats** - RAW files from 50+ camera brands (Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Olympus, Panasonic, Leica, Hasselblad, Phase One, etc.), decoded with rawler from dnglab - Also opens JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, TIFF, JXL, EXR, BMP, GIF, QOI - Exports JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, TIFF (8/16-bit), JXL, and LUTs (`.cube`, `.3dl`) ## Tech stack - [[Rust]] backend - [[Tauri]] for the desktop app - [[React]] and [[TypeScript]] for the UI, with [[Zustand]] for state - WGPU with custom WGSL shaders for rendering The blog is worth a read if you build desktop apps. Timon wrote about how the WGPU renderer works, refactoring a 6,000-line `App.tsx`, and why "vibecoding" only gets you so far when you implement color science (see [[Vibe Coding]]). ## Platforms and install - Windows 10+, macOS 13+, Linux (Ubuntu 22.04+, Flatpak via Flathub, `.deb`, AUR), and Android with a limited UI - Download from GitHub Releases, or build from source (needs Rust and Node.js) - Licensed under the [[Affero General Public License (AGPL)|AGPL-3.0]] - Free. Supported by donations (Ko-fi, GitHub Sponsors) ## On the roadmap GPU-accelerated astrophotography stacking, better support for older GPUs, and the cloud AI service. ## References - Official website: https://getrapidraw.com/ - Documentation: https://getrapidraw.com/docs/ - Blog: https://getrapidraw.com/blog/ - Source code: https://github.com/CyberTimon/RapidRAW ## Related - [[Adobe Lightroom]] - [[Tauri]] - [[Rust]] - [[ComfyUI]] - [[Bring your own model (BYOM)]] - [[Affero General Public License (AGPL)]] - [[Google Photos]]