Raw Photo Development and Editing

RapidRAW is a non-destructive RAW photo editor and digital asset manager designed for decoding manufacturer RAW formats and applying tonal and color adjustments. It functions as a professional image processor that ensures original source data remains unmodified by saving all edits, masks, and crops to sidecar files. The software features a specialized color grading suite using 3D LUTs, color wheels, and HSL mixers, alongside AI-powered utilities for subject isolation, automatic masking, and generative inpainting for object removal. It distinguishes itself with AI-assisted photo retouching and a non-destructive asset management system that organizes libraries via metadata tags and star ratings without requiring database imports. Broad capabilities include high dynamic range merging, panorama stitching, and comprehensive batch processing for adjustments and exports. The system provides a wide range of image manipulation tools covering geometric corrections, film emulation, lens profile calibration, and multi-format export pipelines. Performance is supported by GPU acceleration for real-time rendering of image adjustments.

Darktable is a professional photography post-production suite and digital asset management system designed for the end-to-end processing of raw sensor data. It provides a comprehensive environment for photographers to perform color correction, exposure adjustment, and image retouching while maintaining a non-destructive workflow that keeps original source files unchanged. The software utilizes a modular plugin architecture and a pixelpipe processing pipeline to execute image manipulations, allowing for custom editing workflows. It incorporates a color-managed display pipeline that uses internal floating-point color spaces and ICC profiles to ensure consistent color representation. To maintain performance during complex editing, the application offloads pixel calculations to the graphics processing unit. Beyond image editing, the platform functions as a library organization tool for cataloging and searching through large collections of high-resolution photographs. It maintains a relational database of image attributes, ratings, and tags, enabling rapid filtering and retrieval of files within extensive archives. All adjustments are stored in separate sidecar files, ensuring that the original raw data remains protected throughout the entire post-production process.

Rawstudio is an open source raw-image converter written in GTK+.