A New, Free And Open Source Raw Editor Is In Development – And Its Looking Great!

Raw editors come and go, and we all have our favourite raw editors. Maybe you are a fan of Adobe’s Lightroom, or Luminar Neo, or maybe you like supporting free software like Darktable and RawTherapee. Whatever you use, it’s great to know that you can try other software for free. 

What is even more exciting though, is the prospect of new software, being developed by passionate people who love photography and are not happy with current software.

A Deep Dive

From seemingly nowhere has come RapidRaw, “A beautiful, non-destructive, and GPU-accelerated RAW image editor built with performance in mind“. Developed by Timon Kach, RapidRaw aims to be a modern high-performance alternative to Lightroom and equivalents. 

I’ve taken an early look at this software, and I’ll give you my thoughts on this very early version. 

Currently you can load up one folder at a time for your raw edits, which then gives you access to all the sub-folders. The images are displayed in grid format so you can easily view each and every one of them. Currently there seems to be no way to change the size of the previews, or to only show the raw files, however, like a lot of functions that are missing at the moment, it is still very early in development. 

To open an image, you simply double click the images that you wish to edit. That will then bring up the main editor. I have closed the file system on the right, to show you how the screen looks full-screen.

For many people the editing screen will look very familiar!

The first section gives you the “Basic” adjustments of exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites and blacks (as you can see in the above image). This is followed by a very simple but powerful “Curves” adjustment module that gives you all you would expect from a curves adjustment panel.

Below this you have three more modules, which you can see in these images.

“Color” gives you these options:

“Details” gives you these options:

“Effects” gives you these options:

On the very far right tab, you have a few more little options that you will need in your editing. The very first one is the “Crop and Transform” tab. As you can see from this tab, it has most options you will need for cropping and rotating your images, and it all works very well in this version.

The next tab below the crop and transform tab is the “Masking” section. The first two options are AI based, and I have had various success with them. The “Subject” detect did not work in this example, however, the “Foreground” detect worked perfectly fine. The remaining masking features worked as they should.

The next two tabs are currently not working and are ready for future updates. These are “Presets” and “AI Tools”. Again, these should be another set of useful tools once they are up and running.

And finally, the last tab at the bottom of the stack is “Export”. As you can see, it has all the basic requirements needed to save your files.

How Is RapidRaw In Use?

Sliders work in real-time, so you see exactly what is changing before your eyes. The sliders all seem to work well, however, a few of them just feel a little “off” in the power they supply when adjusting. The highlights slider seems to cause a greyish tint when you drop below -50% on some images. Again, it is VERY early days yet, and there are going to be a lot of tweaks made before it actually gets a release.

The White Balance sliders do not give you any idea of the Kelvin, but you will know instinctively that sliding to the left makes the images cooler and to the right makes your images warmer.

Vibrance and saturation work well, as does the colour mixer option. I actually liked how these worked, they are really simple and effective, something that some other free software could learn from!

The sharpness adjustment seems very un-calibrated at the moment, but I am sure that it will be an easy fix and will work fine.

Initial impressions

With all this taken into account, and understanding that the program is being written in the spare time of an 18 year old, with no previous experience in coding, this is a great start to a simple, but effective piece of editing software.

It is available for Windows, Mac and Linux, which is very nice to see in this day and age. I have been trying out the Windows version, so it would be nice to see how other version of this software perform.

You can download the software from its GitHub page here, and also read in much more detail about the project: DOWNLOAD HERE (OPENS GITHUB PAGE)

Remember guys and gals, it is FREE! So just give it a go and help the developer if you can by giving feedback.