Hi PH! Greengrocer by day, building a WebGPU RAW photo editor by night

Hi everyone! 🇮🇹

My name is Alessandro Di Vito, and I’m thrilled to finally join the Product Hunt community. I wanted to share a quick introduction and a story about putting a dream on hold, and then reclaiming it a decade later through technology.

Eleven years ago, I was an aspiring professional photographer. My career was just starting to take off with international contest placements and publication offers (including one for Fiat Brazil). But that same year, my first son was born. I needed immediate stability for my family, so I made the hard choice to put my camera away and take over my family's local grocery business.

But the passion never really left me. Over the past few months, working in my spare time inside an old cold storage room that I converted into a tiny office, I managed to build Luminens.

Luminens is a 16-bit browser RAW photo editor powered by WebGPU, WebGL, and libraw-wasm (packaged as a desktop app via Tauri). I built about 100% of it using AI-assisted development (Lovable, Vscode, Trae, ecc...), tying the final custom performance pieces together myself.

To test the engine, I recently opened a heavy 200MB Hasselblad RAW file on my modest Ryzen 4000 PC with integrated graphics. It handled the file smoothly in real-time inside the browser. Out of curiosity, I tried opening the exact same file on Photopea on the same machine, and it completely crashed the browser. That was the moment I realized I had built something real.

I’m currently working to refine the UX and security before the official Product Hunt launch.

I’d love to connect with other indie makers, developers, and photography enthusiasts here. Feel free to ask me anything about the WebGPU pipeline or the journey!

Alessandro Di Vito Founder of Luminens