Launched this week
Redlamp
Native, open-source RAW Lightroom alternative editor for Mac
64 followers
Native, open-source RAW Lightroom alternative editor for Mac
64 followers
Redlamp is a native, open-source RAW photo editor for Apple Silicon, built from scratch in Swift and Metal. Lightroom's workflow, with no subscription and no cloud.
Hi Pedro, I know first hand about the "and things got confusing" times. I started in photography / Lightroom right when they were pushing Lightroom CC. Finally after years of literal FOMO, I left town for the week, got a hotel room, and just learned everything about Lightroom Classic and how to migrate over to it during that week. True story.
My product question for you is what sort of guidance do you have to help photographers migrate? For example, will they have to start over with their keywords, ratings, etc.?
@sara_ford_goog Hi Sara,
Really good question - my initial set of milestones aimed primarily at the 'Develop' module. I wanted to demonstrate building it was viable and I made a conscious decision to leave the Library/Catalog out. It's now very clear this is genuinely possible and there's clear demand and interest. As a consequence, the Library is already under heavy development and being tested with catalogs of 2m+ photos. Once that's out there and stabilised, a Lightroom migration will be added, specifically addressing your question.
Hope that hepls!
Hi Pedro, that makes perfect sense to try it one module at a time. Good luck with the launch and the additional modules!
I'm surprised no one made this sooner! I will be testing this out tonight.
I have longed for a Lightroom Equivalent without the cost.
@reuben_hodgkins Thanks! As it turns out, there are a few options out there, Darktable in particular is extremely powerful but it's not known for being particularly easy to use. My approach here was really to go after familiarity - if there's nothing new to learn there's no friction to adoption.
Hope you enjoy it - keep in mind this is still in pre-alpha so rough edges and bugs are to be expected.
built from scratch in Swift/Metal rather than wrapping an existing engine is the part that surprises me, RAW decoding is the kind of thing I'd expect to outsource to libraw or dcraw and spend your own time on the UI instead. what made you go all the way down to writing your own decoder - was it a performance ceiling with the existing libraries, or more about not wanting a GPL dependency sitting under an MPL project, or something else entirely
@galdayan
Handling raw files is only a small part of the rendering pipeline and does not constitute the engine. Redlamp does use LibRaw, and this is described prominently on the website and github. The actual engine is fully custom though.
(note that your comment has been flagged as likely AI)