This 18-year-old’s free Lightroom replacement blows up Darktable’s UX

For over two decades now, Adobe has unilaterally dominated the image and video editing industry, and it bothers me as an amateur photographer. Photoshop, Lightroom CC, and Lightroom Classic are the industry standard for photo management and RAW file processing, and I wouldn’t mind paying per download, but no. Adobe treats its users with a monthly subscription.

In contrast, everyone who abandons the Adobe ship will inevitably hear about Darktable at some point. It’s a complete and completely competitive replacement for Lightroom Classic, but you still suffer from overly complex UI design that favors experts and alienates novices. Last year, 18-year-old GitHub developer CyberTimon killed two birds with one stone, creating RapidRAW as a personal challenge. This tool is fast becoming a firm favorite in the FOSS community, and mine too. Here’s why.

Adobe choked and Darktable alienated a necessity

Fortunately, everything is simple under the software

Darktable has a complex user interface

Allow me to preface the magnitude of this teenager’s achievements with the deplorable state of today’s image editors, leaders in the segment. Adobe Lightroom has become a shameless resource hoarder, much like Google Chrome, silently favoring only top-tier Mac and Windows versions. Of course, Adobe carefully maintains Lightroom CC and Classic in tandem, so you’re free to pick your poison. The former takes a cloud-based approach, allowing you to edit files on your smartphone’s excellent screen using the simplistic user interface including sliders and simple mask tools.

Paying for such cloud-based services on a recurring basis may make sense, but Adobe has repeatedly raised its prices without an equivalent improvement in performance or available features.

On the other hand, Lightroom Classic and its free alternative, Darktable, work with a full set of features on local files. Although it still relies on sliders, the user interface is extremely complex. I never had the courage to pay for Classic, but Darktable separates the image importing, rating, and sorting UI into a section called Lighttable, and you’ll never see the editing tools until switching to Darktable. Once there, it’s easy to make overlapping or conflicting changes to the image, such as adjusting exposure compensation twice in independent modules. The software issues a warning but does not prevent such duplication.

It does everything Adobe does for money for free, but I wouldn’t recommend this tool to anyone starting out in photography unless I want them to quit. The editing UI is also filled with collapsible subsections, so you can identify the ones you use the most and pin them. On the contrary, this design approach leaves the beginner not even knowing where to start. Remember, there is no trace of AI in Darktable.

RapidRAW has a promising future

Fast, easy-to-use, non-destructive editing for everyone

Replicating Adobe’s creations shouldn’t be difficult because image manipulation is algorithmic and non-proprietary, and that’s what RapidRAW does. It’s a functional, GPU-accelerated RAW image editor in a sub-20MB package, delivered via the Tauri framework with a Rust backend for robust performance. In the rendering pipeline, this software package uses a 32-bit image processing engine written in custom WGSL shaders.

In practice, this means your GPU handles every slider adjustment, crop, and mask. I now enjoy real-time editing previews. The interface prioritizes speed and aesthetic simplicity, mimicking the best parts of Lightroom CC with the functional prowess and sense of liberation I got from Darktable. The clean interface, powered by React and TypeScript, is well organized, balancing novice usability with the dexterity desired by experts. For most tools, auto-adjust provides a good starting point for additional artistic adjustments. All changes are stored non-destructively .rrdata sidecar files and not applied until export.

However, RapidRAW is new and mostly run by one person, and it shows. There are many features to add, some effects like film grain need to be refined for a more natural appearance, and Lensfun’s open source lens database doesn’t recognize all of my lenses. Nevertheless, it meets my basic requirements for accurate tone curves with flat line clipping, complex HSL color mixer, comprehensive detail enhancement and automatic lens corrections.

It’s still early, but RapidRAW also outperforms the Adobe suite with AI-based inpainting options. I can use the built-in local AI tool without configuration to intelligently mask the subject, isolate the sky, or mask the foreground with a single click. AI masks also intersect seamlessly with traditional radial and linear gradients for localized edits. However, Adobe’s Generative Fill is something to contend with with optional ComfyUI integration. I can connect the editor directly to a local Stable Diffusion server running on personal hardware, where I would have full control over the AI ​​models, their privacy, and delivery latency.

Image editing feels good again

I admit that my interest in photography has waned in recent years, as switching from Lightroom CC subscriptions to Darktable and other free image editors came with a steep learning curve. Its absence in RapidRAW is a commendable feat for experienced software developers, and even more so for a teenager. Yes, the community is driving and helping develop this well-documented project, but it is already usable on Windows, macOS and Linux, with Android versions in the works.

With fast performance, a clean user interface and no recurring subscriptions, RapidRAW proves once again that a determined enthusiast can outrun buildings full of enterprise developers in a short time, fueled by pure passion.