RAWmakase is a fast, non-destructive RAW photo developer for Linux, macOS and Windows, written in Rust. It opens RAW files from the cameras LibRaw supports, develops them with a Lightroom-style set of controls, and exports JPEG or 16-bit TIFF. It can also import a Lightroom Classic catalog with its ratings, flags, labels, keywords and compatible develop settings, without ever writing to the original catalog or your photos.

⬇ Download the latest version
_{macOS (Apple Silicon, Intel) · Linux (.deb, .rpm, Arch) · Windows (x86_64) · install notes}

It is a personal project in active development. It develops photos from almost every current camera; the exceptions are Sigma's Foveon cameras, monochrome cameras such as the Leica Monochrom, and DNGs that are already demosaiced ("linear" DNGs, such as merged HDR or panorama files). Rendering aims for close, not exact, Lightroom parity; see parity gaps.

• Develop: white balance and picker, one-click Auto tone and Auto white balance, exposure and tone, Shadows/Highlights, Clarity, Dehaze, point curves and levels, HSL color mixer, three-way color grading, detail (denoise and sharpening), crop, straighten and Transform, lens corrections, effects and calibration.
• Spot removal and masks (experimental, early): Heal and Clone spots and brushed areas with automatic sources, and brush, gradient and range masks with local adjustments, also imported from Lightroom. Not yet measured against Lightroom.
• Library: SQLite catalogs, folders, ratings, flags, color labels, filtering, and non-destructive Lightroom .lrcat import with folder relinking.
• Presets and profiles: 26 built-in presets and your Lightroom XMP presets; RAWmakase's own Standard and Color profiles for every camera with a usable color matrix, plus DCP and XMP camera profiles you import yourself.
• Non-destructive: originals are never modified. Edits live in the catalog, and all writes are atomic.
• Fast previews: every change renders at viewport size, with the color and tone stage on the GPU (Metal on macOS, Vulkan on Linux, DirectX 12 or Vulkan on Windows) and a CPU fallback.
• Command line: inspect, render, export thumbnails, import catalogs and profiles, and benchmark without the GUI.
• Updates: the app checks GitHub for new releases; the Apple Silicon and Windows installer builds update themselves, other installs are pointed at the release page.

• LUT support
• AI-powered masks and object removal
• Agentic features: e.g. culling assistance

Download the package for your system from GitHub Releases. Older releases may have only the original Arch-built Linux archive; use the requirements in that release's notes.

Point your coding agent to GitHub Releases and tell it to install the latest version for your operating system, or give it this prompt:

Install the latest release of RAWmakase for my operating system from https://github.com/pch/rawmakase/releases. Pick the right package for my OS and CPU architecture, verify it against the release's checksums, install it, and tell me how to launch it.

Install with Homebrew:

brew install --cask pch/tap/rawmakase

Update with brew upgrade --cask rawmakase.

Or install the DMG directly:

Choose rawmakase-v<version>-macos-arm64.dmg for Apple Silicon or rawmakase-v<version>-macos-x86_64.dmg for Intel. Open the DMG, drag RAWmakase into Applications, and launch it there. Release DMGs are signed and notarized, and include their imaging libraries; Homebrew is not required.

Download the package for your architecture (amd64/x86_64 or arm64/aarch64), then run the matching command from its folder, replacing the filename with the one you downloaded:

DEB/RPM packages include LibRaw and Little CMS. Arch packages use system dependencies. A working graphics driver is required; install your desktop's xdg-desktop-portal backend for native file dialogs.

AUR publication is paused. Install the Arch package directly, or (on Arch Linux ARM too) download and extract rawmakase-<version>-arch-recipe.tar.gz into an empty folder and build as a normal user:

makepkg -si

The development recipe is in packaging/arch/rawmakase-git.

The rawmakase-<version>-<arch>-linux.tar.gz download contains the same bundled imaging libraries as the DEB/RPM packages. Extract it and run ./usr/bin/rawmakase from the extracted folder. Keep the whole directory together. It requires the same OS/runtime baseline as the packages above; it is not a fully static build.

Run rawmakase-v<version>-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc-setup.exe. It installs for your user account only, without administrator rights, and adds RAWmakase to the Start menu. The installer is not code-signed yet, so Microsoft Defender SmartScreen may warn about an unrecognized app: choose More info → Run anyway. For a copy without installing, extract rawmakase-v<version>-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.zip and run rawmakase.exe from the extracted folder.

RAWmakase checks GitHub for a newer release after launch and once an hour, and shows a notice when one is out (turn the check off in Preferences). The Apple Silicon DMG and the Windows installer download and install the update themselves; Intel Macs, the Linux tarball, the Windows archive and package-managed installs (Homebrew, DEB, RPM, Arch) are pointed at the release page or their package manager. Settings and catalogs are kept separately from the installed application, so reinstalling over an old version loses nothing.

After first-run setup, RAWmakase asks once whether to send an anonymous usage report once a week: the version, the system and how it was installed, with no identifier, files or photos. It is off until you agree, the question shows the exact report, and Preferences > General changes the answer. DO_NOT_TRACK=1 turns it off. See docs/usage-stats.md and the totals at stats.rawmakase.com.

Each new packaged release includes SHA256SUMS. After downloading it beside your package, verify downloaded files on Linux with sha256sum --ignore-missing -c SHA256SUMS. On macOS, use shasum -a 256 <downloaded-file> and compare the result with that file's entry in SHA256SUMS.

You need Rust 1.98 or newer, a C++17 compiler with OpenMP, pkg-config, LibRaw 0.22 or newer, and Little CMS 2.

• Arch Linux: sudo pacman -S rust base-devel pkgconf libraw lcms2
• macOS: brew install pkg-config libraw little-cms2 libomp. Use a native rustup toolchain (aarch64-apple-darwin on Apple Silicon); LIBOMP_PREFIX points the build at a non-Homebrew OpenMP.

make                                  # cargo build --release --locked
make install PREFIX="$HOME/.local"    # binary, desktop entry, icon and licenses

make install never builds, so make && sudo make install PREFIX=/usr does not compile as root. make uninstall removes the installed files.

On macOS, packaging/macos/app.sh builds target/release/RAWmakase.app, which you can open from Finder. It uses the Homebrew libraries installed on your Mac and is not a signed, self-contained distribution.

rawmakase                     # reopen the last catalog
rawmakase Photos.rawmakase    # open a catalog
rawmakase photo.dng           # add the photo's folder to the last catalog and edit it

Photos are edited through the Library. A photo dropped onto the window or passed on the command line has its folder added to the open catalog, then opens in Develop; edits it got in earlier releases (its photo.rawmakase.json) come along. You can also drop a catalog onto the window. The first launch offers to create a catalog or import a Lightroom catalog; both are available later from the Catalog menu. The camera's embedded JPEG shows immediately while the RAW develops.

Useful shortcuts:

Double-click a slider to reset it, or type its value for precision.

Every camera with a usable color matrix gets two profiles of RAWmakase's own: RAWmakase Standard (the camera's color matrix with the DNG default tone curve) and RAWmakase Color (a mild look on top of it). A new photo uses a compatible imported Adobe Color, then Adobe Standard, then a DNG's own profile, and RAWmakase Color when it has none of those. No Adobe profiles are bundled. For Lightroom's color, import DCP and XMP profiles you are licensed to use (for example from your own Lightroom or Camera Raw installation, or published third-party DCPs such as RawTherapee's) from the Profile menu in Develop, from Preferences, or with rawmakase import-profiles. On a Mac or PC, the Profile menu also looks in Camera Raw's profile folder and, when it finds profiles filed under the camera's name, offers to import them in one click. Imported profiles are copied into RAWmakase's own data directory. See Lightroom profiles.

rawmakase inspect photo.dng
rawmakase thumbnail photo.dng embedded.jpg
rawmakase render photo.dng edited.jpg --exposure 0.7 --max-edge 2400
rawmakase render photo.dng edited.tiff --xmp preset.xmp
rawmakase render photo.dng edited.jpg --auto
rawmakase import-catalog Lightroom.lrcat Photos.rawmakase
rawmakase help

render starts from the photo's default look, or from an edit a release before 0.1.8 saved as a sidecar (photo.dng.rawmakase.json beside the photo, or in the data directory's sidecars/ folder, whichever is newer). --recipe replaces that starting point with a saved RAWmakase preset; --xmp applies an XMP preset on top of it, so settings the XMP leaves out keep the starting point's values. For a render that depends on nothing saved, pass --recipe. It does not read edits from a catalog yet, so exporting Develop edits is done from the app. It needs --overwrite to replace an existing file.

• Catalogs, with every edit: the .rawmakase file you choose.
• Edits saved beside photos by releases before 0.1.8 (photo.dng.rawmakase.json, with spots and masks in photo.dng.rawmakase-local.json, or in the data directory's sidecars/ folder for read-only locations) are brought into the catalog when you add their folder, and left as they are.
• Profiles, presets, previews and session state: ~/Library/Application Support/RAWmakase on macOS, $XDG_DATA_HOME/rawmakase (default ~/.local/share/rawmakase) on Linux, %APPDATA%\RAWmakase on Windows. RAWMAKASE_DATA_DIR overrides it.

Exports are always sRGB. The display defaults to sRGB; pick a monitor ICC profile under More only if your compositor does not already manage color.

Start with the code map and the architecture guide. The website source and deployment guide live in website/. The opt-in usage stats service lives in stats/.

make check    # cargo fmt --check, clippy -D warnings, cargo test

The repository contains no RAW photos, Lightroom catalogs or camera profiles, so tests that need them are ignored by default. Run them with your own files:

RAWMAKASE_FIXTURES=~/raw-fixtures cargo test --release --test raw_fixtures -- --ignored --nocapture

The public part of the color corpus runs with every cargo test: synthetic chart DNGs rendered on the CPU and compared with committed snapshots and with Camera Raw's renders of the same charts, so a color change beyond its tolerances (ΔE00 0.5 per patch, 0.1 on a case's mean) is noticed. The GPU preview path is covered by the hardware tests below, not by this suite. When a change is intended, RAWMAKASE_BLESS=1 cargo test --test color rewrites the snapshots, and also the charts and the Camera Raw baseline (tests/corpus/camera-raw/baseline.json). Read the baseline diff on its own before committing: it records how far renders are from Camera Raw, and accepting a larger distance should be a decision, not a side effect. Commit the files with the reason.

GPU tests are ignored as well; run them with cargo test --lib gpu -- --ignored on a machine with a compute adapter.

Application CI runs make check, a release build, an Arch package build and a cargo deny license and advisory audit. Website-only pushes and pull requests run the Hugo build instead, and stats-only changes run the stats service's tests; edits to either workflow also run the workflow linter. A stable vX.Y.Z tag on main matching Cargo.toml builds both macOS DMGs, the Linux packages and the Windows installer. Publication waits for Apple notarization and package checks, then refreshes the website's download links. See packaging/RELEASING.md for credentials, rehearsal runs, supported systems and the AUR pause.

RAWmakase is released under the MIT License. The DNG default tone curve and temperature table come from the Adobe DNG SDK, under the license in licenses/Adobe-DNG-SDK.txt. The interface font, Inter, is under the SIL Open Font License (licenses/Inter-OFL.txt), and the icons are Lucide's, under the ISC License (licenses/Lucide-ISC.txt). LibRaw, Little CMS and the Rust dependencies keep their own licenses; see dependencies.

Adobe, Lightroom and Camera Raw are trademarks of Adobe Inc. RAWmakase is not affiliated with or endorsed by Adobe.