The topic RapidRAW is the free, open-source Lightroom alternative I’ve been waiting for is currently the subject of lively discussion — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies’ decisions and competitors’ reactions can quickly change the picture.
Adobe has a bit of a stranglehold on the market when it comes to creative tools, but there’s actually a pretty varied array of alternatives to its most popular tools. Even Lightroom, which is used for developing RAW photos, has well-known competitors like Darktable.
However, Darktable has some significant drawbacks compared to Lightroom, which means Adobe is still the king. But there’s a newcomer on the scene you probably haven’t heard of, and it’s actually the most exciting option out there right now. It’s called RapidRAW, and it’s not only pretty solid already, it’s evolving very fast. Plus, it works on all desktop platforms — yes, including Linux.
Considering the large fees associated with Adobe Lightroom, it’s no wonder people have resorted to finding alternatives that are more reasonable in terms of costs. At the same time, Adobe’s apps are fairly opaque and are tied with some questionable practices, such as automatically signing users up for having their work used to train AI models.
I was also tempted to switch to Darktable at one point, but when I tried it, I found an app that’s just too complex and hard to get to grips with. There are tons of settings and options available, but it makes the act of editing a photo so much more convoluted than the simple UI of Lightroom allows. Without overly complicated menus and a handful of sliders, Lightroom can make photos look great, and on top of that, it features automatic adjustments that make things way easier. Most of the time, these automatic adjustments get you very close to the ideal settings, or at least halfway there.
As a result, I was just never able to embrace Darktable as an alternative. I tried another similar option called RawTherapee, but it suffered from similar issues. But RapidRAW could be a breakthrough for me.
I heard about RapidRAW from a friend as a potential Lightroom alternative for Linux, and I was immediately drawn to it for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, its design. RapidRAW looks and feels like an app designed for the current year, not something that has stuck around since the mid-2000s because “looks don’t matter” or “it’s all about functionality”.
This app packs all the basic necessities for editing RAW photos, including lens corrections, light and color adjustments, detail refinement, and more. But it’s all presented in a fairly easy-to-understand UI, with just a few sliders to tweak the values you want and a handful of screens for additional features. There aren’t 10 sub-divisions to each page that you need to navigate to get just the right setting, or a bunch of confusing names for settings that only the most hardcore professionals would know. It’s actually usable by normal human beings.
I also love that the app is very small and lightweight. Depending on the format and platform you choose to download, the installer can be as small as 20MB, and even the largest downloads are only around 100MB — and that’s for the Linux AppImage file, which is a fully self-contained app that runs out of this single file.
Finally, it’s a free app and it’s fully open-source, with very active development and a transparent process. The app is available on GitHub with numerous releases in the past few months, and the developer often responds to issues and discussions started by users on the page. It’s very encouraging for the future of the app. I’ve actually talked about RapidRAW before on XDA, and I decided to revisit it now because of how much has changed in the three months since that last piece.
Another factor in favor of RapidRAW compared to something like Darktable is that it actually supports some automatic adjustments to make things a lot easier. In the image editor itself, you can apply automatic settings to adjust the brightness, exposure, and so on with one click. I won’t say they always get the right settings, but much like with Photoshop, they often get you closer to an ideal result, and you can make extra tweaks relatively easily.
One thing that’s particularly notable is the recent addition of an AI denoise feature, something that’s legitimately game-changing compared to other open-source apps. Heck, even Affinity, which is a major competitor to Photoshop, still requires me to denoise manually, and often with less than ideal results.
In my previous coverage, I tried RapidRAW’s automatic denoising feature and I was disappointed to find that it was close to unusable for my needs due to how soft the final image became. Details were lost to the point small text become unreadable, which was a major deal-breaker. But in a recent update (to version 1.5.2), RapidRAW introduced AI-based denoising, not too dissimilar from what Photoshop itself offers, and something I’ve never seen anywhere else.
And the results are actually quite good. I wouldn’t say they’re on the same level as Photoshop, as they can still be a little on the soft side, but text is perfectly readable and the image looks much cleaner this way. I’d recommend setting the quality slider to 100 each time for the best results, but this is leagues better than the previous implementation. For reference, here’s my previous test:
The biggest problem with this feature right now is that it doesn’t yet support GPU acceleration, and trying to run this workload on the CPU is extremely intensive and takes a while to conclude. On both devices I tested, this took around 2 minutes and 20 seconds, and on the M4 Mac Mini specifically, that’s a stark contrast from the roughly 40 seconds the same process takes in Photoshop. However, this limitation is something the developer acknowledges, and GPU acceleration is planned for a future update. Typically, that might be frustrating, but the developer behind RapidRAW has proven to be very active, so I have hope it will come sooner rather than later.
Darktable improves technical detail and photographic results
I didn’t want to just try RapidRAW to talk about the UI and features and leave it at that. I legitimately want this app to be part of my workflow in future, so I played with it for a while to understand its shortcomings.
There are a couple of notable ones pertaining to noise reduction right now. One is that to use noise reduction, you need to do it by interacting with an image’s thumbnail, not in the image editor itself. The intended workflow in RapidRAW is to start with denoising, export the denoised image (saved as a TIFF file) and then make edits to it. This is mostly fine and kind of similar to how AI denoising in Photoshop used to work, but the UI isn’t as clear about what you can do and how to do it.
But this leads to another notable problem right now. RapidRAW’s lens correction features don’t work on denoised images. In a bug report on GitHub, the developer says it’s because the features requires access to the lens data, which is removed in the denoised file, but it’s strange that manually selecting the lens profile still doesn’t allow this to work. Thankfully, this is also being looked into, so hopefully it’s something we’ll see improved in a future release.
Then there’s the actual results you get when editing with RapidRAW, and while they are satisfactory, it can be a bit of a mixed bag. In some images, like the one below, results are pretty solid.
Aside from the lack of lens corrections, this worked quite well. Noise reduction was effective, colors and brightness were fairly easy to get down, and even the automatic adjustments were close to what I would want. One thing I always do when editing photos in RapidRAW is change the tone mapper from the “Basic” setting to “AgX”. I’m not too familiar with this term, but I noticed the Basic setting could result in overly saturated colors and color banding, whereas AgX was a bit more natural.
However, in more extreme scenarios, I wasn’t able to get it to perform quite as well. Take a look at this image:
On its own, it looks alright. Details are visible well enough and colors and brightness are reasonably realistic and pleasant. The softness of small text does start to become more noticeable here, though, and it can be uncomfortable to read the small lettering on the screen.
Now, here’s what I was able to achieve by editing the same photo in Lightroom with barely any extra tweaks:
You can clearly see this looks much better. Of course, the removal of chromatic aberration is one big point in favor of Lightroom, but I already mentioned why lens corrections aren’t possible with denoised images in RapidRAW. But even outside of that, Lightroom was able to bring out more details in the shadows of the image compared to RapidRAW without blowing out other areas of the image or washing them out.
The problem that RapidRAW seems to have is that both the shadow and black level sliders affect large areas of the image, rather than just the darkest parts. It feels as though there should be a threshold within the brightness range of the image for what these sliders affect, or maybe the effect of the slider should scale in relation to the original brightness. but as it stands, if I want to bring out details from the darkest areas of the image, the red Switch 2 box becomes far too bright, which I can only counter by lowering contrast, which makes the image appear more washed out.
Still, this is me taking a phone of a screen next to very dark elements, which is a challenging situation. For most normal photos, I think you can get pretty solid results with RapidRAW.
At this stage, RapidRAW may not be the most suitable replacement for Lightroom just yet, but things have evolved massively since I wrote about the app back in January. The current iteration has better performance and the new denoising method is on a completely different level of quality that actually makes this totally usable.
There are some logic and workflow tweaks that still need to be made to deliver better results, but here’s the thing. There have already been nine new releases for this app since I covered it back in January, and I’m not just talking about bug fixes. Almost all of these updates add big new features and improvements, and this developer is working hard to make the app better. Whatever improvements are still needing to be made, I have confidence that they’re being worked on as I write this. I highly recommend checking out RapidRAW and keeping its GitHub page bookmarked, because it’s probably going to be the open-source app to beat in this field.