Orion 0.4.0-alpha.1 — first unofficial build

Unofficial alpha. Apple silicon, macOS 14 or later.

Orion is a fast, subscription-free RAW editor for macOS. This is the first build
outside the source tree — it opens raw files, develops them on the GPU, and
exports. It is an alpha and it is versioned like one.

Install

Drag Orion to Applications, then open it once from the right-click menu:
right-click Orion.app → Open → Open. macOS blocks a normal double-click
because this build is signed ad-hoc rather than with a paid Apple Developer
certificate, and is not notarized. Same binary either way; the warning is about
who vouched for it. If no Open button appears:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Orion.app

What works

• Sony ARW decode, RCD demosaic, scene-linear Rec.2020 pipeline, AgX display transform
• Exposure, contrast, highlights/shadows, whites/blacks, white balance with an eyedropper, vibrance/saturation
• Tone curve, colour mixer across eight hue bands, three-way colour grading
• Clarity (local Laplacian), dehaze (dark channel prior), exposure fusion, one-click Auto
• Creative LUTs — .cube, tetrahedral
• Crop, rotate, straighten; lens corrections from lensfun's database
• Profiled wavelet denoise, capture sharpening
• Local adjustments — linear and radial gradients dragged on the canvas, brush strokes painted on it, and up to four components combined per mask with add, subtract and intersect
• Folder browse, filmstrip, star ratings and reject flags, before/after compare
• Export to JPEG, PNG and TIFF, with resize
• Edits go to XMP sidecars beside your photos. The raw file is never modified.

What does not

• Other Bayer cameras decode through LibRaw but are far less tested than ARW. Fuji X-Trans is not supported.
• No luminance or colour range masks, no spot removal, no presets, no copy/paste of settings across a selection, no batch export. Those are why this is not called v1.
• 16-bit export is not wired up; TIFF is 8-bit for now.
• A brush stroke longer than 256 dabs is truncated, and says so on stderr.
• Intel Macs are not built.

Performance

On an M-series Mac at preview resolution, an exposure drag recomputes three of
118 nodes in 9.1 ms at the 95th percentile. The heaviest single control is
dehaze at 108 ms, which is a one-off render rather than a drag.

Versioning

Minor tracks the milestone in flight — M4, local adjustments, is where the work
is now. v1.0.0 is reserved for the feature list in planning/FEATURES.md, not
for the first build that runs on someone else's machine.