First release.
Added
- Editing. Real RAW decode through Apple's engine, rendered live on the
GPU with Metal-backed Core Image. Light and color: exposure, contrast,
highlights, shadows, whites, blacks, temperature, tint, vibrance,
saturation, a tone curve, and an eight-band color mixer. Color grading by
tonal zone (shadow/mid/highlight hue and strength, plus balance) and a
monochrome mixer weighted by the color mixer's luminance values. Portrait
blur graded in real ƒ-stops from Vision subject masks, person masks, or a
monocular depth map (Depth Anything V2, downloaded on demand) with a
movable focus plane inspectable in a 3D scene. Local adjustments: radial,
linear, and subject masks, each with luminance-range confinement. Detail:
clarity, sharpening, noise reduction, vignette, and film grain with its own
coarseness control; RAW files add decode-time color-noise and moiré
reduction. Crop and straighten with aspect presets, an arc ruler, and a
one-click headshot crop. Six built-in presets plus user-saved ones, and
named versions. Adjustments are scrubbed directly on the photo, with a hold
for before/after. - Library. Folder-based, no import step. Camera cards read straight from
the card. A justified gallery grouped by day, plus grid and sortable
Finder-style list views. Filters, search, and starring to mark and cull
keepers. Export to full-resolution JPEG, HEIF, or 16-bit TIFF with quality
and sizing control. - Non-destructive sidecars. Edits live in a small sidecar file beside each
photo; the original is never written to. For camera cards, read-only or
network volumes, and cloud-synced folders (OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive,
iCloud Drive), the sidecar is kept on the Mac instead, in
~/Library/Application Support/Chiaro/Sidecars/. - Agent surface. An MCP server at
http://127.0.0.1:24242/mcp, on
whenever the app runs, with ten tools:list_photos,get_edit,
set_edit,get_stats,apply_preset,list_presets,set_starred,
open_photo,get_preview, andexport. Chiaro serves its own editing
skill over the MCP prompts primitive, so a connecting agent can fetch the
working method, every control's range and traps, and look recipes. A
status pill shows what a connected agent is doing while it works, and
soft-locks manual input so the two of you aren't fighting the same slider. - Start screen. A welcome card on first run; after that, the last edit as
a hero card, recent edits, recent folders, and any mounted camera card. - Distribution. A DMG installer, a Homebrew tap
(arjunphull123/tap/chiaro), and an in-app check against GitHub releases
that points you at the release page when a newer version is out.