Rawtonic 0.1.0-alpha.7.1

A fix release for the seventh alpha of Rawtonic: a free, open-source RAW developer for photographers.

Warning

This is an early alpha. Features are still missing and you will run into bugs. Rawtonic never writes into your RAW files, but keep backups as you would with any new software.

alpha.7 plus one fix; nothing else changed, and edits and libraries look and open exactly as in alpha.7.

Updating from alpha.7: replace the app (macOS: drag the new Rawtonic to Applications; Linux: AppImageUpdate or Gear Lever, or download the new AppImage).

Install

macOS (Apple Silicon)

1. Download Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.7.1_aarch64.dmg below (Apple Silicon, macOS 13 or later).
2. Open it and drag Rawtonic to Applications.
3. Double-click Rawtonic. The app is signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so macOS opens it after its usual "downloaded from the Internet" question; no Terminal step any more. (If you allowed an earlier alpha with xattr -cr, you don't need to do anything else.)

macOS on Intel (experimental)

Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.7.1_x86_64.dmg is a separate build for Intel Macs, installed the same way and also signed and notarized. It is experimental: so far it has run only under Rosetta 2 on Apple Silicon Macs, never on an Intel Mac. Intel processors and Intel or AMD graphics, its speed there, macOS 13–14 on Intel and tethering a real camera are not tested. If you try it, please tell us how it runs (Report a problem… or a GitHub issue).

Linux (x86-64)

1. Download Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.7.1_amd64.AppImage below.
2. Make it executable and start it:

   chmod +x Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.7.1_amd64.AppImage
   ./Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.7.1_amd64.AppImage

   It runs on Ubuntu 22.04 or later, Debian 12, Fedora and other distributions with glibc 2.35 or later. If it does not start, install FUSE 2 (sudo apt install libfuse2t64 on Ubuntu 24.04, libfuse2 on older Ubuntu and Debian) or start it with --appimage-extract-and-run.
3. Updates. AppImageUpdate or Gear Lever update the AppImage to the next release when you ask them to; they download only the changed parts. Rawtonic itself tells you at startup when a new release exists (at most once a day; turn it off in Preferences) but never downloads or installs it.

Windows is not available in this alpha.

Fixed since alpha.7

• AI masks show on the first open of a photo. When a photo with a stored preview was opened for the first time in a session, its AI masks (Subject, Sky, Depth, People, Object), AI patches and Relight rendered empty: a black mask overlay and layer thumbnail, and the layer had no effect until the photo was opened again. They now show and work right away.

Everything new in alpha.7 and its known limits: alpha.7 release notes and CHANGELOG.md.

Source code of the camera libraries

Tethering uses libgphoto2, libltdl (GNU Libtool) and, in the AppImage, libusb, under the GNU LGPL 2.1 or later. Their unmodified source tarballs are attached below (libgphoto2-2.5.34.tar.bz2, libtool-2.6.2.tar.xz, libusb-1.0.30.tar.bz2); how they are built: scripts/tether/build_libgphoto2.sh.

Feedback

You can report a problem from inside Rawtonic (Report a problem…), with an optional screenshot and photo file, without a GitHub account: you see exactly what will be sent before you click Send, and you can instead copy the report or open it as a GitHub issue. After a crash, Rawtonic offers the crash report at the next start. GitHub issues and hello@rawtonic.cc work too. Please include your Rawtonic version (Settings → About), your system and, for files that don't open or look wrong, the camera model.

---

SHA-256 (also in SHA256SUMS.txt):

• Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.7.1_aarch64.dmg: c0009b40ef035df3a9939158743a577a092396f201eadfd13644cb0ba56f86e3
• Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.7.1_x86_64.dmg: 598841aa41213b2ccd0e8f85694bfe4c1508d3b16c82829cfefe675491529d8c
• Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.7.1_amd64.AppImage: 2a06fd96ba093802b49405af44c2d4b7e5018341f6a804a47b433bfd99ba8876
• Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.7.1_amd64.AppImage.zsync: 1beaca5d7832cfba8ebbd23bb27d89c1025fbad6df337bf7e35395f6b5edbea1

Rawtonic 0.1.0-alpha.7

The seventh alpha of Rawtonic: a free, open-source RAW developer for photographers.

Warning

This is an early alpha. Features are still missing and you will run into bugs. Rawtonic never writes into your RAW files, but keep backups as you would with any new software.

The seventh alpha, and the first one signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple: on a Mac it now opens like any other app, without the Terminal step. Saturated colours keep their hue, the lens corrections Rawtonic reads from the camera's own data now frame and straighten the photo as the camera does on Sony, Nikon Z, Canon EOS R5 Mark II / R6 Mark III, Samsung NX, Panasonic and Fujifilm, and batch exports take about a third less time. There is also a first, experimental build for Intel Macs.

Updating from alpha.6 or 6.1: replace the app (macOS: drag the new Rawtonic to Applications; Linux: AppImageUpdate or Gear Lever, or download the new AppImage). Your libraries open as before; edits you made keep their look (see Changes to existing edits).

Install

macOS (Apple Silicon)

1. Download Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.7_aarch64.dmg below (Apple Silicon, macOS 13 or later).
2. Open it and drag Rawtonic to Applications.
3. Double-click Rawtonic. The app is signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so macOS opens it after its usual "downloaded from the Internet" question; no Terminal step any more. (If you allowed an earlier alpha with xattr -cr, you don't need to do anything else.)

macOS on Intel (experimental)

Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.7_x86_64.dmg is a separate build for Intel Macs, installed the same way and also signed and notarized. It is experimental: so far it has run only under Rosetta 2 on Apple Silicon Macs, never on an Intel Mac. Intel processors and Intel or AMD graphics, its speed there, macOS 13–14 on Intel and tethering a real camera are not tested. If you try it, please tell us how it runs (Report a problem… or a GitHub issue).

Linux (x86-64)

1. Download Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.7_amd64.AppImage below.
2. Make it executable and start it:

   chmod +x Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.7_amd64.AppImage
   ./Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.7_amd64.AppImage

   It runs on Ubuntu 22.04 or later, Debian 12, Fedora and other distributions with glibc 2.35 or later. If it does not start, install FUSE 2 (sudo apt install libfuse2t64 on Ubuntu 24.04, libfuse2 on older Ubuntu and Debian) or start it with --appimage-extract-and-run.
3. Updates. AppImageUpdate or Gear Lever update the AppImage to the next release when you ask them to; they download only the changed parts. Rawtonic itself tells you at startup when a new release exists (at most once a day; turn it off in Preferences) but never downloads or installs it.

Windows is not available in this alpha.

What's new since alpha.6

• Signed and notarized for macOS. The DMG and the app are signed with Rawtonic's Developer ID and notarized by Apple: open the DMG, drag Rawtonic to Applications and double-click it. macOS no longer calls it damaged, and xattr -cr or "Open Anyway" are not needed any more. Checked on the release files as downloaded from a browser (with the quarantine flag macOS gives downloads): Gatekeeper accepts the DMG and the app as notarized Developer ID software. In the signed app, every AI mask (Subject and Sky on Core ML; Depth, People, Object on the bundled AI runtime) and tethering (Sony A7 III over USB: settings, capture, the RAW in the library 2.5 s after the click) work as before.
• Saturated colours keep their hue. Colours a photo holds that the export's colour space (sRGB, Display P3, Adobe RGB), the screen or the soft-proofed space cannot show used to be clipped channel by channel, which bent their hue: blue LEDs and stage lights went purple or cyan, red-orange flowers red, orange stage light yellow. They are now brought into the space at their own hue; colours inside the space are not touched. On 24 public photos with neon, stage light, LEDs, flowers and sunsets, the hue error of the sRGB export against the photo's own wide-gamut rendering fell from 5.3° to 2.4° (IPT hue; Capture One 4.0°, Camera Raw 5.8° against their own wide-gamut renderings), better than before on 24 of 24 photos and better than Capture One on 19; Display P3 exports 4.5° → 2.4°. The Develop view, soft proofing and exports agree.
• Lens corrections from the camera's data, as the camera applies them. For never-edited RAWs and new edits with the camera's own correction data (details below):
  • Nikon Z: framed as the camera frames it (Rawtonic showed 0.3–1.5 % more of the frame than the camera): on 57 public Z NEFs of 13 bodies the geometry against the camera's own JPEG is now within 0.15 px (median; was 18.9 px).
  • Canon EOS R5 Mark II and R6 Mark III: their distortion is now corrected from the camera's data (it was left uncorrected): against Camera Raw's default rendering the R6 Mark III is within 0.2 px median (was 12.6), the R5 Mark II within 0.8 px (was 31.9).
  • Sony: the camera's correction table is followed exactly, including the strong barrel of the RX100 III–V, ZV-1 and RX0; on 15 Sony RAWs against Camera Raw the error fell from up to 31 px to 0.1–1.9 px median.
  • Fujifilm: the camera's own correction table is followed exactly (X-S20 at 16 mm within 0.7–0.8 px of the camera's JPEG, was 2.4–2.6; 129 RAFs measured), and the photo is framed as the camera frames it, without an extra 0.2 % crop.
  • Panasonic bodies zoom in by the scale they store, as the camera does (framing within 0.08 % of the camera's JPEG on 214 frames, was up to 1.2 %); the G7 and G70 correct their 3:2, 16:9 and 1:1 frames at the right radius.
  • Samsung NX (NX200 and later, NX mini, Galaxy NX, EX1 / EX2F / WB2000): distortion corrected from the camera's data (within 0.05–0.09 px of Camera Raw where it uses the same data; was up to 20 px median).
• Faster batch exports. On a Mac mini M4 Pro, exporting 27 public RAWs from the Library as a 2048 px JPEG and a full-size 16-bit TIFF takes about 25 s instead of 37–38 s with alpha.6, and from the command line 19–20 s instead of 31–33 s. Develop stays fluid during the export (54–56 previews per second while dragging a slider, as before). This was measured step by step, each change against the build before it (A/B/B/A runs), not in one run against alpha.6. The colour noise reduction and the edge-fringe correction now run on the graphics card, and exports use the same specialized, faster renderer as the Develop view.
• Intel Macs (experimental). A separate Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.7_x86_64.dmg, signed and notarized like the Apple Silicon one, with the same AI runtime and tethering parts. It has run only under Rosetta 2 on Apple Silicon Macs, not on an Intel Mac yet; see Known gaps.
• Linux AppImage: a headless export with relative paths (./Rawtonic.AppImage export photo.ARW --output out.jpg) and files passed to an already running Rawtonic now refer to the folder you ran the command in (they ended up inside the AppImage's read-only mount and failed); a plain export to a folder that cannot be written stops at once with a clear message.
• Storage: preview size limits and clearing previews live in one place, Preferences › Storage. Clearing only the 1:1 previews keeps the standard previews, and Rawtonic asks first, because photos on disconnected drives cannot be viewed without them. Thumbnails you looked at recently are now kept longer when the cache is trimmed, and many thumbnails missing at once are rebuilt a few at a time instead of all together.

Changes to existing edits

• Saved edits render as before. New edits and never-edited RAWs get the new versions (renderVersion 5 with the hue-keeping colour mapping, cameraGeometryVersion 7, colorNoiseVersion 11, fringeVersion 5); photos edited with alpha.6.1 or earlier keep theirs and export byte-identical: 112 of 112 exports of alpha.6.1-style edits on 28 RAWs of all makers, and 432 of 432 exports of 16 recipe kinds on 27 RAWs, checked byte for byte.
• Never-edited RAWs can look a little different where the new versions apply: framing and straight lines on Nikon Z, Sony, Fujifilm, Panasonic, Samsung NX and Canon R5 Mark II / R6 Mark III bodies (28 of 70 public RAWs of all makers in our pre-release check), and very saturated colours beyond the output space (a blue lamp, yellow flowers, saturated foliage). Everything else differs by less than half a level of 255 on average, mostly in single pixels.
• New edits export with the Develop view's specialized renderer: the result differs from the old general renderer by at most one level of 255 in about 0.002 % of the values of a full-size 8-bit export (more in a JPEG, from its compression).
• Recipe files written by hand or by scripts without a lensCorrectionMode are treated as never-edited and get the current camera corrections; every recipe the editor saves carries one.

Known limits

These are measured shortfalls against the better of the leading professional RAW editors; they stay open until they are closed by measurement.

• Batch export is faster but not yet re-measured against Lightroom and Capture One (alpha.4 on a laptop: 20 RAWs to a web JPEG and a 16-bit TIFF in about 17 s, Lightroom 8 s, Capture One 9 s). It is now limited by the processor; the lens correction warp is the largest part of that work.
• Very saturated colours: the hue now stays, but in areas far outside sRGB, texture and flat patches stay at alpha.6's level, below Capture One's, because Rawtonic's rendering pushes saturated colours further beyond sRGB than the other editors do; the mapping keeps somewhat less colourfulness than the old clipping.
• Lens corrections from camera data, not yet as the camera: Canon R5 Mark II full frame 0.8 px median against...

Rawtonic 0.1.0-alpha.6.1

A fix release for the sixth alpha of Rawtonic: a free, open-source RAW developer for photographers.

Warning

This is an early alpha. Features are still missing and you will run into bugs. Rawtonic never writes into your RAW files, but keep backups as you would with any new software.

alpha.6 plus only the fixes from the first alpha.6 tests; nothing else changed, and edits and libraries look and open exactly as in alpha.6.

Updating from alpha.6: replace the app (macOS: drag the new Rawtonic to Applications and run the Terminal line below again; Linux: AppImageUpdate or Gear Lever, or download the new AppImage).

Install

macOS (Apple Silicon)

1. Download Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.6.1_aarch64.dmg below (Apple Silicon, macOS 13 or later).

2. Open it and drag Rawtonic to Applications.

3. The app is not signed with an Apple Developer ID yet, so macOS says it "can't be opened" or is "damaged". It isn't; allow it once:

   • Open Terminal (press ⌘ Space, type Terminal, press Return), paste this line and press Return (nothing is printed when it worked):

     xattr -cr /Applications/Rawtonic.app

   • Or, without Terminal: try to open Rawtonic once, then System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down and click Open Anyway.

   Step by step with a copy button: rawtonic.cc/#install.

Linux (x86-64)

1. Download Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.6.1_amd64.AppImage below.
2. Make it executable and start it:

   chmod +x Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.6.1_amd64.AppImage
   ./Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.6.1_amd64.AppImage

   It runs on Ubuntu 22.04 or later, Debian 12, Fedora and other distributions with glibc 2.35 or later. If it does not start, install FUSE 2 (sudo apt install libfuse2t64 on Ubuntu 24.04, libfuse2 on older Ubuntu and Debian) or start it with --appimage-extract-and-run.
3. Updates. AppImageUpdate or Gear Lever update the AppImage to the next release when you ask them to; they download only the changed parts. Rawtonic itself tells you at startup when a new release exists (at most once a day; turn it off in Preferences) but never downloads or installs it.

Intel Macs and Windows are not available in this alpha.

Fixed since alpha.6

• A double click on a photo in the Library opens Develop (as D or Return); E and Space stay the loupe for looking through. The loupe's bar has a Develop button, and the Library button in Develop returns to the loupe when Develop was opened from it (G still goes to the grid).
• F full screen on macOS: after F into full screen and F back, the next F did nothing until a click. F, F11 and ⌃⌘F now toggle every time and keep the keyboard focus, also when pressed quickly again during macOS's full-screen animation.
• Shortcuts after a slider drag: while the slider just dragged kept the focus, only Undo and Redo reached the app, so M did not show the mask overlay again. A focused slider now keeps only the keys that move it (arrows, Home/End, Page Up/Down); M, F, ratings, the tool keys and [ ] for the brush size work right after a drag.
• No grid flicker when the Library comes back from Develop (the grid drew three large columns for a frame before its real width was known).

Everything new in alpha.6 and its known limits: alpha.6 release notes and CHANGELOG.md.

Source code of the camera libraries

Tethering uses libgphoto2, libltdl (GNU Libtool) and, in the AppImage, libusb, under the GNU LGPL 2.1 or later. Their unmodified source tarballs are attached below (libgphoto2-2.5.34.tar.bz2, libtool-2.6.2.tar.xz, libusb-1.0.30.tar.bz2); how they are built: scripts/tether/build_libgphoto2.sh.

Feedback

You can report a problem from inside Rawtonic (Report a problem…), with an optional screenshot and photo file, without a GitHub account: you see exactly what will be sent before you click Send, and you can instead copy the report or open it as a GitHub issue. After a crash, Rawtonic offers the crash report at the next start. GitHub issues and hello@rawtonic.cc work too. Please include your Rawtonic version (Settings → About), your system and, for files that don't open or look wrong, the camera model.

---

SHA-256:

• Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.6.1_aarch64.dmg: 45bc70e4bbd03b46ee6fb595ff71e528ee3344410b48f1f4702db15e3fb6bd4a
• Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.6.1_amd64.AppImage: 1306d1187665621b47149d099a258326b7b4cda56f33f2e31ac3ddd655e89e8d

Rawtonic 0.1.0-alpha.6

The sixth alpha of Rawtonic: a free, open-source RAW developer for photographers.

Warning

This is an early alpha. Features are still missing and you will run into bugs. Rawtonic never writes into your RAW files, but keep backups as you would with any new software.

The sixth alpha: the changes since alpha.5, many of them from the first use tests of alpha.5. A native menu bar on the Mac and a command palette, faster imports and culling, undo for ratings and flags, built-in styles and presets per tool, a range wheel and skin tones in the Colour Editor, a photograph-only full screen, Highlights that go further in night scenes, and a Storage page in Preferences.

Updating from alpha.5: replace the app (macOS: drag the new Rawtonic to Applications and run the Terminal line below again; Linux: AppImageUpdate or Gear Lever, or download the new AppImage). Your libraries open as before; edits you made keep their look (see Changes to existing edits).

Install

macOS (Apple Silicon)

1. Download Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.6_aarch64.dmg below (Apple Silicon, macOS 13 or later).

2. Open it and drag Rawtonic to Applications.

3. The app is not signed with an Apple Developer ID yet, so macOS says it "can't be opened" or is "damaged". It isn't; allow it once:

   • Open Terminal (press ⌘ Space, type Terminal, press Return), paste this line and press Return (nothing is printed when it worked):

     xattr -cr /Applications/Rawtonic.app

   • Or, without Terminal: try to open Rawtonic once, then System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down and click Open Anyway.

   Step by step with a copy button: rawtonic.cc/#install.

Linux (x86-64)

1. Download Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.6_amd64.AppImage below.
2. Make it executable and start it:

   chmod +x Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.6_amd64.AppImage
   ./Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.6_amd64.AppImage

   It runs on Ubuntu 22.04 or later, Debian 12, Fedora and other distributions with glibc 2.35 or later. If it does not start, install FUSE 2 (sudo apt install libfuse2t64 on Ubuntu 24.04, libfuse2 on older Ubuntu and Debian) or start it with --appimage-extract-and-run.
3. Updates. AppImageUpdate or Gear Lever update the AppImage to the next release when you ask them to; they download only the changed parts. Rawtonic itself tells you at startup when a new release exists (at most once a day; turn it off in Preferences) but never downloads or installs it.

Intel Macs and Windows are not available in this alpha.

What's new since alpha.5

• Menus and commands. On macOS a full menu bar (File, Edit, Photo, View, Window, Help) with Open Recent and Export with Recipe; its key equivalents follow the shortcuts you set in Preferences. A command palette (⇧⌘P / Ctrl+Shift+P, rebindable) finds and runs any command; on Linux the same menus sit in the top bar's … menu. The view keys G/E/D and the flag keys P/U/⇧X can now be rebound.
• Import. Importing 200 RAW+JPEG pairs from an exFAT card with a backup copy now takes about 10 s until the files are in place instead of 27 s (Lightroom 11.5 s, Capture One 23.7 s on the same laptop): the library copy and the backup are made from one read of each source, then each copy and the source read again are compared byte for byte before anything is published. The import dialog has metadata presets (creator, copyright with the capture year, description, usage terms, credit, keywords; contact details only when you tick them) that fill empty fields, or overwrite them when you say so.
• Culling. The next photo shows at once: Develop, the Library loupe and the full screen develop the neighbours ahead in the direction you step, show the camera's embedded JPEG (colour-managed, framed like the developed photo) until the developed frame is in, and Auto-advance after a rating or flag key can be turned on in Preferences › General (off by default). Ratings, flags and colour labels can be undone (⌘Z / Ctrl+Z), also for many photos at once.
• Full screen and loupe. F shows only the photograph, full screen, from the Library and Develop (the window's own full screen moved to F11 / ⌃⌘F); I shows the photograph's facts over it. The Library has a loupe (E, Space or a double click; G back to the grid). Ratings and flags there apply to the photo shown.
• Presets. Grain, Vignette, Color grading, Black & white, Sharpening and Noise reduction have a preset button in their header: hover to preview, click to apply, save your own. 39 built-in presets and styles with descriptive names (Preferences › General hides them). Presets with AI masks now find the subject, sky or person again on each photo they are applied to, instead of reusing the first photo's mask.
• Colour Editor. A range wheel to see and drag every colour range, and a Skin tone mode with Uniformity for hue, saturation and lightness. On four public portraits it evens skin out at least as much as Capture One's Skin Tone at uniformity 50 and 100, while changing less outside the skin. Capture One styles with skin tone entries import into it; the conversion is approximate and the import report says so.
• Masks. Every mask kind is one click away in the row above the layer list. An Object mask takes several clicks or boxes: Shift adds another object, Alt (⌥) takes a part away, ⌘Z / Ctrl+Z takes the last one back.
• Highlights in night scenes. New edits lower Highlights further in dark frames (lamps, candles, lit windows): on 7 of 7 dark test frames −50 and −100 now reach at least as far as Camera Raw's; brighter frames render as before (see Changes to existing edits).
• Before/After can split top and bottom as well as left and right (the Compare button's menu, or ⇧Y to cycle); each session remembers its choice.
• Storage in Preferences shows how much space caches, downloaded AI models, logs and the open library's cache take, with limits and buttons to clear each. Clearing never touches photos, sidecars, catalogs, saved masks, Output or Trash; removed thumbnails are made again when needed.
• Faster AI masks after a fresh install. On a Mac the first Subject mask took 13.7 s; Rawtonic now prepares the Subject and Sky models in the background while you are in Develop, so a click 25 s after opening the first photo took 1.5–3.3 s (four runs). A click within about 15 s of opening Develop still waits for part of it.
• Library header. Search, filters and sorting share the session bar in wide windows. Grain moved to the Detail tab after Noise reduction; Vignette, Light effects and LUT are separate tools in Adjust.
• First start asks on which side the Develop tools should be (also in Preferences).
• Fixes: unticking a People part (e.g. Lips) left its mask on the photo; the tone curve followed a drag only about 4 times a second (now every frame); targeted adjustment missed the first press on the photo; deleted photos stayed in Previous Import and albums; the session's Trash folder had no trash icon.

Changes to existing edits

• Highlights: new edits get toneVersion 3. Photos edited before keep their version and render as before, and so do recipes that lower Highlights or raise Shadows above +50; the editor moves other recipes to 3 when it opens them, where nothing renders differently. Never-edited RAWs render as before (Highlights at 0 is unchanged).
• Exports of existing recipes are otherwise unchanged: the faster export resize and colour-noise steps and the faster lens correction produce identical files (checked byte for byte on 27 public RAWs, 54 files). For this release, six RAWs from six camera makers and an edited alpha.5 project exported byte-identical to alpha.5 on a Mac and on Linux.
• Photos moved to the system Trash leave albums and Previous Import at once (catalog schema 16; libraries are upgraded when opened). Photos trashed with an earlier alpha cannot be told apart from photos whose drive is disconnected, so they stay listed as offline.
• Keys: F is the photograph-only full screen (window full screen F11 / ⌃⌘F); D in Develop no longer has a second meaning for the panels.

Known limits

These are measured shortfalls against the better of the leading professional RAW editors; they stay open until they are closed by measurement.

• Batch export is still about 2× slower than Lightroom and Capture One (alpha.4: 20 RAWs to a web JPEG and a 16-bit TIFF in about 17 s, Lightroom 8 s, Capture One 9 s). This round made it about 4–11 % faster on a Mac mini (27 RAWs, two recipes: 41 → 37–38 s in the app); the rest is develop work on the CPU. Not re-measured against Lightroom and Capture One yet.
• Culling has not been re-measured with real key presses against Lightroom and Capture One yet. Scripted on a Mac mini: the next photo's first pixels after about 90 ms, its full development after about 0.2 s (was 0.62 s) at a steady pace; when you step faster than about every 0.6 s, the camera JPEG shows within about 20 ms and the development follows after about 0.43 s.
• Import with a metadata preset takes about 1–2 s longer for 200 photos than without.
• Highlights −100 in dark scenes now goes further than Camera Raw's on some frames (candles, snow) and looks darker and flatter there; about −50 to −60 matches Camera Raw's −100. On an overexposed bulb Camera Raw still lowers the bright area much further.
• Skin tone import from Capture One styles is approximate, and the Colour Editor as a whole is not yet at the better editor's level.
• Before/After side by side (two panes) is not available yet; the split shows one photo.
• Storage: removing AI models takes effect at the next start; most languages other than English and German show the Storage page in English.
• Menus: single-key shortcuts are not shown in the macOS menu items (only those...

Rawtonic 0.1.0-alpha.5

A fix release for alpha.4 of Rawtonic, the free, open-source RAW developer for photographers.

Warning

This is an early alpha. Features are still missing and you will run into bugs. Rawtonic never writes into your RAW files, but keep backups as you would with any new software.

alpha.4's downloads were built without the address of Rawtonic's report relay, so Report a problem, crash reports, camera test results and the optional usage statistics could not be sent from the app; only Copy report and Open on GitHub worked. alpha.5 sends them as described in the alpha.4 notes. Nothing else changes: edits render exactly as in alpha.4. Everything new since alpha.3 is listed in the alpha.4 notes and in CHANGELOG.md.

Updating from alpha.4: replace the app (macOS: drag the new Rawtonic to Applications and run the Terminal line below again; Linux: AppImageUpdate or Gear Lever, or download the new AppImage).

Install

macOS (Apple Silicon)

1. Download Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.5_aarch64.dmg below (Apple Silicon, macOS 13 or later).

2. Open it and drag Rawtonic to Applications.

3. The app is not signed with an Apple Developer ID yet, so macOS says it "can't be opened" or is "damaged". It isn't; allow it once:

   • Open Terminal (press ⌘ Space, type Terminal, press Return), paste this line and press Return (nothing is printed when it worked):

     xattr -cr /Applications/Rawtonic.app

   • Or, without Terminal: try to open Rawtonic once, then System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down and click Open Anyway.

   Step by step with a copy button: rawtonic.cc/#install.

Linux (x86-64)

1. Download Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.5_amd64.AppImage below.
2. Make it executable and start it:

   chmod +x Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.5_amd64.AppImage
   ./Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.5_amd64.AppImage

   It runs on Ubuntu 22.04 or later, Debian 12, Fedora and other distributions with glibc 2.35 or later. If it does not start, install FUSE 2 (sudo apt install libfuse2t64 on Ubuntu 24.04, libfuse2 on older Ubuntu and Debian) or start it with --appimage-extract-and-run.
3. Updates. AppImageUpdate or Gear Lever update the AppImage to the next release when you ask them to; they download only the changed parts. Rawtonic itself now tells you at startup when a new release exists (at most once a day; turn it off in Preferences) but never downloads or installs it.

Intel Macs and Windows are not available in this alpha.

Source code of the camera libraries

Tethering uses libgphoto2, libltdl (GNU Libtool) and, in the AppImage, libusb, under the GNU LGPL 2.1 or later. Their unmodified source tarballs are attached below (libgphoto2-2.5.34.tar.bz2, libtool-2.6.2.tar.xz, libusb-1.0.30.tar.bz2); how they are built: scripts/tether/build_libgphoto2.sh.

Feedback

You can now report a problem from inside Rawtonic (Report a problem…), with an optional screenshot and photo file, without a GitHub account: you see exactly what will be sent before you click Send, and you can instead copy the report or open it as a GitHub issue. After a crash, Rawtonic offers the crash report at the next start. GitHub issues and hello@rawtonic.cc work too. Please include your Rawtonic version (Settings → About), your system and, for files that don't open or look wrong, the camera model.

---

SHA-256:

• Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.5_aarch64.dmg: c9d0a78a39dd08ee4e511adbd1ee4a38e85b768bfe1c2378523f8d94dfafce29
• Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.5_amd64.AppImage: 36cc875e98a614b85e65860fa29bbc5f08f7e2f406b9bfbca0e165a93b56d999

Rawtonic 0.1.0-alpha.4

Important

Please use 0.1.0-alpha.5. These alpha.4 downloads were built without the report relay, so Report a problem, crash reports, camera tests and usage statistics cannot be sent from them. alpha.5 fixes only that.

The fourth alpha of Rawtonic: a free, open-source RAW developer for photographers.

Warning

This is an early alpha. Features are still missing and you will run into bugs. Rawtonic never writes into your RAW files, but keep backups as you would with any new software.

The fourth alpha: about 130 changes since alpha.3. Red eye correction, library search with smart albums, RAW+JPEG pairs and imports that resume, moves to other drives, a copy/paste picker, named snapshots and an export queue panel arrive. Sharpening, colour noise reduction, fringes, curves and Clarity were reworked and measured against the leading RAW editors, and you can now report a problem or a crash from inside the app, without an account.

Install

macOS (Apple Silicon)

1. Download Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.4_aarch64.dmg below (Apple Silicon, macOS 13 or later).

2. Open it and drag Rawtonic to Applications.

3. The app is not signed with an Apple Developer ID yet, so macOS says it "can't be opened" or is "damaged". It isn't; allow it once:

   • Open Terminal (press ⌘ Space, type Terminal, press Return), paste this line and press Return (nothing is printed when it worked):

     xattr -cr /Applications/Rawtonic.app

   • Or, without Terminal: try to open Rawtonic once, then System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down and click Open Anyway.

   Step by step with a copy button: rawtonic.cc/#install.

Linux (x86-64)

1. Download Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.4_amd64.AppImage below.
2. Make it executable and start it:

   chmod +x Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.4_amd64.AppImage
   ./Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.4_amd64.AppImage

   It runs on Ubuntu 22.04 or later, Debian 12, Fedora and other distributions with glibc 2.35 or later. If it does not start, install FUSE 2 (sudo apt install libfuse2t64 on Ubuntu 24.04, libfuse2 on older Ubuntu and Debian) or start it with --appimage-extract-and-run.
3. Updates. AppImageUpdate or Gear Lever update the AppImage to the next release when you ask them to; they download only the changed parts. Rawtonic itself now tells you at startup when a new release exists (at most once a day; turn it off in Preferences) but never downloads or installs it.

Intel Macs and Windows are not available in this alpha.

What's new since alpha.3

• Red eye and pet eye correction. A new mode of the spot tool: click an eye and the pupil is found and corrected (drag to size the search circle), with Pupil Size and Darken; pet eyes keep a catchlight. The correction stays on the eye through crops, turns and lens corrections. Lightroom's red eye corrections come over with catalog imports.
• Help without an account. Report a problem (Help menu on macOS, the … menu in Library and Develop) sends your description with optional system details, log, a screenshot of the window and the photo file; after a crash Rawtonic offers a crash report at the next start; the tether camera test can send its result; a RAW that does not open offers help to get its camera supported. Nothing is sent before you have seen the exact text and clicked Send, and every dialog can instead copy the report or open it on GitHub. See Privacy.
• Update check and opt-in usage statistics. Rawtonic looks for a new release at startup at most once a day (can be turned off; it never downloads or installs anything itself). Anonymous weekly usage statistics — which camera models were opened and which tools were used, without any id — are sent only if you turn them on in Preferences (off by default).
• Library search and smart albums. Find photos by part of any word, filter by camera, lens, focal length, aperture, ISO, shutter speed, capture year and keywords (Shift-click picks a range), and save the filter as a smart album with nested all/any/none rules and live counts.
• Import. A RAW and its JPEG come in as one photo; an import cut off by a quit, a crash or a card taken out finishes when the library opens again, without duplicates; CR3 files and merged DNGs get their capture details, and the rating the camera wrote is taken over. Imports and exports onto exFAT drives on macOS work (they failed with "os error 45").
• Move photos and whole folders to another drive, verified byte for byte before the originals go to the Trash, undoable, keeping Finder tags and other extended attributes; photos can also move to exFAT drives on macOS.
• Copy, paste and sync with a picker for tools and single layers, Previous (paste the settings of the photo open before) and Lens Correction.
• Snapshots have names and thumbnails, sit with History in a dock in every Develop tab, and can be compared with the current edit in Before/After (F12).
• Export. Photos exported with several recipes are developed and rendered once for all of them (20 RAWs to a web JPEG and a 16-bit print TIFF: about 17 s instead of 31–35 s, every file byte-identical); a queue panel shows each photo's progress and the time left, with pause and cancel per job; Develop stays fluid while a batch exports; stripped exports keep creator and copyright.
• Curves. A Luminance channel (contrast without extra saturation or hue shifts), curves with more than 16 points, curves in a wide working space, and targeted adjustment for the region curve; Lightroom tone curves import as Camera Raw draws them.
• Detail. Sharpening follows the photo's brightness and follows Camera Raw's Radius and Masking more closely, its Amount goes to 150, and JPEGs get stronger sharpening at high amounts. Colour noise reduction leaves fewer colour specks (on 55 high-ISO RAWs now fewer than Camera Raw at Color 25 and 50 and Capture One at its default), luminance noise reduction fewer single-pixel specks. Purple and green fringes from axial chromatic aberration are corrected automatically, edges between two saturated colours are cleaner, and thin dark lines no longer get coloured stripes.
• Looks. Clarity leaves fewer halos beside narrow bright edges; film grain looks the same on every graphics card; LUTs go to 200 % amount, import as packs from folders, and 1D and shaper .cube files are read.
• Speed. Multi view zooms sooner (the selected photo at 100 % 0.98 → 0.67 s, a 12-photo zoom 4.6 → 2.5 s, with a first view of each region within about 0.5–0.7 s); the first frame of a never-opened RAW on Linux comes after 0.75 s instead of 1.2 s (on a cold NVIDIA driver cache 2.9 s instead of 4.4 s); the first slider drag after opening a photo is no longer slowed by previews built in the background.
• Many fixes: Lightroom catalog imports render their gradients, brushes, colour ranges, spots and red eyes in exports of photos never opened in Develop; lens profiles from the lens database are looked up at the photo's aperture and its sensor's crop factor (Canon, Fujifilm, Olympus and Panasonic RAWs got wrong vignetting and distortion corrections); Save & Relaunch restarts the app again; Return in a new export recipe's name saves the recipe instead of starting an export.

The full list is in CHANGELOG.md.

Note on existing edits

New behaviour is tied to recipe version keys (renderVersion 2 and 3, sharpenVersion 3–6, colorNoiseVersion 8–10, lumaNoiseVersion 2, fringeVersion 3 and 4, clarityVersion 2, grainVersion 2, maskVersion 4 for new layers, curves.version 2 and 3), so photos edited with alpha.3 render as before; never-edited RAWs develop with the new defaults. Exceptions:

• Lens profiles from the lens database for photos without saved lens parameters (never-edited RAWs and their previews) are looked up at the photo's f-number and its body's crop factor and keep their whole lateral chromatic aberration correction: 31 of 62 public test RAWs get a different vignetting, distortion or CA correction. Saved edits keep the lens parameters they were saved with.
• Photos imported from a Lightroom catalog and never opened now export with their gradients, brushes, colour ranges, spots and red eye corrections (they were left out until the photo was opened in Develop; opening it changes no pixel). Lightroom AI masks still need the photo opened (see Known gaps).
• Export metadata (no version key): recipes that strip metadata, including Fast (Web) and your own recipes, now keep creator, copyright and usage terms. Pixels are unchanged.
• Ratings (no version key): photos whose metadata you have not changed take the rating the camera wrote into the file (read once when the library is opened).

Known gaps

These are measured shortfalls against the better of the leading professional RAW editors; they stay open until they are closed by measurement.

• Batch export is about 2× slower: 20 RAWs to a web JPEG and a 16-bit TIFF (38 files) take about 17 s, in Lightroom 8 s and in Capture One 9 s on the same Mac; while you keep editing during a batch, Capture One exports 3–4× as many files in the same time. The GPU render is the slowest stage.
• Import of 200 RAW+JPEG pairs from an exFAT card with backup takes 27 s (Lightroom 11.5 s, Capture One 23.7 s), and the import dialog has no metadata preset for creator and copyright yet (set them after the import).
• Culling: the next photo after a rating key shows after 0.51 s (median; Capture One 0.10 s, Lightroom 0.35 s); there is no auto-advance after rating yet.
• AI masks: the first Subject mask after a fresh install takes 13.7 s (the model loads; Lightroom...

Rawtonic 0.1.0-alpha.3

The third alpha of Rawtonic: a free, open-source RAW developer for photographers.

Warning

This is an early alpha. Features are still missing and you will run into bugs. Rawtonic never modifies your RAW files, but keep backups as you would with any new software.

Install

macOS (Apple Silicon)

1. Download Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.3_aarch64.dmg below (Apple Silicon, macOS 13 or later).
2. Open it and drag Rawtonic to Applications.
3. The app is not signed with an Apple Developer ID, so macOS blocks it at first. Clear the quarantine flag once in Terminal:

   xattr -cr /Applications/Rawtonic.app

   Or right-click the app → Open → Open, or System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway.

Linux (x86-64)

1. Download Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.3_amd64.AppImage below.
2. Make it executable and start it:

   chmod +x Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.3_amd64.AppImage
   ./Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.3_amd64.AppImage

   It runs on Ubuntu 22.04 or later, Debian 12, Fedora and other distributions with glibc 2.35 or later. If it does not start, install FUSE 2 (sudo apt install libfuse2t64 on Ubuntu 24.04, libfuse2 on older Ubuntu and Debian) or start it with --appimage-extract-and-run.
3. New: updates. From this version on, AppImageUpdate or Gear Lever can update the AppImage to the next release when you ask them to; they download only the changed parts. Rawtonic itself never checks for updates. (alpha.2 AppImages carry no update information; replace them by hand once.)

Intel Macs and Windows are not available in this alpha.

What's new since alpha.2

Tethered shooting (experimental)

• Connect a camera on USB, set ISO, shutter, aperture, exposure compensation, white balance and more, fire it from the app (button or ⌘K / Ctrl+K), focus, and see its live view.
• Every shot — fired in Rawtonic or on the camera — is copied into the session, verified and named by your template, with your next-capture adjustments, rating and keywords, and selected (and opened when Develop is showing).
• The camera library runs in its own helper process, so a camera or USB fault cannot crash the app. Nothing on a memory card is deleted. On cameras that keep tethered photos in a transfer queue (Fujifilm in USB tether mode), a photo is freed there only after it is verified in your library; the Tether tool can turn that off.
• Tested on macOS with Sony a7 III, Sony a7 IV, Fujifilm X-H2S and Fujifilm GFX 50R: a new photo is on screen 1.1–1.5 s after the shot (2.4 s on the GFX 50R). Other Sony and Fujifilm bodies may work but are untested. Canon cameras are not offered yet. Fujifilm live view does not work yet. On Linux the tether tool is included but has not been tried with a real camera — reports welcome.

Local adjustments

• 16-bit layer masks: gradients without banding steps.
• Refine edge slider for hair, fur and foliage.
• A better Auto Mask for brush strokes, and an Upgrade to current Auto Mask action for layers imported from Lightroom.
• Solo: see one layer or mask alone (H, or Option/Alt-click its eye); it follows the selection as you click through layers.
• Brush strokes follow the pointer more closely, also on layers with many strokes; photos with 20–32 layers stay fluid while dragging sliders; exports with many layers need about half the memory.

Develop

• AI Denoise has a new, faster model for new edits: about 10 s instead of 27–31 s for a 24 MP photo on our test Mac. Its amount scale was recalibrated (50 = default). The model downloads once, on first use. Photos you denoised with alpha.2 keep their model.
• Auto straighten: one click (crop tool Auto, Shift+R, or the photo's context menu) levels the horizon or the verticals and crops so no empty corners show; no answer rather than a wrong one when a photo has no clear lines.
• Auto white balance rebuilt: neutral in daylight and cool light, while sunsets, golden hour and lamplight keep their mood.
• Colour noise reduction keeps colour edges and fine colour texture (moss, small flowers) and removes more lone coloured specks; dark noisy colours keep their hue.
• Defringe removes only colour the edge does not explain: purple and green fringes go, purple flowers and green signs stay.
• Remove chromatic aberration is on by default for new RAW edits whose camera or lens data has no correction of its own; Panasonic cameras' own correction data are used.
• Highlights recover without pink, magenta or green casts; Shadows and Highlights act more like the leading editors; sharpening keeps halos in check at high amounts.
• Updated Lensfun lens database; lenses renamed there keep their correction in saved edits.
• Multi view's Edit all selected updates every photo live again.

Library and import

• Redo for undone renames, moves and moves to the trash (⇧⌘Z / Ctrl+Y); empty a session's Trash.
• The hot folder resumes after a restart, can include subfolders, and applies next-capture rating and keywords.
• Naming tokens from each photo's EXIF (capture time, camera, lens, ISO, …); XMP sidecars on the card come along at import.
• Preset import from Lightroom and Capture One lists what it could not translate, and translates Capture One's Color Editor.

Linux

• Smoother slider drags on NVIDIA under Wayland; the first photo after an install or driver update shows in about 3 s instead of 12 s.

Fixes: an export the graphics card fails to render (for example when it runs out of memory) is reported as failed instead of being written as a black file, exported files are readable by other users (they were owner-only), very large WebP exports and some colour values give an error message instead of crashing the export, virtual copies export with their own edits, edits are saved before files are moved or renamed, edits made while background tagging runs are kept, and many more.

Note on existing edits

New behaviour is tied to version keys in each edit, so photos edited with alpha.2 look as before, with these exceptions:

• Black edge fixed: lens vignetting without distortion correction, a chromatic aberration correction that found nothing, or rejected guide lines left the last pixel row and column of the photo black, in exports too. They now keep their pixels, and pixels near the right and bottom edge can differ very slightly.
• Highlights: photos with clipped highlights change in those areas (no more colour casts there).
• Text watermarks may differ by at most 2 of 255 levels in a few pixels.

Known gaps

Measured shortfalls against the better of the leading professional RAW editors:

• AI Denoise is slower than the leading editors' AI denoise (about 10 s for 24 MP on our test Mac) and leaves a higher lightness error at fine detail; on Linux it takes about 35 s per 24 MP photo on the GPU.
• Tethering is experimental. On the GFX 50R a new photo appears 2.4 s after the shot, slower than the leading tethering software.
• Auto straighten has a low median error on our 51 test photos, but a few photos are still off (90th percentile 0.46°). Straightening several selected photos at once is not available yet.
• Layers: at most 32 visible layers take effect; further visible layers are ignored.
• Colour noise reduction still leaves more lone colour specks than the leading editors, and fine colour detail at ISO 3200 and above is below the best of them.
• Chromatic aberration and fringes remain above the best reference on a few cameras (e.g. Lumix GX850, TZ202, Canon EOS M50 II); sharpening keeps less low-contrast detail at high Amount/Detail.
• Nikon High Efficiency NEFs don't open yet; imports from Lightroom and Capture One don't carry every adjustment over.
• Linux: tested on an NVIDIA graphics card under KDE Wayland, and with exports on Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora; other graphics cards and desktops may show problems — please report them.
• Relight is experimental: the original light's own cast shadows stay in the photo.

Full list of changes: CHANGELOG.md.

Source code of the camera libraries

Tethering uses libgphoto2, libltdl (GNU Libtool) and, in the AppImage, libusb, under the GNU LGPL 2.1 or later. Their unmodified source tarballs are attached below (libgphoto2-2.5.34.tar.bz2, libtool-2.6.2.tar.xz, libusb-1.0.30.tar.bz2); how they are built: scripts/tether/build_libgphoto2.sh.

Feedback

Please report bugs and ideas as GitHub issues, with your Rawtonic version (Settings → About), your system (macOS version and Mac model, or Linux distribution and graphics card) and, for files that don't open or look wrong, the camera model. Tethering reports are especially welcome: which camera, macOS or Linux, and what worked.

---

SHA-256:

• Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.3_aarch64.dmg: c9b9fc807b0769b88294acccfa1f6244ff5223cbb79f6cee94452d9c7763647c
• Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.3_amd64.AppImage: 3822711c4d6cf4bcc392a625085045f66d1df9b4ca89bcb281a693681a6b8b33

Rawtonic 0.1.0-alpha.2

The second alpha of Rawtonic: a free, open-source RAW developer for photographers.

Warning

This is an early alpha. Features are still missing and you will run into bugs. Rawtonic never modifies your RAW files, but keep backups as you would with any new software.

Install

macOS (Apple Silicon)

1. Download Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.2_aarch64.dmg below (Apple Silicon, macOS 13 or later).
2. Open it and drag Rawtonic to Applications.
3. The app is not signed with an Apple Developer ID, so macOS blocks it at first. Clear the quarantine flag once in Terminal:

   xattr -cr /Applications/Rawtonic.app

   Or right-click the app → Open → Open, or System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway.

Linux (x86-64) — new

1. Download Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.2_amd64.AppImage below.
2. Make it executable and start it:

   chmod +x Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.2_amd64.AppImage
   ./Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.2_amd64.AppImage

   It runs on Ubuntu 22.04 or later, Debian 12, Fedora and other distributions with glibc 2.35 or later. If it does not start, install FUSE 2 (sudo apt install libfuse2t64 on Ubuntu 24.04, libfuse2 on older Ubuntu and Debian) or start it with --appimage-extract-and-run.
3. The very first start takes a while: before the first photo appears in Develop, the graphics driver prepares Rawtonic's shaders, about a minute or more. Later starts are quick.

Intel Macs and Windows are not available in this alpha.

What's new since alpha.1

Linux: the first Linux build, as an AppImage for x86-64 (see Install).

Develop

• Multi view (N): compare up to 12 selected photos side by side, with a reference photo, locked zoom and Edit all selected.
• Before/After (Y): a split view with a movable divider; hold \ to see the whole photo before.
• Full screen (F), proof margin (X), viewer background and capture info under the photo.
• Noise reduction: new colour noise reduction measured per photo — calmer colour blotches, crisper colour edges, more even grain at low Luminance.
• Grain structure: Even, Soft, Clumped, Speckled or Gritty.
• Colour grading: a 3-way view; visible Auto white balance.
• Tone controls (Contrast, Whites, Shadows, Blacks) keep tones in order across the whole range.
• Relight (experimental): add up to four lights to a photo, with patterns. Rawtonic estimates the depth, the people's surfaces and the photo's own lighting on your computer, so a new light can light a face's shadow side, the original light can be turned down, and the subject casts its shadow on the background. Models download once on first use (about 1.3 GB in total). Expect rough edges.

Library and import

• Drag photos from the Finder or file manager onto the window to import; large preview of the card's photos; import into folders outside the catalog, or add photos where they are.
• Synchronize Folder: find photos moved, renamed, added or deleted outside Rawtonic, review the changes and apply them. Previous Import album.
• Portable libraries: copy a catalog with its photos, make a full backup and restore it.
• Hot folder captures form an import batch; batch exports list each failed photo with its reason.

Export: the export dialog closes as soon as the export is queued.

Fixes: many, including the edit history no longer growing by megabytes with large edits (a mask or Relight analysis is now stored once, not in every step), a readable message when a file can't be opened, photographs no longer counted twice in sessions on exFAT or network drives (macOS's hidden ._ files), renders of photos larger than the GPU's texture limit, Light flare on large photos, Hasselblad X2D/X1D II files, ratings shown after a rename, and edits that could land on the wrong photo when switching quickly.

Note on existing edits

Noise reduction and tone controls changed. Photos you edited with alpha.1 keep their old colour noise reduction, but tone adjustments (Whites, Contrast, Shadows, Blacks, Highlights) and luminance noise reduction may look slightly different after updating.

Known limitations

• Nikon High Efficiency NEFs don't open yet.
• Imports from Lightroom and Capture One don't carry every adjustment over.
• Linux: Develop shows its preview through the app's web view rather than directly on the GPU, so it is not quite as immediate as on a Mac. Tested on an NVIDIA graphics card under KDE Wayland, and with exports on Ubuntu and Debian; other graphics cards and desktops may show problems — please report them.
• Relight is experimental: the original light's own cast shadows stay in the photo, and the subject's shadow on the background does not touch the ground.

Feedback

Please report bugs and ideas as GitHub issues, with your Rawtonic version (Settings → About), your system (macOS version and Mac model, or Linux distribution and graphics card) and, for files that don't open or look wrong, the camera model.

---

SHA-256:

• Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.2_aarch64.dmg: e09f44bbd90f0d45779cc22df8f6891c66db96a9de2837d8b456ffa306b78826
• Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.2_amd64.AppImage: 547ef82553e1d7357468c13438f0af0a3a3728c275c2309391b5e55d51b3b6e5

Rawtonic 0.1.0-alpha.1

The first public alpha of Rawtonic: a free, open-source RAW developer for photographers.

Warning

This is an early alpha. Features are still missing and you will run into bugs. Rawtonic never modifies your RAW files, but keep backups as you would with any new software. Rawtonic is built in my spare time, so there can be longer gaps between releases and bug fixes.

Install (macOS, Apple Silicon)

1. Download Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.1_aarch64.dmg below (Apple Silicon, macOS 13 or later).
2. Open it and drag Rawtonic to Applications.
3. The app is not signed with an Apple Developer ID, so macOS blocks it at first ("can't be opened" or "damaged"). Clear the quarantine flag once in Terminal:

   xattr -cr /Applications/Rawtonic.app

   Or right-click the app → Open → Open, or System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway.

Intel Macs, Windows and Linux are not available in this alpha.

What's in it

• Sessions and ingest: verified copies from the card with an optional backup, hot folder for tethered shooting, import of Lightroom Classic catalogs and Capture One sessions.
• Library: ratings, picks, colour labels, filters, albums, keywords and IPTC metadata in XMP sidecars.
• Develop: light, colour, detail, curves, colour grading, lens corrections, crop and Upright, with GPU rendering.
• Local adjustments: brush, linear and radial masks, colour and luminance ranges, AI masks for subject, sky, background, depth and people.
• Retouch: heal, clone, object removal and automatic face retouch.
• Merge: HDR, panorama, HDR panorama and focus stacking to DNG.
• Export: recipes, a queue that survives restarts, JPEG/TIFF/PNG/WebP/JPEG XL/AVIF in sRGB, Display P3, Adobe RGB or ProPhoto RGB.

AI tools are optional and run on your Mac. Each model is downloaded once, from rawtonic-app/models, when you first use the tool. Nothing else goes online (privacy).

Known limitations

• Nikon High Efficiency NEFs don't open yet.
• Imports from Lightroom and Capture One don't carry every adjustment over.
• No direct tethering (the hot folder works with your camera maker's tethering app).

Feedback

Please report bugs and ideas as GitHub issues, with your Rawtonic version (Settings → About), macOS version, Mac model and, for files that don't open or look wrong, the camera model.

---

SHA-256 of Rawtonic_0.1.0-alpha.1_aarch64.dmg: 216aa9eacd120389195ef6730506c4b141911dd55c57e2f9dffc08e2a8d0aafb