Rembrandt

Stop paying for Adobe. Flush the incrapification.

A free photo editor for macOS, Windows and Linux.
No account needed, no subscription, no “we’ve updated our terms” emails.

Download · Quick facts · Self-host · Features · Compare · Build

_{▶ Watch the 26-second demo}

Ask: “golden hour, shadows +25”, and watch Rembrandt paint it	Touch: drag on the photo to change that tone or colour	Super Resolution: 2× and 4× on your GPU
Library: albums, search, sorting, one-click delete	Masks: brush, gradients, AI subject and depth	Before / after: split or side by side

All files and checksums: Releases. On a Mac the install line puts Rembrandt.app in ~/Applications without an administrator password and adds a rembrandt command: rembrandt gui opens the app, rembrandt update updates it and rembrandt uninstall removes it. It opens without the "can't verify" prompt. Builds aren't code-signed yet: with a downloaded .dmg, use System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway on macOS, and More info → Run anyway on Windows.

Serve Rembrandt from the computer that holds your photos and edit them in any browser:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thesnarkitecht/rembrandt/main/install.sh | bash -s -- --server

It asks which photo folder to use, starts at login, and prints a private link. Edits are saved next to each photo as XMP; the photos themselves are never changed. Add --lan to reach it from other devices on your network. Linux and macOS; one small dependency-free binary (server/). To update, press Update in the browser (Settings › About); it installs the latest release, checks it against the published SHA-256 sums, and restarts the server.

• Ask in words: type “warmer and a bit brighter”, “down exposure by ten points”, “shadows +25” or “paste the edits from the previous photo” (Ctrl/⌘ K), or say it: press the microphone in the side panel and say “bring lens blur down”. A small Rembrandt in dots thinks it over, then makes each change while you watch the sliders move. It understands everyday phrasing too (“the sky is too white”, “it looks too yellow”, “start over”) through Needle 3, a 36 MB language model that runs on your device; exact requests like “shadows +25” never need it, and with AI off the words still work.
• Edit the photo itself: drag up or down on any part of the picture to lighten or darken that tone, left or right to change that colour; the sliders follow.
• AI looks: Enhance, Relight, Sky (deepen it, or replace it with a clear, cloudy, golden-hour, sunset or dusk sky that relights the scene), Atmosphere, Sunrays, Skin, Motion and Lens Blur with aperture shapes, from on-device depth and subject maps.
• Refocus: brings back detail in out-of-focus photos, even heavy defocus (regularised deconvolution on the GPU), on the subject or the whole picture.
• Super Resolution: 2× and 4× with real detail, or Restore at the same size for soft photos; runs on the GPU (Metal on Apple silicon).
• AI Denoise: clean high-ISO shots into a new DNG with the same edits, on the GPU.
• Background work that stays out of the way: AI Denoise, Super Resolution and merges run in small GPU slices that pause while you edit, or when you're away, or overnight in a night window you set (Settings › Performance). The queue survives restarts.
• Merge: HDR from brackets, panoramas and focus stacks, each to a RAW-like DNG. HDR from one photo makes darker and brighter exposures of a single shot and blends each where it looks best, so shadows open and highlights hold without a tripod or brackets.
• RAW from 1,000+ cameras, developed on the GPU: tone, colour, curves, grading, dehaze, detail. Default colour measured against Camera Raw on test charts, and the tone sliders (Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks) are broad, overlapping zones fitted to how Lightroom's move each tone, so adjustments blend into the light around them, without halos, banding or hue shifts. A 24 MP RAW is ready to edit in a second or two (half size first, full size in the background), and going back to one you just had open is instant. Two profiles of our own: Rembrandt Standard (neutral, matched to Camera Raw) and Rembrandt Color (the default: a little more contrast, richer reds and yellows, calmer greens), or Match my camera for your camera's own look.
• Your workspace: hide the tools and panel sections you don't use (Settings › Workspace), and turn AI off altogether: its tools disappear and no model is downloaded or run.
• Made for old computers too: Rembrandt times your graphics card once and picks a working size it can keep up with, works at half size while a slider moves, and needs only WebGL 2 (OpenGL 3.3-class graphics).
• Looks: film-style colour (Portrait 400, Vivid 50, Chrome, Tungsten 800, Matte, Pan 400 B&W) with an Amount slider, and your own 3D LUTs: import any .cube file once and use it on every photo.
• Masks: brush, gradients, colour and tone ranges, AI subject, background, object and depth, and People: face skin, body skin, hair, eyebrows, eye whites, irises, lips, teeth and clothes.
• Remove: paint over anything and Generative Remove fills it with what was most likely behind it (a small inpainting network that runs on any computer's CPU, no upload). People in the background finds and removes passers-by in one click and keeps your subject. Heal and Clone copy from a matching part of the photo. Remove blemishes heals spots on portraits in one click and keeps moles and beauty marks. Visualize spots shows sensor dust and specks as white on black and Remove all dust heals them in one go; Color speckles (Detail) clears red and other colour dots at small high-contrast points that noise reduction can't reach.
• Portraits: Smooth skin, Light the face, Brighten eyes, Define irises and Whiten teeth, each one slider on an AI People mask you can fine-tune in Masks.
• Reshape (L): face sculpting (Eyes, Face width, Nose, Smile) from the AI's face landmarks, and Liquify brushes (Push, Bloat, Pucker, Restore).
• Generative Expand (Crop): a wider, taller or square copy of the photo, its new edges filled with what plausibly continues the scene.
• Edit like me: after a few edits, Rembrandt edits a new photo the way you would. It learns from the photos you've edited, by what each looked like before you touched it, so a dark photo still gets lifted the way you like. On your device; nothing to train or upload.
• Make these consistent: select a shoot, pick a hero frame, and every other frame's exposure and white balance are matched to it by measuring the results, keeping the rest of each photo's edits.
• Match my camera: every RAW carries the JPEG the camera made from it. Rembrandt learns your camera's own colour and tone from those JPEGs, per camera model, and applies it with one switch.
• Pick the best: select a shoot and Rembrandt groups the bursts, picks the sharpest frame with open eyes in each and rejects the blurry and eyes-closed ones. Your own flags are kept; one Undo. Compare (C) shows 2–4 frames side by side with zoom and pan linked.
• Lens corrections: the camera's built-in profile from Fujifilm and Sony RAWs, or one of 1,500 lens profiles from Lensfun (distortion, vignetting, chromatic aberration), plus manual distortion and vignetting for any photo, and Auto distortion for lenses with no profile, which straightens the photo's straight lines. Auto straighten levels horizons; Transform's Vertical and Horizontal fix converging lines, and Auto makes a building's verticals parallel.
• On-device AI: Refocus, background replacement. Nothing is uploaded.
• Smart search: type “dog on the beach” or “red car” and find the photos, with no keywording. On-device (CLIP, a 155 MB model downloaded once when you turn it on in Preferences); photos and searches never leave your computer.
• Library: albums, ratings, flags, colour labels, keywords, virtual copies, search, Find similar, sorting, keyboard shortcuts (or Lightroom's), one-click delete with Undo.
• Batch: copy and paste edits to hundreds of photos, batch export, and presets that fit each photo's exposure. Imports Lightroom presets (.xmp, .lrtemplate and zip packs). Watch a folder to apply a preset and album to new photos as they arrive.
• Share how: a before/after page with a slider, a replay video of the edit, or the recipe inside the exported file so anyone can see (and reuse) how it was edited.
• Bring your photos: folders, Lightroom Classic (edits, keywords, labels, virtual copies, collections, with a report of anything that can't come over) and Lightroom, Google Photos, Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive (setup). Export back to them too.
• Open formats: edits are standard XMP, readable by Lightroom and others. Export to JPEG (optionally HDR: an Ultra HDR JPEG whose highlights shine on HDR screens and look normal everywhere else), PNG, WebP or TIFF, with an optional watermark; exports keep the camera details and date taken, add your name and copyright, and embed an sRGB profile; location is never written.

• Lightroom: the everyday editing and library work is here: RAW development, masks (including AI subject, depth and object), healing, presets, lens corrections, HDR and panorama merges, denoise, batch editing, and catalog import. Not here yet: Print, Book, Slideshow, Web and Map modules, face recognition, Adobe's camera profiles, tethered capture (a watched folder covers most tethering apps), and a plugin ecosystem.
• darktable: Rembrandt borrows darktable's central idea, a scene-referred pipeline (edits work on linear light before a tone curve maps it to the screen), which is why highlights recover cleanly. darktable has far more modules and control; Rembrandt aims to be usable in five minutes, with fewer, broader controls and on-device AI. The engine is an independent implementation (see Credits).
• LightCraft: a newer open-source Lightroom reimplementation in Rust, from the ArtCraft team, with more of Lightroom's library and export surface (stacks, Survey view, all of Upright's modes, AVIF and HDR export) and an MCP server for AI agents. By its own status table, its AI masks and denoise are still classical heuristics or in progress and Super Resolution isn't started; some CR3, Olympus and Nikon HE RAWs don't decode yet. Rembrandt's on-device AI (People and subject masks, AI Denoise, Super Resolution, Refocus, blemish removal, culling by focus and eyes), the features that learn from you (Edit like me, Match my camera, Make these consistent) and LibRaw's 1,000+ cameras are where it differs most.
• RawTherapee / ART: similar ground to darktable; Rembrandt trades depth of control for speed of use.
• GIMP / Photoshop: different kind of tool. Those are pixel editors for compositing and painting; Rembrandt is a non-destructive RAW developer and library, like Lightroom.

Rembrandt never moves or rewrites your originals. Edits are saved as standard XMP sidecars next to your photos, which Lightroom, darktable and others can read, and Settings › Data & privacy exports a backup of all your edits. If Rembrandt disappeared tomorrow, your library and your edits would still be yours, in open formats.

JavaScript with WebGL2 and WebGPU shaders for the editing engine and on-device AI, in a small Rust (Tauri) desktop app. RAW files are decoded by LibRaw (C++, compiled to WebAssembly). Every release is built by GitHub Actions from this repository, with checksums and signed build provenance (SECURITY.md).

• darktable: the scene-referred workflow Rembrandt's engine is modelled on. An early prototype ported darktable's algorithms; it was replaced by an independent implementation of the published methods (listed in NOTICE.md) before the code was released.
• LibRaw (RAW decoding), Lensfun (lens profiles), RAWmakase (lens tables, heal and clone), Real-ESRGAN (Super Resolution), KAIR / FFDNet (AI Denoise), MediaPipe (subject, depth and object models). Licences and notices in NOTICE.md.

Rembrandt is free and stays free. Star the repo, tell a photographer, report a bug or send a fix.

npm ci && npx http-server -c-1 .   # web app
npm run tauri dev                  # desktop app (Rust + Tauri prerequisites)

Details in docs/building.md. Contributions welcome: CONTRIBUTING.md.

Free software under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later, the same licence as darktable. Use it, study it, change it and share it; if you distribute a modified version, share its source under the same terms. It may also be distributed through app stores (an additional permission under the GPL; see NOTICE.md, which also lists the third-party parts).

_{Screenshot photos from the scikit-image sample data: espresso by Rachel Michetti and cat by Stefan van der Walt (CC0), rocket launch by SpaceX and Hubble eXtreme Deep Field by NASA (public domain).}