RapidRAW - lightweight RAW editor from an 18-year-old developer

Imagine: you returned from a photo shoot, shot hundreds of RAW frames, but your computer can barely handle Adobe Lightroom. Familiar situation? This is exactly the problem RapidRAW solves — an incredibly lightweight (under 30 MB!) cross-platform editor that is also fully open source and free.

What is this beast?

RapidRAW is a RAW image editor with three key advantages:

Incredible lightness — weighs dozens of times less than alternatives
GPU acceleration — all processing runs on the graphics card via WGSL shaders
Non-destructive editing — originals remain untouched

The project was created by 18-year-old developer Timon Keh as part of a personal challenge. Funny enough, the author himself calls it "a result of my stubbornness and unwillingness to pay for Lightroom".

Who will find it useful?

Photographers tired of "heavy" editors
Travelers with low-power laptops
Everyone who values open source

5 reasons to try RapidRAW

Lightning-fast work Thanks to Rust and GPU shaders, the interface stays responsive even with complex edits. In demo videos, you can see how smoothly the image changes when adjusting exposure.

Smart masks AI algorithms automatically detect objects and foreground. You can combine automatic masks with manual ones — brush, gradient, or radial.
32-bit precision No artifacts or quality loss even with aggressive corrections. Under the hood — a linear RAW processing pipeline.
Full library Convenient browsing, ratings, tags, and batch processing. There's even a built-in map for geotagged photos.
Generative AI (optional) You can inpaint elements via text descriptions through a local ComfyUI server.

Technical details

The project combines:

Rust — for the core and image processing
React — for the interface
Tauri — for packaging into a native application
WGSL — shader language for GPU acceleration

What's especially impressive is that the author, without formal education in the field, used AI to figure out complex algorithms like Menon's demosaicing.

How to try it?

Download a pre-built release: Releases
Build from source:

git clone https://github.com/CyberTimon/RapidRAW.git
cd RapidRAW
npm install
npx tauri dev --release

RapidRAW is a rare example of a hobby project that can compete with commercial solutions. Though it still has a long way to go compared to Lightroom in terms of features, it wins by a landslide in speed and lightness.

Especially recommended for:

Traveling photographers
Owners of low-end PCs
Everyone tired of software subscriptions

And if you're a Rust developer — you might be interested in contributing to the project. The author actively accepts pull requests!