RAWdemptionBeta

A RAW editor for the Mac. Free, and it stays free.
A one-person project. I edit my own photos with it every day.

A hobby shouldn't come with a monthly rent.

Install for Mac
Public beta · Only 7.0 MB · Apple silicon · macOS 13 or later

Why RAWdemption exists

I started RAWdemption when I stopped paying for Lightroom. All I wanted was to go through my photos, keep the good ones, make them look nice and export them.

The free editors I tried were capable, honestly. They just felt made for pros: panels everywhere, modules, settings for the settings. I wanted something I could open and just use.

So I made my own. It's for people who shoot for fun: you just got your first camera, you shoot on weekends, you want your photos to look good without learning a whole program first. If you've edited photos on your iPhone or in Photomator, it'll feel familiar straight away.

It's free. Not a trial, not a freemium thing with the good stuff locked away. Just free.

Free forever, for anyone.

It's just me building it. If you like it and want to chip in, there's Patreon. You never have to.

Support on Patreon

What's in it

The stuff I use the most. Click a card to watch it again.

Sort & filter

Sort by date, name or size. Filter by camera, lens and focal length. Search “35mm” or “2024”.

Things

Beaches, mountains, snow, cities: your photos get sorted by what's in them, automatically. Click one to see them all.

Favourites .

Press . to heart a photo. Hearts are saved next to the photos, so they move with the folder.

Copy & paste edits ⇧⌘V

Copy the edit from one photo and paste it on the rest. Crops and masks stay with their photo.

One-click subject

Click Subject, People or Background and the mask is drawn for you. Brighten the subject, calm the background.

Masks M

Brush, linear and radial too. Each mask gets its own exposure, colour and clarity.

Crop & straighten C

Common ratios or free. Auto levels the horizon, or draw along anything that should be straight.

Your numbers

How many photos you took, edited, exported and loved, and which cameras and lenses you really use.

Border & date

Optional white border, and the capture date stamped in the corner like an old film camera.

How it works

From the SD card to the export, the way I actually do it.

Fast, and it stays smooth

This is the part I care about most. Opening a folder, flicking through photos, dragging a slider, exporting a batch: none of it should make you wait.

~0.1 sto the next photo in the editor. It gets the next one ready while you're looking at this one.
LiveEvery slider redraws while you drag it, even with all the others in use.
0.2–0.4 sper photo to export. 20 edited RAWs as full-size JPEGs took 4 to 7 seconds, faster when their thumbnails were already made.
7.0 MBfor the whole app. Thumbnails are kept, so a folder opens straight away the second time.

Timed on my M2 Pro with 24-megapixel RAW files. Older Macs take longer, but I test on those too.

Things: your photos, sorted for you

RAWdemption looks through your photos in the background and works out what's in them. Beaches, mountains, snow, cities, sunsets. They show up in the sidebar, most common first. Click one and there they all are. Search finds them too.

Nothing to tag and nothing to set up. It uses Apple's Vision, the on-device recognition built into macOS, running on your Mac's Neural Engine. Nothing gets uploaded. It looks at each photo once, pauses while you edit, and you can pause it or switch it off whenever you want.

Your profile

Your photos already know how you shoot: which cameras and lenses, which focal lengths, what time of day. RAWdemption turns that into a profile page, which is a fun thing to look at now and then. It's all worked out on your Mac and stays there.

The full profile is a thank-you for supporters on Patreon (€2 a month). Editing, exporting and everything else are free and unlimited, for everyone.

How your RAW files are developed

RAWdemption has no colour science of its own. Every RAW file is developed by Apple's RAW engine, the one built into macOS that Photos and Preview use. What I wrote sits around it.

Apple's engine

  • Reads the file and demosaics it at full sensor resolution
  • Applies Apple's colour profile for your camera
  • White balance, Exposure and Sharpness, with Apple's own controls
  • Noise reduction, at Apple's default for your camera
  • The final rendering: Apple's tone curve and highlight roll-off

RAWdemption

  • Shadows, Highlights, Contrast, White, Black and Dehaze, on the linear, demosaiced data inside Apple's engine, after white balance and before its tone curve. Recovered highlights come from the raw data, not from a finished picture.
  • Clarity, Brightness, colour, masks, black & white, vignette and grain, after Apple's rendering, in linear light
  • Gamut mapping: colours outside sRGB or Display P3 lose saturation at the same hue instead of being clipped
  • Crop, the library, copy and paste, export

In practice:

  • With no edits, a RAW looks much like it does in Apple Photos. It won't match Lightroom, Capture One or your camera's JPEG, and those don't match each other either.
  • Colour for each camera is Apple's work, not mine.
  • There are no camera-matching looks (film simulations, picture styles) and no camera or lens profiles of my own.
  • New cameras arrive when Apple adds them, usually with a macOS update. If Photos can't open your files yet, RAWdemption can't either.
  • Exports go through exactly the same steps, at full resolution unless you pick a smaller size: JPEG or HEIC in 8 bits, TIFF or PNG in 16 bits, sRGB or Display P3.

Where it's going

I work on it whenever I can. Updates come often, and most of them are small.

Regular updates

Updates install from inside the app, signed and checked first. Bugs people report get fixed before anything new.

Faster, lighter

I keep chipping away at speed and memory, so it runs well on older Apple silicon Macs too, not just new ones.

New tools, slowly

I add a tool when it makes editing nicer, not just longer. Fewer tools that work well beats a hundred that sort of work.

Your ideas

Anyone can send an idea from Settings › Feedback in the app. I read every one. I can't promise to build everything, but plenty of what's in the app started as someone's message.

Windows, maybe

Once the Mac version is solid, I'd like to look at Windows. No dates though.

Free stays free

No subscription later, no paid version, no ads. Nothing that's free today will end up behind a payment.

Support on Patreon

Questions

Will it stay free?

Yes. Editing and exporting are free and always will be: no limits, no subscription, no ads, and nothing that's free today will be put behind a payment later. Patreon is optional. It lets me spend more time on RAWdemption, and as a thank-you, supporters get their full profile page.

Did you use AI to make it?

Yes. I'm a photographer, not a professional developer, and I wrote RAWdemption with AI coding assistants, mostly Claude. Without them, a RAW editor made by one person in their spare time wouldn't exist.

I'll keep using them. They make fixing bugs and adding features way faster, and I'd love RAWdemption to become one of the best free photo editors out there. It's a trade-off I'm happy with.

Nothing leaves your Mac. The features that recognise what's in your photos (Things, and the one-click Subject and People masks) use Apple's Vision, the same on-device recognition Photos uses, running on your Mac's Neural Engine. Your photos are never uploaded anywhere, and no AI service ever sees them.

If that puts you off, fair enough. Personally, Adobe's subscription bothers me a lot more.

Which cameras does it open?

RAWdemption develops RAW files with the RAW engine built into macOS (more on that), so it opens what Apple Photos opens: most cameras from Canon, Fujifilm, Leica, Nikon, Olympus/OM System, Panasonic, Pentax/Ricoh, Sony and more, plus DNG. Apple publishes the full list on its support site (“Digital camera RAW formats supported by macOS”), and new cameras arrive with macOS updates. JPEG, HEIC, PNG and TIFF open too.

Why Apple's RAW engine and not your own?

Because it's good, Apple keeps it up to date for hundreds of cameras, and it's already on your Mac. Writing a demosaicer and profiling cameras properly is years of work for a team. The downside is that colour is Apple's interpretation, and a brand-new camera has to wait for macOS to support it.

Will my photos look like they do in Lightroom?

Not exactly. Lightroom starts from Adobe's profiles, RAWdemption from Apple's. Neither is more correct than the other, but you'll see differences in contrast and in some colours. If you're used to Adobe Standard, give it a few photos.

Is it scene-referred?

Partly. The tone controls (Shadows, Highlights, Contrast, White, Black, Dehaze) work on linear data before Apple's tone curve. Apple's rendering then takes the photo to display, and Clarity, colour and masks work after that, in linear light. It isn't a fully scene-referred pipeline like darktable's.

Does it change my photos?

Never. Originals are only read. Each edit is a small recipe saved in a hidden .lightbox folder beside the photos, along with your favourites, so edits travel with the folder to another drive or Mac. Exports are always new files.

Which Macs does it run on?

Macs with Apple silicon (M1 or later) on macOS 13 Ventura or later. 16 GB of memory is recommended for smooth editing of 24-megapixel RAW files; Intel Macs aren't supported.

Why does installing need Terminal?

macOS only opens an app downloaded in a browser if Apple has notarised it, which takes a paid developer membership. RAWdemption is free and made by one person, so it isn't notarised, and macOS calls it “damaged” instead. The Terminal command installs the very same app without the “downloaded” label that triggers this. The install script is short enough to read, and every update after that is signed and checked by the app before it installs.

Can it replace Lightroom?

For a lot of people who shoot for fun, yes. It covers what I used Lightroom for day to day. It doesn't do catalogues across many drives, tethered shooting, print layouts or plugins, and I don't plan to add them.

Is it finished?

Nope. It's in public beta and gets better with every release. If something breaks or looks off, Settings › Feedback sends it straight to me from inside the app. I read every report.

RAWdemption icon

Install RAWdemption

Version 0.9.27 beta · 2.8 MB download, 7.0 MB installed · Apple silicon · macOS 13 or later · 16 GB memory recommended · RAW, JPEG and HEIC

The quickest way. Open Terminal (press ⌘ Space and type Terminal), paste this line and press Return:

curl -fsSL https://rawdemption.com/install.sh | bash

It downloads RAWdemption, checks that it arrived complete and intact, and puts it in Applications. It never asks for your password and installs nothing else. Read the script first if you like; it's short.

Why not a plain download button? I make RAWdemption on my own and give it away. macOS only opens a browser-downloaded app straight away if Apple has notarised it, which needs a paid yearly developer membership, so for now it blocks RAWdemption and calls it “damaged”. Nothing is wrong with the file.

Each way above does what you would do by hand: put the app in Applications and tell macOS you chose to open it. After that, every update is signed with RAWdemption's own key, and the app checks that signature before installing anything.

Support on Patreon

I use it every day, but it's still a beta, and there are cameras and Macs I haven't tried. If something breaks or looks off, Settings › Feedback sends me a note (with the crash report, if it quit) right from the app.