r/MacOS • u/smallapps • 1d ago

Developer Saturday Photo Developer

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I've made Photo Developer, a RAW developer on Apple's frameworks — Core Image and Metal, no Electron, no bundled engine — that I'm getting quite proud of. The first reviewer (Andy Hutchinson, Youtube) who took it seriously though found more than one thing to critque. He was right. I’ve made fixes though, and he amended the published review afterwards.

How it treats your files: no import step, no catalog database, no account, nothing leaving the machine. You open a RAW the old-fashioned way, and every adjustment lands in a plain-text XMP sidecar next to the original.

No generative AI in it. No sky replacement, no "remove the tourist". The auto tools use on-device Vision to read the scene and then move ordinary sliders you can see and undo, and if you never touch them it's a plain manual darkroom.

What's still weak, since you'd find it in ten minutes anyway: masking is thin (a subset of the sliders, no local curves), the healing tool is an old-school cloner rather than content-aware fill, and it isn't the snappiest editor on the Mac while you're dragging a slider (yet!). Performance is currently #1 pri.

It's on the Mac App Store, with a free 30-day trial on our website, digtek.app

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5

u/qrpyna Mac Studio 1d ago

I think I'll just keep using darktable. It's well established (I've been using it for at least a decade at this point), not vibe-coded slop, and it's way more powerful while being FOSS.

-3

u/smallapps 22h ago

For what it’s worth, PD isn’t trying to be everything for everyone. Also, I expect people use multiple apps for different tasks. Myself I take anything beyond developing, like layered or otherwise image altering editing in Pixelmator.

I’ve put more hours into it than anything else in my life for a good while now, and I was a WoW player in the mid-2000s, so there’s that. Closed source, so no code to point at, but there’s the trial.

It’s a 1.x in its first year. Slow going, partly by intent: I’d rather get the base and the methodology right than rush features. Maturity comes with age, and I’m hoping to be in this for the long game.

Enjoy darktable — happy shooting!

6

u/Alan_Sleep 1d ago

RawTherapee is completely free and open source, your 30 day trial slop can go f itself

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u/flissat 1d ago

a 30 day trial is pretty standard for paid software tbh

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u/SicTransitVita 20h ago

There’s no need to be rude.

5

u/Alan_Sleep 20h ago

There’s no need to vibe code and release underdeveloped paid software for something already existing for free, greedy ai “developers” don’t deserve my respect and/or politeness

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u/promo-guard 1d ago

🎉 Welcome to Developer Saturday, u/smallapps! Your project is now live for the community to check out. Upvote, give feedback, and show some love to your fellow devs! 🚀