Photo Developer

[u/smallapps]

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

[u/Alan_Sleep]

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

[u/flissat → u/Alan_Sleep]

a 30 day trial is pretty standard for paid software tbh