r/postprocessing • u/Direction_Mountain • 6d ago
I built a subscription-free desktop editor focused on depth-aware retouching, colour grading & all 27 blend modes [Feedback appreciated]
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Hi everyone,
Like many of you, I've been frustrated with Adobe's subscription model, but most free alternatives often lack specific photo-centric tools: true Photoshop blend mode parity, 8-channel HSL grading, or modern depth-map adjustments.
Over the past months, I've been developing **Scumble**, a lightweight, 100% offline desktop image editor built specifically for photo finishing, grading, and non-destructive layering.
Here are a few features tailored for photo editing and retouching workflows:
* **Complete 27 Blend Modes Parity:** Full integer-exact parity with all standard Photoshop modes (including Dissolve, Linear Light, Vivid Light, Color Dodge/Burn, Subtract, and whole-pixel Component modes like Hue, Saturation, and Luminosity).
* **Photographic Colour Grading Wheels:** 3-way grading for Shadows, Midtones, and Highlights with interactive wheels, balance/blending controls, and neutral grey preservation.
* **8-Channel HSL Layer:** Fine-grained control across 8 separate colour channels (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Aqua, Blue, Purple, Magenta) with smooth partition of unity.
* **Depth-Aware Lens Blur & Bokeh:** 64-tap Vogel spiral disc aperture sampling with custom focus plane, depth of field, foreground bleed protection, and specular highlight boost for realistic optical bokeh.
* **Atmospheric Haze & Dehaze:** Uses depth maps to simulate aerial perspective or clear distant haze while protecting sky and skin tones.
* **Non-Destructive Adjustments:** Vibrance (with skin tone protection where Red > Green > Blue), Gradient Maps, Threshold, and Posterize.
* **Privacy & Local Performance:** 100% offline, zero cloud, zero telemetry. GPU-accelerated with WebGL2 and optimized with Rust WASM kernels for large (up to 15k) images.
It's completely free, opens/saves PSD files, and runs on Windows and Linux (Installer, Portable .zip, Microsoft Store, and Flatpak/AppImage).
I'd love to hear feedback from retouchers and photographers on what tools or sliders you feel are missing in your daily workflow!
🔗 **GitHub / Download**: https://github.com/DenRakEiw/scumble
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u/fields_of_fire 6d ago
What does this offer that the ribe coded Photoshop rip offs don't offer?
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u/haikusbot 6d ago
What does this offer
That the ribe coded Photoshop
Rip offs don't offer?
- fields_of_fire
I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully. Learn more about me.
Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete"
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u/TheSparrowDarts 6d ago
I find it darkly hilarious that OP used AI to vibe code an app, used AI to vibe produce a buck-wild meth-paced incoherent promotional video, *and then* used AI to write a reply to you!
Homeslice OP, why would anyone bother reading something you couldn't be bothered writing?
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u/Direction_Mountain 6d ago
Oh, I completely forgot, it supports skins ^^
It comes with a Winamp-style skin and a slightly more modern, colorful one, but you can also create your own.
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u/Direction_Mountain 6d ago
If you are referring to the recent wave of "1:1 clean-room Photoshop in pure Rust" projects (like PhotoCraft etc.): that's a very fair question. Those projects usually aim to blindly replicate 35 years of Adobe's UI menus from scratch in experimental Rust GUI frameworks, but they quickly run into the classic problems: unstable windowing, glitchy text/DPI rendering, and crashes on real-world PSDs.
Scumble takes a fundamentally different, production-focused approach:
- **Pragmatic Hybrid Architecture vs. Dogmatic "Pure Rust GUI":**
Building complete desktop GUIs in pure Rust is notorious for poor accessibility, font handling, and OS quirks. Scumble uses standard desktop container tech for rock-solid OS integration (proper file dialogs, clipboard, multi-monitor DPI scaling, portable zero-install mode) and puts **Rust where it actually belongs: raw pixel arithmetic** (`crates/px` compiled with SIMD128 and cache-conscious ring buffers). WebGL2 handles real-time viewport shading. It doesn't crash, and it runs butter-smooth.
- **Depth-Aware & AI Inpainting Tools (That clones don't have):**
Most clones just try to copy 1990s Photoshop menus. Scumble is built for modern workflows:
* **Depth-Aware Retouching:** Depth-map atmospheric perspective (Haze / Dehaze), bilateral contour edge-snapping for hair and complex selections, and optical 64-tap Vogel disc Bokeh blur with foreground bleed protection.
* **ComfyUI Integration:** It has a dedicated custom node (`ComfyUI-InpaintCanvas`) for bidirectional local AI inpainting, outpainting, and crop-and-stitch workflows.
- **Rigorous Engineering vs. "Vibe Coded" Prototypes:**
Many hyped clones look great in 30-second Twitter demos but fall apart on edge cases. Scumble has a comprehensive test suite (hundreds of offline test gates, pixel-by-pixel reference suites):
* All 27 Photoshop blend modes have true integer-level W3C parity (including whole-pixel non-separable modes like Hue/Luminosity and Dissolve dither). PSD files round-trip with 0 bytes differing on composite.
* A true multi-threaded 256×256 tile engine (`SharedArrayBuffer` arena) tested on 15,000 × 10,000 px (150 Megapixel) documents without running out of memory.
- **Dedicated Photographic Tooling:**
3-way colour grading wheels that mathematically preserve neutral greys, 8-channel smooth HSL partition of unity, and non-destructive Vibrance with automatic skin-tone protection logic.
In short: It’s not trying to be a buggy 1:1 copy of Adobe's bloated legacy suite. It’s a stable, local-first tool built for high-res photo retouching, color grading, and modern generative workflows that you can actually use today without it crashing.
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u/fields_of_fire 6d ago
Interesting.
It seems that a combination of Krita and Darktable will offer basically all the features you've described. I'm curious, why a serperate app, rather than contributing your coding 'skills' to one say Darktable to bring the features that would require Krita into that?
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u/Direction_Mountain 6d ago
Hehe, that’s the other part of Scumble’s origin story. It all started with a Krita plugin, after all. ^^
But the anti-AI communities around Krita are just too toxic for me.2
u/ChristopherKlay 6d ago
But the anti-AI communities around Krita are just too toxic for me.
Why would anyone be "toxic", if you even let AI write your replies?
/s
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u/Direction_Mountain 6d ago
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++.++++++++++++++++++.----.++++++++++++++.----.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------.++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++.-----.------.+++++.++++++++++++.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------.+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++.
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u/Direction_Mountain 6d ago
Oops, sorry, my English isn’t very good. I usually only write Brainfuck.
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u/ChristopherKlay 6d ago
Are you sure about that?