Guys, I just learned about this new FOSS editor called "RapidRAW" on GitHub, and this might well be the Lightroom (non-Classic) killer as Darktable is to Lightroom Classic. See, as much as I love Darktable for its power and feature set, most of my non-tech photographer friends have mentioned how its power comes at the cost of complexity even beyond LrC. Yes, I love DT, but I do have to agree – It can be overwhelming to a newer user not as familiar with LrC or wanting to learn a whole new program just for quick edits.
...and then I found RapidRAW! This looks like it could be it: A sleek, lightweight, elegant, comprehensive (enough) editor that seems to finally strike the balance between power and beginner-friendliness! Even better, like Darktable, it too appears to be FOSS, breaking away from the money-hungry Adobe corporate software! Now, I've only just started looking into it, but what do you think? Could this be the next piece in the essential toolkit for Ex-dobe users switching from Lightroom but not quite wanting a full LrC replacement? Check it out!
https://github.com/CyberTimon/RapidRAW
I took a shot at this since it has Linux support. Generally I'm having to either use Darktable or dual boot into windows to use LR Classic (especially if I need to denoise the photos)
For the controls themselves it had most of what I use from LR Classic (probably a good time to mention I never used LR so I can't compare that) but I had 3 major issues. Both may be because I'm on openSUSE which is not officially supported, although an RPM is provided
The UI is extremely slow to use. Slower than LR classic even.
I can't figure out how to show my photos at full 60MP resolution. It seems to show only proxies that completely fall apart when you try to zoom. I could only imagine performance being even worse however with full resolution.
Editing highlights down completely falls apart as if I was editing a jpg and not RAW. I was willing to work past the other 2 issues but not that.
I am still interested in the software as it gets updates though, and its very possible my issues are because I'm running it in opensuse.
That’s definitely odd. I mean, it is still definitely WIP (even core-functionality wise), but at least on macOS (via M4 MBA with 16 GB RAM) and Windows 11 (via VMware Fusion with 8 GB RAM and 3D Acceleration on the same ARM Mac, mind you), RapidRAW ran well with my test 48 MP shot and some quick edits.
I’m with you though – Darktable’s an excellent piece of software, but I’d love a “Lightroom-esque” program and this looks promising!
I ended up trying it out on windows. My performance was fine, and I can get past the low resolution editing, but adjusting exposure and especially highlights is still very bad. Instead of recovering highlights it just.. Makes it less bright. Like editing a JPG.
I wonder if its actually an issue of how the program is reading ARW files? Maybe its only reading the embedded jpeg from the ARW (ARW is sony's RAW file format - I'm shooting on an A7R V for reference)
Edit: on second though it definitely isn't using embedded jpeg since those are way lower resolution, but still maybe it isn't handling the file correctly
Could be. Full file format support is hit-or-miss with newer programs – even if it can read and write the data, it may not be able to fully interpret it. Try running through *Adobe DNG Converter or converting it to a TIFF, then see if that works any better, perhaps? Also check if there’s already a “full resolution editing” suggestion on the GitHub, and if not, make one! I’m away from my computer right now, but if you find/make one, please link it here so I can also share it.
*Adobe DNG Converter is the one Adobe tool I do use since it’s 100% free and offline. It JUST converts images to “standard” DNG files or JPEGs, and I do this for iPhone ProRAWs or other unsupported images when trying to edit in Darktable. I had to make some “iPhone DNG presets” and all since ADC removes the Apple DNG-specific data, but it works well beyond that.