pdcgomes / redlamp

A native, open-source RAW photo editor for Mac, iPad, and iPhone that anyone who knows Lightroom will find familiar. 
Redlamp is built from scratch in Swift and Metal for Apple Silicon. It focuses on one thing, *developing* photos, and aims to do it faster and more natively than anything else on the platform.
 Watch the film: Introducing Redlamp (1:42, on YouTube) 
> **Status: alpha, iteration 2 (macOS).** The core RAW pipeline and the Develop workspace work today: Basic (with Texture, Clarity and Dehaze), Tone Curve, Color Mixer, Color Grading, Detail (noise reduction and sharpening), Effects, lens corrections, crop and Upright, **masking** (gradients, brush, color and luminance range, Subject, Sky, Background, People and its parts, Objects, Landscape and Depth Range) with local adjustments, **healing and removal** (Heal, Clone, Remove, content-aware or generative, and Remove Dust), **focus stacking**, and **Base Looks** and **Recipes**, Redlamp's profiles and presets, with film looks measured from cameras' own renderings and **film simulations** of 36 film looks from 30 stocks, built from the manufacturers' datasheets. AI Denoise and the rest of Develop parity are next, then 1.0 and the iPad and iPhone apps. See Where we are, the Roadmap, and how Redlamp compares with Lightroom.
>
> This README is the project's primary status page and is kept up to date as work lands. *Last updated: 4 October 2026.*
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## Contents
- Why Redlamp
- Goals
- Where we are
- Film simulations
- Screenshots
- Roadmap
- Installation
- Getting started
- Component harness
- Using Redlamp
- Architecture
- Contributing
- Support Redlamp
- License and acknowledgements
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## Why Redlamp
A **red lamp** is the darkroom safelight: the one light you can work by without fogging the paper. That is the idea behind the project: you can see and shape your photo freely, and the original is never harmed.
Lightroom defined how millions of photographers edit, but it is a cross-platform application that doesn't feel at home on a Mac, iPad, or iPhone, and it is tied to a subscription and a cloud. Redlamp keeps the workflow photographers already know, including the panel layout, slider names and ranges, and keyboard shortcuts, and rebuilds everything underneath as a native, GPU-first, open-source application.
**Redlamp works on your folders.** It keeps a working set of folders, as Lightroom Classic's Folders panel does, and stores edits in small sidecar files next to the photos. A library built the same way is planned for 1.0 (roadmap): folders on your disk stay the organisation, ratings, keywords and collections are saved with each photo, and an index on your Mac, there only for speed, is designed for libraries of a million photos.
## Goals
1. **Immediately familiar to Lightroom users.** The Develop module's layout, panel order, slider names, ranges and defaults, and single-key shortcuts all carry over. We copy conventions, never Adobe's assets. Profiles and presets are kept apart, as in