Redlamp

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A native, open-source raw photo editor for Mac, iPad and iPhone that anyone who knows Lightroom will find familiar.

Redlamp's Develop workspace: a raw photo of a carnival dancer in a swirling skirt in the middle, folders and recipes on the left, the histogram and the Basic and Tone Curve panels on the right

About the project

Redlamp is a raw photo editor built from scratch in Swift and Metal for Apple Silicon. It does one thing, developing photos, and tries to do it faster and more natively than anything else on the platform.

It keeps the workflow photographers already know from Lightroom: the panel layout, slider names and ranges, and the single-key shortcuts. Underneath, it's a native, GPU-first app with its own raw pipeline, no subscription and no cloud. It works on your folders, and keeps each photo's edits in a small file beside it.

The Develop workspace works today: tone and colour, noise reduction and sharpening, lens corrections, masks (including Subject, Sky and People), healing and removal, focus stacking, and Recipes, which put presets, profiles and LUTs in one place, film simulations included. AI Denoise is next, then 1.0, and then the iPad and iPhone apps.

The name comes from the darkroom safelight: the one light you can work by without fogging the paper.

Licence

Redlamp is open source under the Mozilla Public License 2.0, which is compatible with the App Store. Its algorithms are written clean-room from papers and specifications.