RapidRAW Files

RapidRAW has officially crossed 10,000 GitHub stars and over 610,000 downloads. What started as an empty project folder on my laptop has grown into an incredible global community of photographers and open-source contributors. To celebrate this milestone, I wrote a deep-dive reflection on the entire journey, covering the early prototypes, the late-night shader experiments, and the path forward. You can read the full retrospective on the blog.

Alongside this milestone, version 1.6.4 delivers one of the most technically challenging updates yet: rebuilt highlight recovery capable of reconstructing clipped color channels. This release also reworks the shader pipeline to introduce true exposure adjustments, adds a responsive masonry grid layout to the library, includes faster crop and pan canvas shortcuts, offers a neutral grey canvas mode, and squashes several backend bugs across export and EXIF handling.

New Features

### Highlight Recovery To be 100% honest with you: highlight recovery was always one of the weaker spots in RapidRAW. I spent so many hours trying to get it right in the past that I started telling myself it was just "too hard" to solve nicely. But over the last few days, I had a strong urge to finally crack it, and I'm honestly blown away by how well it works now. RapidRAW can now reconstruct clipped highlights (> 1.0) using the remaining color channel information. The results speak for themselves: **Example 1** (Shot by Wojciech Wolas): | Before | After | | :---: | :---: | | | | **Example 2**: | Before | After | | :---: | :---: | | | | **Example 3**: | Before | After | | :---: | :---: | | | | Alongside this, I reworked parts of the shader pipeline. To reflect how the math actually works now: - The **Exposure** slider (previously EV Shift) is now a true **Exposure** slider that cleanly pulls down overexposed highlights. - The old exposure slider has been renamed to **Brightness**. It runs after the tonemapper, letting you tweak perceived image brightness without introducing clipping. ### New Crop, Pan & Zoom Shortcuts It might seem like a small detail, but this is a massive workflow improvement. You no longer have to open the crop tool and drag the corner handles every single time: - **Ctrl + Mouse Wheel:** Quick crop in/out - **Ctrl + Drag:** Pan inside the crop frame - **Shift + Drag:** Straighten / rotate (as before) This makes reframing and checking compositions super fast and intuitive. ### Library Navigation The Sources panel now includes an active folder navigation header, letting you quickly move back and forth between directories. ### Masonry Library Grid Added a new thumbnail view mode that arranges photos into a clean masonry layout, utilizing all available screen space. Alongside this change, the **Original Ratio** thumbnail mode is now enabled by default. ### Neutral Grey Canvas You can now toggle the canvas background to a neutral middle-grey in the settings. This helps avoid optical contrast illusions and color bias while editing.

What to Download

For other platforms and formats (ARM builds, RPM, AppImage, etc.), check the full asset list below.

Running on Windows and macOS

RapidRAW is not yet code-signed, so Windows and macOS may show warnings when launching the app.

• Windows: When launching the app, you may see a Windows Defender SmartScreen warning.

• Click "More info" → "Run anyway" to proceed.

• macOS: You'll need to remove the quarantine flag after installation, otherwise macOS may report the app as corrupted:

  :::bash xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/RapidRAW.app