Can It Compete With Adobe Lightroom?

Adobe Lightroom is a resource hog. It has been for nearly a decade, to the best of my recollection. It didn’t matter what spec-ed out Mac or Windows system I had; even seemingly basic touch-ups to photos, especially raw ones, would cause my RAM usage to spike. Don’t even get me started on what happens when you try to bulk export images. I once had to even cold boot my system when I accidentally turned on face recognition for the first time; the system fans began revving so crazily, I thought the whole thing would blow up.

The Big Picture: RapidRaw Editing Software Review Conclusions

It’s not often that a one-person effort can shake things up, especially when the product can be considered as still in its infancy stages. But Timon Käch, aka CyberTimon, has made a useful product here that has a lot of potential for photographers who are still getting to grips with their image editing. The layout is fantastic, and the UX is appealing to the eye and uncomplicated to use. For an 18-year-old to create such software from scratch and then make it available for free to photographers is quite a commendable effort. It’s not without its limitations, of course, but RapidRaw looks like a software that can easily be scaled. To really stand out from its competitors, it needs a lot more work, which I’m fairly certain Timon realises already:

• Really fast to load. Much more quicker than you’d think it could be
• Clean, minimalistic interface that’s easy on the eyes
• Very low system resource usage while in use
• Quick exports

I’ll give RapidRaw 3 out of 5 stars for its effort to create something for those who can’t afford subscription-based editing software. It’s got quite some way to go before it becomes a much-downloaded software based on word of mouth, but from what I’ve seen so far, it won’t take too long for it to get there. Timon is very transparent about what features he’s working on currently and what he’d like to bring to RapidRaw, both from a functional and system perspective.

Experience

The software is available for download on Timon’s GitHub page and is currently available for both Windows and macOS systems. If you’re using a Mac, you’ll need to do a tiny Terminal patch, but Timon has listed the instructions to make it easy for you to install RapidRaw. Once you’ve done this, you need to pick a folder to edit.

It’s cool that the color for the UI can be changed and the resolution preview can be adjusted. A super cool addition is the presence of keyboard shortcuts. All edits are non-destructive and saved in a tiny sidecar .rrdata file. RapidRaw reminds me of some of the very early editions of Adobe Lightroom Classic, and I certainly wish the best for this software to scale new heights.

No catalogs exist in this tool, which was built out of the frustration of using Lightroom, but funnily enough, you do have sessions like in Capture One. For this review, I bundled a bunch of raw files into a new folder to test out the various features.

You can find all the basic editing tools that you’d expect in a desktop image editing tool today. Thankfully, there are no gimmicky filter-related options in here that sometimes find themselves in editing software, inevitably ending up devaluing the quality of such a product. You can also rate images.

Editing is done primarily using sliders, but you could also use the Curves tool if you’d like to start with that route. You can save edit settings as presets for quick usage later on. Overall, it feels like it’s almost got a web UI look to it, and once you start to use it, you’ll feel the same.

Making adjustments to your photos is a swift process. My eyes often glanced at my CPU and Memory usage indicators, but no unusual consumption was observed. You might observe a bit of freezing while exporting an image, but nothing that lasts more than a second.

Unexpected Bugs

I did run into some bugs, most of which I’m sure can be fixed in upcoming releases. Over the last handful of years, a lot of my image library comprises photos taken with the Nikon Z mirrorless series. Unfortunately, for now, it appears that RapidRaw doesn’t support 14-bit RAW images from these cameras.

Adjusting the Shadows slider to the right doesn’t brighten them as one would expect. Instead, it seems to do the opposite of what the Dehaze tool in Lightroom does.

The Masking tool doesn’t work as expected. This probably has to do with the unavailability of AI intergration at the moment.

I don’t quite know how to put this, but the edits come out looking like the images were taken on a CCD sensor camera from the early to late 00s (see image gallery below). Not everyone will be a fan of this, and I’m hoping that more color spaces can be added to RapidRaw to correct this later on.

Keyboard shortcuts don’t seem to be customizable at the moment. The familiarity of this layout to Lightroom had me tapping at my usual shortcut keys only to realise they don’t work.

The Grain slider seems to add more noise than the grain you’d expect to see in film stock, even if I didn’t slide it all the way to the right.

Edited Images

Overall Thoughts

For now, think of RapidRaw as a lighter version of Adobe Lightroom (not Classic), and you’ll find the process quite intuitive. In its current state, it could match up to about 50% or so of what Lightroom can offer, which is a tradeoff you’d have to accept for a free tool versus a paid one.

If you’d like to give RapidRaw a try to see if it does what you’re looking for, click on this link. There’s a good future ahead for this editing software if Timon continues to work on it. I just hope it stays light on system resources even in the years to come. There are some significant changes required to catch up to speed on some counts, and support for more file types is required too. Creating free software is a thankless job, so kudos to Timon for wanting to keep improving this.

Declaration of Journalistic Intent

The Phoblographer is one of the last standing dedicated photography publications that speaks to both art and tech in our articles. We put declarations up front in our reviews to adhere to journalistic standards that several publications abide by. These help you understand a lot more about what we do:

• This article is in no way sponsored. We discovered RapidRaw on a social platform and decided to see if it stood up to its claims
• None of the reviews on the Phoblographer are sponsored. That’s against FTC laws and we adhere to them just the same way that newspapers, magazines, and corporate publications do.
• The Phoblographer’s standards for reviewing products have become much stricter. After having the world’s largest database of real-world lens reviews, we choose not to review anything we don’t find innovative or unique, and in many cases, products that lack weather resistance. Unless something is very unique, we probably won’t touch it.
• In recent years, brands have withheld NDA information from us or stopped working with us because they feel they cannot control our coverage. These days, many brands will not give products to the press unless they get favorable coverage. In other situations, we’ve stopped working with several brands for ethical issues. Either way, we report as honestly and rawly as humanity allows.
• At the time of publishing, the Phoblographer is the only photography publication that is a member of Adobe’s Content Authenticity Initiative. We champion human-made art and are frank with our audience. We are also the only photography publication that labels when an image is edited or not.

More can be found on our Disclaimers page.

We tested RapidRaw v1.1.1 for our review