CyberTimon/RapidRAW v1.6.4

RapidRAW v1.6.4 - Highlight Recovery, Masonry Layout, Crop Shortcuts & 10k Stars!

on GitHub

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.

• Export Subfolders: Added support for exporting to the original folder with a custom subfolder.
• Smoother Vibrance: Rewrote the vibrance algorithm to behave much more smoothly and predictably.
• Quick Filter State: The expanded/collapsed state is now remembered across sessions.
• EXIF & Metadata Fixes: Fixed several bugs that caused EXIF data to go missing & metadata now shows up properly inside the Albums view.
• Under-the-Hood: Squashed a bunch of bugs for better overall stability.

1. Install libgphoto2 on your machine

RapidRAW uses libgphoto2 to communicate directly with connected cameras over USB. Because the tethering binary links dynamically against this library to stream live view and control camera settings, the driver must be present on your system for the app to detect and control your camera.

• macOS (via Homebrew):

  brew install libgphoto2 pkg-config

• Ubuntu / Debian:

  sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y libgphoto2-dev pkg-config

• Arch Linux:

  sudo pacman -S libgphoto2 pkgconf

• Fedora:

  sudo dnf install libgphoto2-devel pkgconf-pkg-config

2. Download Tethering Build

(Note: Windows and Android are not supported for camera tethering due to OS driver limitations).