Redlamp and Lightroom, feature by feature

Raw files from most cameras

Through LibRaw 0.22; 25 cameras are verified by the decode tests, Hasselblad and Phase One medium format among them (every camera). Nikon's High Efficiency NEFs and the Sony A7 V don't open yet, and raws other than DNG use one colour matrix per camera, where DNGs blend two by white balance

Fujifilm X-Trans raw files

A first-generation demosaic; a Markesteijn-class one is planned. Fujifilm exposure differs from the camera's by up to ±0.9 EV, depending on the body

Apple ProRAW and other phone DNGs

Gain maps and embedded camera profiles are applied, and ProRAW can render with the iPhone's own look

JPEG XL DNGs

Linear ones (iPhone ProRAW) open; JPEG XL mosaic DNGs don't yet

Testing your own camera

The camera bench checks your raws against the camera's own JPEG on your Mac, and sends only the measurements, which add to the cameras page

JPEG, HEIC, TIFF and PNG

Shown as the file at default settings, as Lightroom does

PSD, AVIF and JPEG XL files

WebP files

Per-camera raw defaults

By camera, lens, ISO and file type

Tethered capture

Video

Redlamp develops still photos

White balance: presets, Temp and Tint, eyedropper and Auto

A camera white-balance model built on each camera's colour matrix

Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites and Blacks

Highlights and Shadows keep the texture inside each region for new edits

Auto settings

A heuristic Auto, as a starting point

Texture, Clarity and Dehaze

Clarity and Dehaze follow the photo's edges for new edits, so a skyline gets no bright and dark bands

Vibrance and Saturation

Boosts stop at the edge of the output's colours instead of clipping

Tone curve: parametric and point curves

With split points and the point curve's presets

Tone curve: separate red, green and blue curves

Targeted Adjustment Tool

Drag on the photo to move a curve or a colour band

Color Mixer: hue, saturation and luminance per colour

Works in OKLCh

Black and white

B&W mix: brightness per colour band

Today the Color Mixer's Luminance shapes a black-and-white photo

Point Color

Lightroom's now has a Variance slider too, which evens out similar colours; Capture One's separate hue, saturation and lightness uniformity, for skin, is proposed

Color Grading

Shadows, midtones, highlights and global wheels, with Blending and Balance

Profiles

Profiles are Base Looks inside Recipes: six built-in looks and the film looks, each with an Amount slider (0–200)

Camera-matching looks

Four looks measured from Fujifilm cameras' own JPEGs (one provisional), under Redlamp's own names

More camera-matching looks (Eterna, Classic Negative, Acros and others)

Need more photos with the camera's JPEG beside the raw

DNG camera profiles

Dual-illuminant colour and the embedded HueSatMap; a profile's look is offered as a Base Look

Custom `.dcp` camera profiles

Deferred on 2 October 2026

ICC input profiles

Calibration panel

Shadows Tint and the red, green and blue primaries

Process versions

An edit keeps rendering the way it was made; moving it to a newer process is your choice

HDR editing and export

Adaptive (AI) profile and personalised auto settings

Sharpening

Lightroom's four controls; the photo's noise and grain aren't sharpened

Noise reduction

Lightroom's six controls, scaled to each photo's measured noise; calibrated profiles for the first ten bodies wait on calibration shots

AI Denoise

On the Mac, working on the raw data, without writing a new file

Super Resolution

2x and 4x, faithful to the photo rather than inventing detail

Raw Details

Lens corrections the raw file carries

DNG opcodes, Sony's and Fujifilm's built-in corrections

Lens corrections from Panasonic and OM System raws

Adobe LCP lens profiles

Profiles you put in Redlamp's Lens Profiles folder; Redlamp doesn't ship Adobe's

A built-in lens profile database

The lensfun database, once a licence question is answered

Manual distortion and vignetting

Remove Chromatic Aberration and Defringe

From the lens profile, or measured from the photo's own edges

Upright: Auto, Level, Vertical, Full and Guided

Corrects only where the photo's straight edges agree

Transform sliders

Crop and straighten

Aspect presets, Lightroom's overlays, the Straighten tool and Constrain to Image

Lens Blur

Post-crop vignette

With Highlights, to keep bright areas bright

Grain

Sized to the frame and strongest in the shadows, as film's is

Halation and bloom

The glow film gives bright lights

Light leaks, dust and scratches, and frames

Linear and radial gradients

Brush, with Auto Mask and pen pressure

Color and luminance range

Subject, Sky and Background

Computed on the Mac; photos are never uploaded. Sky also uses Depth Anything 3, an open model trained partly on data Redlamp couldn't use itself. Edges are solved when a mask is made, not refined again as you edit

People and their parts

Face parts from Apple Vision; body skin, clothes and hair from SAM 3, a download under Meta's SAM License

Objects

Hover to preview, click to select (Segment Anything 2.1, an 80 MB download, an open model trained partly on data Redlamp couldn't use itself)

Landscape

Water, vegetation, mountains, architecture and ground, from SAM 3 (a 988 MB download under Meta's SAM License); Lightroom's also finds snow

Depth Range

From the photo's own depth map, or estimated by Depth Anything, an open model trained partly on data Redlamp couldn't use itself

Refine AI mask edges

Refine Edges, and a Refine Edge brush that solves an edge again where you paint; Lightroom has Feather and Edge sliders

Mask presets (Blue Sky, Whiten Teeth and others)

Save your own from any mask

Add, Subtract, Intersect, invert and duplicate

Local adjustments in masks

Local Whites and Blacks are approximated with tonal-region gains

Curves inside masks

Point Color inside masks

An Even Skin Tone preset on Face Skin and Body Skin is proposed

Update AI masks across photos

Pasted and synced settings recompute their AI masks for each photo

Reuse a mask inside another, and keep only its textured areas

Lightroom can start a new mask from an existing one; Redlamp also adds, subtracts or intersects one inside another, and a mask's Detail keeps only its textured or flat areas

Heal and Clone

Spots and brushed strokes, each finding its own source

Content-aware Remove

A classical fill on the Mac; large areas wait for generative fill

Remove people and objects with a click

Find and remove things named in words

Trash, signs, cables and more, found anywhere in the photo; something as large as a car leaves a smeared patch until generative fill arrives

Generative Remove

An opt-in download that runs on the Mac, labelled as generated fill

Dust removal and Visualize Spots

Also across a shoot: specks in the same place on the sensor are healed in every photo

Reflection removal

Red Eye and Pet Eye

Generative Expand: fill beyond the frame

Generative Upscale (Topaz)

Redlamp's planned Super Resolution is faithful rather than generative

AI sharpening for blur and missed focus (Topaz)

Proposed for Redlamp as a head on its own raw denoiser, on the Mac

Edit by describing the result (Prompt to Edit, Firefly)

Presets

Presets, profiles and LUTs are all Recipes, with an Amount slider; Lightroom's words still work in search

Lightroom presets (`.xmp`)

Imported with a report of what came across exactly, approximately or not at all. Sliders aren't yet calibrated against Lightroom's renders, so a preset can look different

LUTs (`.cube`, `.3dl`, HaldCLUT)

Imported directly, including LUTs made for camera log footage; Lightroom takes LUTs only wrapped as profiles

Film stock simulations (Portra, Tri-X and others)

36 looks from 30 stocks, built from the manufacturers' datasheets; Lightroom's film-inspired presets don't replicate particular films

Film looks fitted from film shot beside digital

With charts and lab scans, per stock

Camera recipe cards

Fujifilm-style recipes, typed in as the card lists them

Premium and recommended presets

Redlamp has no cloud service

Folders

A working set of folders, not a catalog; nothing on disk is moved

Copy and paste settings

Lightroom's checklist, remembered

Sync and Auto Sync

Ratings, flags and colour labels

Saved with the photo's edit, shown on the filmstrip

Batch export

Batch rename

Open photos edited in Lightroom

Converts Lightroom's XMP sidecars once, and never writes them

History and unlimited undo

The last 20 editing sessions are kept with the photo

Snapshots

Virtual copies and versions

Before and after

Three layouts

Reference view

Zoom, Navigator and clipping

Fit, Fill, 1:1 and 2:1; Lightroom zooms to 11:1

Histogram you can drag to adjust

Lightroom Classic's keyboard shortcuts

83 actions on 87 key bindings

Command palette

Every action and slider from the keyboard (⌘K)

Sensor clipping and a colour-assessment view

Soft proofing

Secondary display

Focus stacking

Stacks are found for you; merge, view the depth map and retouch, and the result develops like a raw

Focus stacking: lens corrections, halo handling and DNG output

AI-assisted focus stacking

Fewer frames, handheld sequences, better edges

HDR merge

Panorama

JPEG, HEIC, AVIF, PNG and TIFF

8, 10 or 16 bits, in sRGB or Display P3

Size, metadata and export presets

With Export with Previous

Adobe RGB, ProPhoto and custom ICC output

DNG, PSD and JPEG XL output

Watermarks

Output sharpening

Edit in Photoshop or another app

Content Credentials

The edit embedded in exported files

Command-line rendering and export

The redlamp tool

Catalog, collections and smart collections

Redlamp is an editor; a library is a separate, later track

Keywords and metadata editing

People (face recognition) and Map

AI search

Culling in a grid, and AI-assisted culling

Lightroom's Assisted Culling judges sharpness, faces and eyes; rating, flagging and labelling work in Redlamp's filmstrip today

Stacking similar photos, and finding duplicates

Print

Redlamp develops photos; it doesn't lay out prints

Book, Slideshow and Web

Publish services, and sharing to Adobe's web and Firefly

Redlamp has no cloud service

Mac

macOS 26 on Apple Silicon, free and open source, with no subscription. Not sandboxed yet; photos decode in a sandboxed service

Windows

Redlamp is built for Apple's platforms

iPad and iPhone

The same engine, after 1.0

Edits shared between Macs

Through iCloud Drive: sidecars sync safely and conflicting copies merge. A photo that's open doesn't reload yet when another Mac changes its edit

Edits moving between your Mac, iPad and iPhone

Through iCloud Drive and Files, rather than Adobe's cloud

Cloud sync with smart previews

Photos library and a Photos editing extension