A fast, open-source, cross-platform photo editor.

Written in Rust and rendered on the GPU. Free, open source and non-destructive,
for macOS and Linux now and Windows later.

Download · Website · User guide · Feature status · Contributing

_{Luxforge 0.1.0's Develop workspace, captured from the running app.}

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Luxforge aims to meet or exceed the quality and experience of Adobe Lightroom, a benchmark DHH once called "the last holdout" keeping him on macOS. Every slider, brush and crop is a request through one API, so AI agents and scripts can edit alongside you. Each tool is a module on a small core.

Develop will feel familiar if you know Lightroom. Underneath it is new: a small, fast core that keeps every edit as data and never touches the original. Every edit is kept in the history, so you can step back to any point or save it as a named version, and the status bar says what just happened and what drew the picture on screen.

Get Luxforge

Luxforge 0.1.0 is the first preview. It is pre-release software, so its catalog format can change between versions; a version that can't read your catalog says so and leaves it as it is. It never writes to your originals.

Platform	Download	Install
macOS, Apple silicon, macOS 14 or later	Disk image (65 MB) or ZIP	Signed and notarized. Open it and drag Luxforge onto Applications.
Linux, x86-64, built on Ubuntu 24.04	Tarball (71 MB)	Extract it and run Luxforge/luxforge; ./Luxforge/desktop-integration.sh install adds it to your launcher. It needs a Vulkan driver and an XDG desktop portal, and INSTALL.txt lists the rest. Other distributions may work, but they are not tested.

Checksums · complete source · every release

Or build it from source

You'll need Rust (the toolchain is pinned) and the platform prerequisites in the development guide. Then:

git clone https://github.com/Willyham/luxforge.git
cd luxforge
cargo xtask develop --open fixtures/s0/orientation-6.jpg

That builds an optimized editor and opens a sample photo. Use --catalog path/to/catalog.sqlite to keep your edits somewhere specific, or point --open at any JPEG or supported RAW of your own. Luxforge only records a reference to the original and never copies or changes it.

The user guide covers the workspace, keyboard shortcuts and every tool. Maintainers cut releases with cargo xtask release.

Fast where you feel it

Luxforge opens before you've finished clicking, sorts a year of photographs while you watch, keeps up with your hand on every slider, and goes quiet when you stop.

9 ms	From slider to screen. Each move of a slider, drawn on a 20 MP RAW in the next frame of a 120 Hz display.
40 ms	To flick to the next frame. Full screen, as fast as you press the arrow key.
0.3 s	To open. From launch to a window ready to work.
1 s	To sort a year. 3,507 photographs, 150 GB of RAW and JPEG, sorted into days, cameras, bursts and brackets.
25 s	To preview all of it. Every one of those photographs, ready to look through.
< 1%	CPU at rest. When you stop, Luxforge stops: no busy loops, no fans, no drained battery.

_{Rounded from measurements of 0.1.0 on a MacBook Pro with an M4 Pro, browsing the owner's own 2023 folder in place. The performance spec has the budgets and how they're measured. Luxforge shows its own memory, CPU and GPU use as it works, and any script can read them too.}

API driven and agent friendly

Everything you can do in Luxforge, a program can do too. Every slider, mask, correction, pick and export is a request through one documented API, so a script or an AI agent works on your photographs the way you do, in the same history, where you can see and undo it.

• Every action, a request. The API covers developing, masks, corrections, picking, merging, exporting and history. Right-click any control and choose Copy as JSON request to get the exact call it makes.
• Self-describing. schema.list explains every method and parameter in plain words, with ranges and defaults, so an agent knows what Highlights −35 will do before it sends it.
• Attributed and undoable. An agent's edits land in the photograph's history beside yours, each labelled with who made it.
• Safe beside you. Each edit names the revision it expects. If you changed the photograph first, it's refused rather than applied on top, and a slider you're still dragging is kept.

Hey Claude, make the photo I have open in Luxforge look vintage.

$ luxforge-ctl call recipe.describe --params '{"asset_id":"asset-effb…"}'
$ luxforge-ctl call edit.set-raw --asset asset-effb… --params '{"temperature":6900,"tint":6}'
$ luxforge-ctl call edit.set-basic --asset asset-effb… --params '{"contrast":-12,"highlights":-35,"shadows":25,"whites":-20,"saturation":-18,"vibrance":-8}'
$ luxforge-ctl call edit.set-curve --asset asset-effb… --params '{"luminance":[[0,0.09],[0.25,0.28],[0.75,0.75],[1,0.93]]}'
$ luxforge-ctl call edit.set-mixer --asset asset-effb… --params '{"grade-shadows-hue":195,"grade-shadows-saturation":18,"grade-highlights-hue":42,"grade-highlights-saturation":24,"green-saturation":-30,"blue-saturation":-25,…}'
$ luxforge-ctl call edit.set-vignette --asset asset-effb… --params '{"amount":-22,"feather":70}'

Done: a warmer white balance, lifted blacks and softened highlights for a faded-film curve, teal shadows under warm highlights, muted greens and blues, and a soft vignette. That's five entries in its history, each one undoable in Luxforge.

Before	After
The editor afterwards: five history entries, each signed by luxforge-ctl, the sliders showing the agent's values, and the status bar saying who changed what.

Scripting it

Every operation in the editor is a JSON request. You can talk to the running app, or start a headless process that holds the same catalog and send it one request per line. cargo xtask build --release builds it with the editor, and cargo build --release -p luxforge-cli builds it alone, without the GUI stack:

target/release/luxforge-json --catalog path/to/catalog.sqlite

{"id":"schema","method":"schema.list","params":{}}
{"id":"expose","method":"edit.set-basic","params":{"asset_id":"asset-…","mutation":{"expected_revision":5,"request_id":"expose-1","actor":"my-script"},"exposure":0.5}}

schema.list and module.list describe every method with its parameters, ranges and defaults, so a client can discover what's possible instead of hard-coding it. Edits carry an expected revision, so stale requests are refused rather than silently applied, and a retried request with the same request_id is never applied twice.

To drive the photograph open in the running editor from a shell or an agent, use luxforge-ctl, built alongside it. It finds the running session, fills in the revision and request identity for you, and its edits appear in history as its own:

target/release/luxforge-ctl status
target/release/luxforge-ctl call edit.set-basic --asset asset-… --params '{"exposure": 0.5}'
target/release/luxforge-ctl call edit.auto-tone --asset asset-…

To let an AI agent work in the running editor, connect it to luxforge-mcp, a Model Context Protocol server built alongside it. Settings › Agents shows the configuration for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex, Cursor and other MCP clients with a Copy button, and lists the agents connected now; luxforge-mcp config claude-code prints the same text. An agent's edits land in history under its name, and an agent can never grant consent or permissions (connecting an agent). If a script commits an edit while you're mid-drag, Luxforge keeps your draft and asks whether to discard it or reapply it on top.

A whole trip of photographs, nothing imported

Point Select at a folder or a camera card and browse it where it is. Luxforge sorts every frame by day, camera and moment as it reads them: bursts gathered into one choice, exposure brackets and panoramas found and ready to merge, RAW and JPEG pairs kept together. Pick the keepers, and only those come into the catalog.

• Select reads a folder where it sits, filters and searches it, and shows each frame in the loupe. Info says why frames belong together: a burst's frame number and spacing, beside the camera, lens and exposure. P picks a keeper; Develop takes the picks into the catalog. Originals are never copied or changed.
• The catalog keeps folders, collections, recently developed photographs and a Removed view. If you move or rename originals, Missing originals and Locate find them again.
• HDR merges of RAW brackets and panorama merges of RAW or JPEG frames start from a selection. You get a merge preview first, and the result is an editable photograph stacked with its originals. Both are early: they've been checked on synthetic frames, and natural-scene quality hasn't been qualified yet.

Change one part of the picture, exactly

Masks reach every part of Develop: Basic, the Tone curve, Detail, the colour mixer and Presence can each work through one. Draw gradients, paint with a brush, or pick a colour or a band of tones from the photograph, then combine them. Every mask is numbers in the recipe rather than pixels, so it stays sharp at any size and can be changed at any time.

• Up to sixteen masks on a photograph, each named, with its own amount and invert.
• Linear and radial gradients with feather, angle and handles you drag on the photograph.
• A brush with size, feather, flow and erase, which can keep to one colour as it paints.
• Colour and luminance ranges, picked with an eyedropper from the photograph itself (an experiment in 0.1.0).
• Add, subtract and intersect any of them. Here, Paddies is a radial gradient, minus a brush stroke, within a luminance range, with a live overlay of what it covers.

Take out what shouldn't be there

Dust, power lines, strangers in the background. Heal and Clone fix small things in a click, finding their own source; Remove paints over something bigger and fills it in with AI that runs on your own computer, so your photographs never leave it.

Before

After: two people on the road, gone. The fill ran on the Mac.

• Heal blends a patch into its surroundings; Clone copies it exactly. Both work as spots or strokes.
• Sources are found for you, or set by hand, and moved whenever you like.
• AI Remove fills a painted selection on a local model, offering candidates to choose between. Describe something else and it becomes Replace. It's an experiment in 0.1.0, off by default.
• Nothing is final. Up to 100 corrections on a photograph, each one a history entry you can edit, reorder or delete.

Where Luxforge stands

Luxforge is pre-release, and everything is v0. With that said, a lot already works and has been checked on Apple silicon Macs. Feature status has the full, current picture, including what hasn't been verified yet, and the roadmap has what comes next.

Working today

• Non-destructive editing with ordered layers, persistent history, undo and redo, append-only restore, and named versions. Nothing in history is ever deleted, and repeated drags on one control collapse into a single entry.
• Select and the catalog: browse folders where they are, pick and develop. Missing originals are found again.
• RAW editing from sensor data, with RawSpeed unpacking, a Standard look for new RAW photographs and automatic lens profiles. The camera catalog covers 259 camera and phone identities and 316 recording modes, regression-tested against a corpus of authentic files. Camera coverage records the exact scope.
• Basic adjustments: white balance with a neutral picker and As shot, exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites, blacks, vibrance and saturation, with Lightroom's slider responses as the reference, plus Auto tone (Cmd+U).
• Tone curve, Presence (texture, clarity, dehaze), Detail (capture sharpening and noise reduction) and a vignette.
• Colour mixer with hue, saturation and luminance for eight ranges, and colour grading wheels for shadows, midtones, highlights and global.
• Crop, transform and straighten, with 90° rotation, mirror and flip, plus lens correction from Lensfun profiles and manual perspective correction.
• Local masks: gradients and brushes, combined by adding, subtracting and intersecting, applying Basic, Tone curve, Detail, colour mixer and Presence adjustments locally. Luminance and colour ranges are an experiment.
• Heal and Clone: spots and strokes, each with a source picked for it or set by hand.
• Presets, including import of Lightroom Classic XMP and .lrtemplate presets with a report of anything that couldn't be carried over, and copy and paste settings across one or many photographs.
• Export to JPEG, WebP and 8- or 16-bit TIFF, resized, size-limited and sharpened for screen or print. Exports never replace an existing file or touch the original.
• GPU rendering at every zoom. The GPU draws motion, the finished picture, the histogram and exports, all held within a declared tolerance of an independent whole-frame CPU reference.
• An RGB histogram with clipping overlays, Before/After comparison with a draggable divider, image information, a minimap at high zoom, a command palette, and live counters for memory, CPU and GPU alongside background jobs.
• Themes, including Omarchy's 22 built-in themes bundled and import of your own, plus preferences for the defaults that matter.
• Programmable: the JSON API, luxforge-json, luxforge-ctl and the luxforge-mcp server for AI agents.

In progress

• HDR and panorama merges: checked on synthetic frames; real brackets and panoramas are still to be judged.
• AI Remove and Replace: generative fill on local models, behind an experiment that is off by default.
• Automatic updates: built, but not yet live.
• Linux and Windows: Linux builds and passes its headless checks; native GPU checks are open. Windows comes later.

Planned

• Lightroom catalog import: bringing a Lightroom Classic catalog's photographs and edits across.

The pillars

These are the core principles that development follows.

1. Originals are sacred. Source files are never modified. Edits are ordered layers in a recipe with immutable history. Incompatible data is refused, never quietly discarded.
2. Everything is programmable. Every operation has a discoverable, schema-described equivalent through the same command service. A GUI gesture is never the only way in, and UI/API parity is tested, not assumed.
3. Fast, bounded and honest. Responsiveness, bounded memory and image correctness are architectural requirements, measured on photo-sized inputs. The GPU is the renderer of record, and its correctness is a declared tolerance against the whole-frame CPU reference, measured on the corpus.
4. Small core, deliberate extension points. The core owns transactions, history and shared invariants. Tools own their own validation, controls and processing.
5. Open source, Mac first. GPL-3.0-or-later project code and open-source dependencies, targeting Apple silicon Macs first while keeping Windows and Linux portable.
6. Prove it. Claims about behavior come with evidence: exact-buffer tests for the reference renderer, reference-buffer tests within the declared tolerance for the GPU, correlated state, logs and captures for UI, and recorded measurements with their scope.
7. Beautiful defaults, familiar feel. A small, focused workspace that feels familiar if you've used Lightroom's Library and Develop.

How it's built

Luxforge is written in Rust with a deliberately small core. The core owns the catalog, recipes, history and undo, rendering and the command service. Each tool (Basic, the colour mixer, crop and the rest) is a module that declares its parameters, controls and processing. The desktop builds its panels from those declarations, and the API generates edit.* methods from the same ones, so the two can't drift apart.

Crate	What it holds
luxforge-core	Images, recipes, rendering, the SQLite catalog and history, preview scheduling, the JSON API
luxforge-net	The host's checked network transport and secure secret store, kept outside the core
luxforge-gpu	The shared wgpu executor: shader cache, uploads, render passes, histogram reduction and tile readback
luxforge-gpu-types	Pure GPU formats and pass shapes shared by the core's planning and the device; depends on std only
luxforge-jpeg	The one JPEG codec (libjpeg-turbo) for reading originals and writing exports, with the JPEG container around it; depends on no workspace crate
luxforge-process	CPU, memory and GPU counters for the editor process
luxforge-raw	RAW decoding and development
luxforge-onnx	Local model inference through ONNX Runtime, with Core ML on macOS
luxforge-diffusion	The local generative runtime (stable-diffusion.cpp and ggml, built from pinned sources)
luxforge-watch	Folder and volume change notifications, and the mounted file systems the catalog's index reads
luxforge-input	Native input the window framework omits, such as trackpad magnification
luxforge-update, luxforge-sparkle, luxforge-install	Signed update feeds, the macOS Sparkle bridge and the Linux updater, and moving the app into Applications
luxforge-ui	The widget library (built on iced), with no dependency on the core
luxforge-app	The desktop app
luxforge-cli	The headless luxforge-json, live-session luxforge-ctl and MCP server luxforge-mcp binaries, and where the application keeps its files; builds without the GUI stack
luxforge-evidence	The evidence script's step types, shared by the desktop and xtask so a scripted run and a hand-written one read the same shape
luxforge-reference	Independent f64 references (colour, mask, mixer, Presence, range, tone, vignette, white balance) that production is tested against; depends on no workspace crate
luxforge-testbase	The one gate and hang-bounded wait every test orders its steps by; depends on no workspace crate, never shipped
luxforge-test-macros	The #[slow] test attribute the quick tier leaves out; never shipped
luxforge-testkit	Fixtures shared by the tests and xtask, such as the loopback test server; never shipped
xtask	Every build, check, evidence and packaging command

The editor tells you what it's doing. The Performance section shows memory, CPU and GPU use alongside whatever is running in the background, and the same numbers are available to any client through resources.read and activity.list.

More detail is in the architecture and tool module docs.

Platforms

macOS on Apple silicon is the primary target and the only platform with native GPU verification so far. On Linux, CI builds and packages for x86-64 and runs the headless checks with no graphics adapter; its rendered journeys through the software Vulkan adapter await a passing hosted run. The same Linux checks and a release download are configured for ARM64 Linux and have not run yet, so 0.1.0 has no ARM64 download. Windows CI is disabled, and Windows support will come later. Native Windows and Linux desktop checks remain open. See platforms.

Contributing

Luxforge is developed in the open by a human maintainer working alongside coding agents, and the docs are written for both. Start with AGENTS.md for the pillars and working rules, then CONTRIBUTING.md for the layout and checks. Before handing off a change:

cargo xtask verify --tier quick --output artifacts/my-change-quick

Useful reading:

• Product: roadmap, decisions, feature status, user guide
• Design: architecture, Develop workspace, versions and lineage, tool modules, brand
• Specs: edit history, crop and export, source recovery, performance
• Engineering: development, performance rules, dependencies
• Research: stack options, Lightroom Classic, darktable
• Task plans: tasks

License

Luxforge is free software under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later. Third-party components keep their own licenses. A manual review of licenses, native dependencies and assets has been deferred and is not complete.