A raw photo editor and catalog. Keep your workflows and muscle memory. Leave the subscription behind.
Requires macOS 27 or later · Notarized by Apple · MIT licensed
PixelLoupe 1.3
Faster culling, web galleries, one-click subject masks and light you can add after the shoot.
Library
Click Analyze and PixelLoupe sorts a shoot into selects and rejects for you. It checks subject focus, eye focus and whether eyes are open, and catches exposure problems, misfires and stray shots of documents. Set how sharp counts as sharp, review the verdicts photo by photo, then apply the flags or auto stack the keepers.
Web Gallery
Pick your photos and build a web gallery around them. Set a headline, description and contact email, choose text and background colors, how many photos go on a page and how large they are, and add borders, shadows and capture-date captions. Click Generate and it’s ready to share.
Masking
Brush, Subject and Background join Linear and Radial. Subject finds the people in a photo and masks them for you; Background flips it around. Refine either with the brush, Option-drag to take away, and set amount, feather and edge. Masks are stored as shapes, not bitmaps, so they stay on the subject when you change the crop.
Portrait Lighting
Relight the people in a photo with Studio, Contour, Stage and Stage Mono effects, then dial back the intensity until it looks like it was there all along.
Rim Light
Place colored lights behind your subject that catch the edges of hair and shoulders. Add as many as you need and set each one’s color, angle, strength, width and choke, with a glow over the whole effect.
Presets
A new set of built-in presets, from film simulations to landscape and portrait looks. Search the list, apply one, and use the Amount slider to decide how much of it you want.
The gang’s all here. Every develop tool you’ve come to expect.
Draggable. ISO, Lens size, F Stop, and Shutter Speed for good measure.
Presets and an eye dropper to sample from your photo.
Load Lightroom Presets so your style comes with you.
Point curves for all channels or red, green and blue on their own, over a live histogram.
Hue, Saturation, Luminance.
All the variables needed with an auto application button.
The usual color wheels you’ve become accustomed to, with blending and balance.
Make your photos pop.
Because no one wants to look like the devil.
Clean up those noisy photos.
Shadows and RGB Hue/Saturation tweaks.
All the transformations you’d expect.
Add grain for that old timey look.
Linear, radial, brush, subject or background.
All the expected ratios and an auto button for those landscapes that aren’t straight.
Purpose
Aperture is gone, and Lightroom became a subscription. PixelLoupe is the photo library and raw developer that should have taken their place: a native Mac app built on Apple’s own raw engine, Core Image and Metal, that opens a catalog of tens of thousands of photos and stays quick.
It works the way Lightroom Classic does, down to the keyboard shortcuts, so years of muscle memory carry straight over. Bring your Lightroom Classic catalog with you, with its folders, collections, keywords, stacks and develop settings.
Because it’s open source, it’s yours. Download the Xcode project, read every line, and change whatever doesn’t fit the way you work.
Develop
Press ` and a magnifier drops onto the photo, from 50% to 1600%, with the RGB value under the crosshair. Check focus on an eyelash without leaving the full view, then shape the tone with point and parametric curves, levels and a Lightroom-style histogram you can drag.
Masking
Every mask carries its own exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, temperature, saturation, clarity, texture and dehaze, so you can shape one part of the photo without touching the rest.
Crop & Straighten
Press R to crop with a rule-of-thirds overlay, locked or free aspect ratios and an angle slider. Auto straightens the horizon, X flips the orientation, and nothing is ever thrown away: every crop can be undone or changed later.
Transform & Calibration
Upright corrections (Auto, Level, Vertical, Full and Guided) fix converging verticals, with manual vertical, horizontal, rotate, aspect and scale. Calibration rotates and strengthens the red, green and blue primaries when you want the color itself to change, not just the sliders on top of it.
Library
Loupe, Compare and Survey views, a filmstrip that follows you into Develop, and the full EXIF and IPTC record of each photo: camera, lens, exposure, GPS and your own titles, captions and keywords. Edits to metadata stay in the catalog; your original files are never touched.
Survey
Select a handful of frames and Survey lays them out next to each other, as large as the window allows. Weigh one expression against another, or a color edit against its black-and-white version, then rate or flag your favorite and click × to take the rest out of the running.
Map
Every photo with a GPS location lands on the map, grouped by place with a count on each pin. Switch between Standard, Satellite and Hybrid, then click a pin to peek at what you shot there and arrow through them without leaving the map. Hover over or tap the map to try it.
Export
Export to JPEG, HEIC, TIFF, PNG or PSD in sRGB, Display P3, Adobe RGB or ProPhoto RGB, with output sharpening, file naming templates and presets. Add a text or graphic watermark from the Watermark Editor, and it looks the same at every export size.
Photo Merge
Merge your exposures into a High Dynamic Range photo. Use Auto Align to sync your handheld shots.
Photo Merge
Create stunning panorama photos without leaving PixelLoupe.
Coming from Lightroom Classic?
File ▸ Import Lightroom Catalog turns a Lightroom Classic 13+ catalog into a new PixelLoupe catalog. Lightroom’s files are only read, and your photos stay exactly where they are.
White balance, the Basic sliders, tone curves, HSL, color grading, black & white, detail, crops, gradients and history come across. A report lists anything that didn’t, photo by photo.
G and D, P, U and X, 0 to 5, ⌘' for a virtual copy, ⇧⌘E to export. Library, Develop, Compare, Survey and the filmstrip sit where you expect them.
