What advantages does this offer over Darktable, the long standing FOSS lightroom alternative?
Edit: One criticism of Darktable is that it emphasizes its "scene-referred workflow" as opposed to a "display-referred workflow" like Lightroom does, making it not a true Lightroom alternative. Seems like this also happens to be written in C++ and also uses a scene-referred workflow? Quite the coincidence. How much of the important design decisions (or implementation) are just copied from Darktable?
Fair question. The scene-referred design is modelled on darktable’s, and darktable deserves the credit for it. My very first prototype ported some of darktable’s algorithms, and I replaced that with an independent implementation before releasing. Both projects are GPL-3.0, and the README now credits darktable directly.
I built Rembrandt because darktable’s learning curve kept me from using it, not because it’s worse; it has far more control. The goal here is approachability: fewer, broader controls, on-device AI for masks and denoise, and Lightroom catalog import.
Stack: the engine is JavaScript with WebGL/WebGPU shaders, in a small Rust (Tauri) desktop shell. LibRaw (C++) decodes RAW files.
Edit: corrected my earlier reply. I wrongly said it was written in C++, and I overstated the darktable answer.
The only surprising thing in your comment is that the day's latest vibe coded app actually got upvoted.
I mean really, you had to ask Claude whether the workflow was Darktable-inspired. The people in this thread who read Claude's README probably know more about how "your" software works than you do.
I think it's great that the era of bespoke software is here. I have always had a political stance against intellectual property and I think AI will cause an explosion in self directed learning.
I think it's asinine that HN of all places upvotes every vibe coded bespoke app and with a straight face compares it to decades old projects whether open or closed source.
I could have my own version of this app for the effort I've put into writing comments about it.
I too hate how intellectual property has been abused by capital to exploit labor. However, what I hate more then intellectual property is straight up theft of labor. Vibecoders are doing the latter.
The scene-referred workflow is vastly superior because it makes all the adjustments before the full Raw data is converted to the display space.
You don't even need to know what that means for it to be useful. In practice, it just means less artifacts, less weird stuff that happens with color near clipping highlights, etc. You use the software in exactly the same way you'd use the display-referred workflow, except that under the hood, the modules are working with the linear Raw data.
Virus Total:
Activity related to AMADEY - according to source Cluster25 - 6 months ago
This DOMAIN is used by AMADEY. Amadey is a botnet agent that appeared around October 2018 sold on Russian-speaking hacking forums. It periodically sends information about the system and installed AV software to its C2 server. It can also load other payloads to the victims' devices.
If you copy the url at the top and resolve it, it downloads the bin. But i think this may be a false alarm and the botnet just spread his malware over github.
I love trying out new software, but with Github getting blasted all the time, supply chain compromise, and now in the vibe coding era with people not even checking, we have to be careful. It sucks that this is the status quo now.
No worries, thanks for checking. If anyone wants to verify a download: hashes are in SHA256SUMS on the release, and the installers now have GitHub build attestations (gh attestation verify <file> --repo thesnarkitecht/rembrandt).
This is unfortunately exactly the kind of project I wouldn't want to trust my photo management workflow to...software is cheaper than ever, thoughtful maintenance and longevity is worth much more to me.
Fair. Your originals are never modified and edits are standard XMP sidecars that Lightroom and darktable can read, so if this project ever stops, nothing is locked in.
Fellow photographer here. Really interested in Rembrandt, couldn't give less of a shit about how you made it or any philosophical discussions about AI. Congrats on building something that looks genuinely useful.
Two things:
Will you add the ability to import Lightroom presets?
Will you add auto blemish removal? Adobe Cloud has it, Lightroom does not. My latest workflow includes putting photos in the Adobe Cloud, auto detecting and removing blemishes and then bringing those images into Lightroom. If you could figure out a way to auto detect and remove blemishes for portraits, that would be a true game changer. But that also includes being able to keep moles/beauty marks etc.
There have been at least 10 (probably more) photo editing suites. It seems that now everyone who doesn't want to learn the existing suites just can make their own with AI.
AI means that anyone at all can pay tiny amounts of money for software that fits their exact needs.
This excites them and they share it under the assumption someone else has their exact needs but lacks the inclination to have AI make one of their own.
The real question is why does HN keep upvoting them?
>The real question is why does HN keep upvoting them?
Because a significantly large demographic of HN is aggressively pro-AI to the point of cultishness and the mere existence of such applications, to them, is a vindication of all of their beliefs and an expression of triumph over all of the critics and doubters.
Note that it doesn't actually matter how well they work, or whether they work at all. Many people will assume by default that they do, and that anyone claiming otherwise is just a deluded, bitter Luddite, and will praise and defend them regardless of quality. The rules and standards that apply to human written software don't apply to AI generated software.
I do however think sharing your own personal vibecoded software is a bit like saying "hey world! Check out how good the plot is on the latest page of my diary!"
I am anti LLM by many means, but I do believe it is possible (setting aside some moral quandaries just for the sake of argument) to accelerate the development of software in a meaningful way using them. But doing so requires a strictly defined process of incrementalism, incorporating human expertise and intervention, treating the LLM as a tool and not as magic and as much of a potential liability as a benefit. Anyone serious about developing a graphics editor or replicating Photoshop software who doesn't have professionals - both developers and from the industry - involved isn't serious. A project of that scale should still take months at least to do properly even with AI. Posting whatever Claude spits out over a weekend and declaring coding "solved" is clown shit.
The problem is many AI developers don't want to have to care about the code, or human expertise. They consider the process beneath them. They want to trust the LLM implicitly, believing in its superior intelligence. They want to already be living in the sci-fi post scarcity post singularity universe where they can just say "Computer make me a photoshop" and it just happens, perfectly and without error. And all else being equal... that attitude will never lead to quality software, it will only lead to vibecoded slop.
It's sad because there are already plenty of open source alternatives to Adobe[0], but none of them are AI generated, so no one is going to bother trying to support or contribute to them. Except with vibe-coded slop PRs.
Look, most people really do not care about the code. The relationship most people (and most developers!) want to have with code is the relationship they have with photographs.
That is to say, maybe they'd put down for something professional for a special occasion, but the one they can make with the thing in their pocket is good enough 99% of the time.
The world where that's possible with photographs has been here for over a decade, but with software it has only arrived this past year. So it's novel. I guess I've answered my own question about why it gets upvoted. I still hate seeing it. I wonder if something similar happened when digital cameras first got cheap.
Is it a full clean-room implementation? I really want to see how the AI clean-room reverse engineering projects fare against legal challenges.
Supposedly clean-room implementations are legal. But they're so easy with AI - it seems like that will need to change. Or the world will come crashing down. Hard to say which is more likely right now.
I don't understand the fuss. Other image editors have always existed. Photoshop doesn't own selecting pixels and doing stuff to that selection. Nobody owns that.
The AI disruption means now, your product better be fucking good. Beacon status in a sea of slop. That's all, no pressure.
Interesting the community pushback on datacentres. I wonder if people are asking "do we need 7 trillion vibe-coded photocraft apps in our neighbourhood?"
By the way I don't think Adobe hangs around lamenting its status as original king of media editing tools, with its own word, who others like to imitate and aspire to. It's not the drag it sounds like!
I think the "fuss" lately is the ease with which people can clone existing proprietary programs and make them open-source using basically the same UI everyone is already familiar with.
A huge barrier to entry for getting people to switch platforms is that they're set in their ways and like their UIs exactly how they're used to seeing them.
It's got the kind of UI that I would love pre-2024 or so but these days it just screams "AI generic" unfortunately. Documentation is fairy concise and reasonably LLM-jargon free though.
Pro photographer here. And I've counted at least ten of these photo editing apps that have appeared in the last year, many of them in the last few months. All of them LLM-assisted or completely vibe coded.
They definitely work but...
Unlike Lightroom or Darktable (an open source Raw editor that took years to get to a sophisticated level), they are all rough around the edges. Maybe in the future they'll get better in terms of being really refined to handle advanced photography, but right now they're hobby applications.
To me this highlights the absurdity of AI, because enormous amounts of energy is wasted on duplicating stuff and making something new.
I won't try and argue that nothing nice can come out of it, but it seems absurd to me to waste so much energy as a species this way. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a hundred more of these apps in another year.
Most everyday Lightroom editing and library work is there. Missing: print, book, map and web modules, face recognition and tethering. There’s a full list in the README under “How it compares”.
perhaps my requirements aren’t that complex but i find Affinity mostly a great replacement for InDesign. there are some annoyances and unintuitive limitations but its all workable.
If you're talking about the artcraft stuff, it's strange. The codebase goes back to 2016 as a monorepo but not the full suite and was recently split out as separate apps and other parts of the Adobe suite added. The CLAUDE.md [1] are... interesting and left me puzzling about it.
I was mostly interested in the pdfcraft (have been appreciating https://www.nobloatpdf.com/)
> Clean-room.
> * Never read, disassemble or copy anything inside the Acrobat bundle (names and listings only). Never open Contents/Resources/JavaScripts/.
> * Behaviour comes from public docs, specs (ISO 32000-2, the Arlington model) and black-box observation (plan/acrobat/).
> * Never copy GPL/AGPL code. MuPDF, Ghostscript, Poppler, veraPDF and DSS run only as external oracle processes.
> * See plan/README.md §Clean-room and plan/adr/0001.
It really looks like they have AI running Adobe (and other apps) as sources of truth and have rules against disassembly or including source from GPL projects which left me pondering the ethics of it.
Yep, their work used to be in a mono repo. That's still up there. They have a reference to how to find it. I didn't read all the history but it does date back to 2016. Seems like it was mostly a web app and not open source until recently is the vibe I was getting from it.
Given that some are now reversing all closed software using LLMs, it should be now finally worth reversing the whole of Nvidia’s closed source software, drivers and blobs, including CUDA.
There's Asahi Linux, why arent they doing it already? Imo the end result is not great and it's very hard to maintain. Like Asahi has already demonstrated
I think they're not reversing the way you may think(and they're doing a very bad job, if you try any of these apps they collapse very soon for basic workflow things) but rather copying the behaviour by looking at input and output. A clean-room design is called iirc
What advantages does this offer over Darktable, the long standing FOSS lightroom alternative?
Edit: One criticism of Darktable is that it emphasizes its "scene-referred workflow" as opposed to a "display-referred workflow" like Lightroom does, making it not a true Lightroom alternative. Seems like this also happens to be written in C++ and also uses a scene-referred workflow? Quite the coincidence. How much of the important design decisions (or implementation) are just copied from Darktable?
I will admit that all in all darktable has a more comprehensive set of controls over editing. However, it is harder software to use.
Fair question. The scene-referred design is modelled on darktable’s, and darktable deserves the credit for it. My very first prototype ported some of darktable’s algorithms, and I replaced that with an independent implementation before releasing. Both projects are GPL-3.0, and the README now credits darktable directly.
I built Rembrandt because darktable’s learning curve kept me from using it, not because it’s worse; it has far more control. The goal here is approachability: fewer, broader controls, on-device AI for masks and denoise, and Lightroom catalog import.
Stack: the engine is JavaScript with WebGL/WebGPU shaders, in a small Rust (Tauri) desktop shell. LibRaw (C++) decodes RAW files.
Edit: corrected my earlier reply. I wrongly said it was written in C++, and I overstated the darktable answer.
The only surprising thing in your comment is that the day's latest vibe coded app actually got upvoted.
I mean really, you had to ask Claude whether the workflow was Darktable-inspired. The people in this thread who read Claude's README probably know more about how "your" software works than you do.
Hate more.
I think it's great that the era of bespoke software is here. I have always had a political stance against intellectual property and I think AI will cause an explosion in self directed learning.
I think it's asinine that HN of all places upvotes every vibe coded bespoke app and with a straight face compares it to decades old projects whether open or closed source.
I could have my own version of this app for the effort I've put into writing comments about it.
I too hate how intellectual property has been abused by capital to exploit labor. However, what I hate more then intellectual property is straight up theft of labor. Vibecoders are doing the latter.
I don't see it that way.
Are you copy pasting LLM output or is even the posting and answering automated?
The scene-referred workflow is vastly superior because it makes all the adjustments before the full Raw data is converted to the display space.
You don't even need to know what that means for it to be useful. In practice, it just means less artifacts, less weird stuff that happens with color near clipping highlights, etc. You use the software in exactly the same way you'd use the display-referred workflow, except that under the hood, the modules are working with the linear Raw data.
More familiar UX and better performance on macOS are two major pluses.
Edit4: Sorry, False Alarm: https://any.run/malware-trends/amadey/
https://dnschecker.org/reverse-dns.php?query=185.199.111.133
---
Virus Total: Activity related to AMADEY - according to source Cluster25 - 6 months ago This DOMAIN is used by AMADEY. Amadey is a botnet agent that appeared around October 2018 sold on Russian-speaking hacking forums. It periodically sends information about the system and installed AV software to its C2 server. It can also load other payloads to the victims' devices.
macOS download url after downloading with librewolf and rightclicking "copy downoload url": https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/f1e08a34d17fd85cd8896ba86...
Edit: i dont get this when copying direct links from the readme.md. Its just when i click them and copy the url it used to download.
Edit2: i get this too when i download the x64 exe and copy the download link from the librewolf (firefox fork) download manager https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url-analysis/u-6a55e124c22f9b...
Edit3: maybe false alarm and the botnet used the github url https://release-assets.githubusercontent.com/ to spread malware?
I'm not sure you submitted the actual artefact? Would be interested in knowing, though.
If you copy the url at the top and resolve it, it downloads the bin. But i think this may be a false alarm and the botnet just spread his malware over github.
I love trying out new software, but with Github getting blasted all the time, supply chain compromise, and now in the vibe coding era with people not even checking, we have to be careful. It sucks that this is the status quo now.
No worries, thanks for checking. If anyone wants to verify a download: hashes are in SHA256SUMS on the release, and the installers now have GitHub build attestations (gh attestation verify <file> --repo thesnarkitecht/rembrandt).
This is unfortunately exactly the kind of project I wouldn't want to trust my photo management workflow to...software is cheaper than ever, thoughtful maintenance and longevity is worth much more to me.
Not that Adobe's getting my money either.
Fair. Your originals are never modified and edits are standard XMP sidecars that Lightroom and darktable can read, so if this project ever stops, nothing is locked in.
Hey,
Fellow photographer here. Really interested in Rembrandt, couldn't give less of a shit about how you made it or any philosophical discussions about AI. Congrats on building something that looks genuinely useful.
Two things:
Will you add the ability to import Lightroom presets?
Will you add auto blemish removal? Adobe Cloud has it, Lightroom does not. My latest workflow includes putting photos in the Adobe Cloud, auto detecting and removing blemishes and then bringing those images into Lightroom. If you could figure out a way to auto detect and remove blemishes for portraits, that would be a true game changer. But that also includes being able to keep moles/beauty marks etc.
Will definitely add those ASAP. Thanks for your support!
Happy to do it. How do I get notified after you've updated it and made those changes?
Why are there so many of these in the last 2 days?
There have been at least 10 (probably more) photo editing suites. It seems that now everyone who doesn't want to learn the existing suites just can make their own with AI.
AI means that anyone at all can pay tiny amounts of money for software that fits their exact needs.
This excites them and they share it under the assumption someone else has their exact needs but lacks the inclination to have AI make one of their own.
The real question is why does HN keep upvoting them?
>The real question is why does HN keep upvoting them?
Because a significantly large demographic of HN is aggressively pro-AI to the point of cultishness and the mere existence of such applications, to them, is a vindication of all of their beliefs and an expression of triumph over all of the critics and doubters.
Note that it doesn't actually matter how well they work, or whether they work at all. Many people will assume by default that they do, and that anyone claiming otherwise is just a deluded, bitter Luddite, and will praise and defend them regardless of quality. The rules and standards that apply to human written software don't apply to AI generated software.
I'm not anti LLM by any means.
I do however think sharing your own personal vibecoded software is a bit like saying "hey world! Check out how good the plot is on the latest page of my diary!"
I am anti LLM by many means, but I do believe it is possible (setting aside some moral quandaries just for the sake of argument) to accelerate the development of software in a meaningful way using them. But doing so requires a strictly defined process of incrementalism, incorporating human expertise and intervention, treating the LLM as a tool and not as magic and as much of a potential liability as a benefit. Anyone serious about developing a graphics editor or replicating Photoshop software who doesn't have professionals - both developers and from the industry - involved isn't serious. A project of that scale should still take months at least to do properly even with AI. Posting whatever Claude spits out over a weekend and declaring coding "solved" is clown shit.
The problem is many AI developers don't want to have to care about the code, or human expertise. They consider the process beneath them. They want to trust the LLM implicitly, believing in its superior intelligence. They want to already be living in the sci-fi post scarcity post singularity universe where they can just say "Computer make me a photoshop" and it just happens, perfectly and without error. And all else being equal... that attitude will never lead to quality software, it will only lead to vibecoded slop.
It's sad because there are already plenty of open source alternatives to Adobe[0], but none of them are AI generated, so no one is going to bother trying to support or contribute to them. Except with vibe-coded slop PRs.
[0]https://github.com/KenneyNL/Adobe-Alternatives
Look, most people really do not care about the code. The relationship most people (and most developers!) want to have with code is the relationship they have with photographs.
That is to say, maybe they'd put down for something professional for a special occasion, but the one they can make with the thing in their pocket is good enough 99% of the time.
The world where that's possible with photographs has been here for over a decade, but with software it has only arrived this past year. So it's novel. I guess I've answered my own question about why it gets upvoted. I still hate seeing it. I wonder if something similar happened when digital cameras first got cheap.
It would be an improvement if vibe coders cared even as much about the code as influencers do about their selfies.
Is it a full clean-room implementation? I really want to see how the AI clean-room reverse engineering projects fare against legal challenges.
Supposedly clean-room implementations are legal. But they're so easy with AI - it seems like that will need to change. Or the world will come crashing down. Hard to say which is more likely right now.
By "world will come crashing down" do you mean that we'd have to finally replace intellectual property with something that works?
Yes. What you describe will ruin many people's fortunes. Is it good? Is it bad? Who knows. It is destroyed.
Property is not the world, property is a game that we can decide to play differently at any time. Fortunes be damned.
Yes, well, many people disagree with you.
Surely Adobe has many design patents
Yes. Maybe. I guess time will tell.
I don't understand the fuss. Other image editors have always existed. Photoshop doesn't own selecting pixels and doing stuff to that selection. Nobody owns that.
The AI disruption means now, your product better be fucking good. Beacon status in a sea of slop. That's all, no pressure.
Interesting the community pushback on datacentres. I wonder if people are asking "do we need 7 trillion vibe-coded photocraft apps in our neighbourhood?"
By the way I don't think Adobe hangs around lamenting its status as original king of media editing tools, with its own word, who others like to imitate and aspire to. It's not the drag it sounds like!
I think the "fuss" lately is the ease with which people can clone existing proprietary programs and make them open-source using basically the same UI everyone is already familiar with.
A huge barrier to entry for getting people to switch platforms is that they're set in their ways and like their UIs exactly how they're used to seeing them.
I'm not sure how to respond to you. Of course the large software companies are terrified of an endless sea of clone software.
You could try asking someone who works for one.
It's got the kind of UI that I would love pre-2024 or so but these days it just screams "AI generic" unfortunately. Documentation is fairy concise and reasonably LLM-jargon free though.
Pro photographer here. And I've counted at least ten of these photo editing apps that have appeared in the last year, many of them in the last few months. All of them LLM-assisted or completely vibe coded.
They definitely work but...
Unlike Lightroom or Darktable (an open source Raw editor that took years to get to a sophisticated level), they are all rough around the edges. Maybe in the future they'll get better in terms of being really refined to handle advanced photography, but right now they're hobby applications.
To me this highlights the absurdity of AI, because enormous amounts of energy is wasted on duplicating stuff and making something new.
I won't try and argue that nothing nice can come out of it, but it seems absurd to me to waste so much energy as a species this way. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a hundred more of these apps in another year.
How does this compare with Gimp? Dramatically better or just a thing you do because you can.
If we stipulate that GIMP is roughly an equivalent to Photoshop (if!) then this thing is a Lightroom-alike and they are different kinds of software.
This compares more closely with Darktable, RawTherapee, ART etc.
What’s the feature parity vs LR?
Most everyday Lightroom editing and library work is there. Missing: print, book, map and web modules, face recognition and tethering. There’s a full list in the README under “How it compares”.
How does this compare to https://github.com/pdcgomes/redlamp or https://github.com/storytold/lightcraft?
would love an AE and InDesign clone, theres just nothing as good as either
perhaps my requirements aren’t that complex but i find Affinity mostly a great replacement for InDesign. there are some annoyances and unintuitive limitations but its all workable.
ae with more stability and error handling would be a treat
Another GitHub has some after effect clone as well. Along with a near complete Adobe suite clone.
Where that's good, I don't know..nobody seems to care telling.
If you're talking about the artcraft stuff, it's strange. The codebase goes back to 2016 as a monorepo but not the full suite and was recently split out as separate apps and other parts of the Adobe suite added. The CLAUDE.md [1] are... interesting and left me puzzling about it. I was mostly interested in the pdfcraft (have been appreciating https://www.nobloatpdf.com/)
> Clean-room.
> * Never read, disassemble or copy anything inside the Acrobat bundle (names and listings only). Never open Contents/Resources/JavaScripts/.
> * Behaviour comes from public docs, specs (ISO 32000-2, the Arlington model) and black-box observation (plan/acrobat/).
> * Never copy GPL/AGPL code. MuPDF, Ghostscript, Poppler, veraPDF and DSS run only as external oracle processes.
> * See plan/README.md §Clean-room and plan/adr/0001.
It really looks like they have AI running Adobe (and other apps) as sources of truth and have rules against disassembly or including source from GPL projects which left me pondering the ethics of it.
[0] https://getartcraft.com/
[1] https://github.com/storytold/pdfcraft/blob/main/CLAUDE.md
That's the one I was referring to as you asked about an alternative to AdobeAE.
I only came across it recently as it's trending. I had no idea they had already started developing adobe apps clones for so many years
Yep, their work used to be in a mono repo. That's still up there. They have a reference to how to find it. I didn't read all the history but it does date back to 2016. Seems like it was mostly a web app and not open source until recently is the vibe I was getting from it.
Love this.
Given that some are now reversing all closed software using LLMs, it should be now finally worth reversing the whole of Nvidia’s closed source software, drivers and blobs, including CUDA.
No excuses this time.
Apple silicon as well.
There's Asahi Linux, why arent they doing it already? Imo the end result is not great and it's very hard to maintain. Like Asahi has already demonstrated
I think they're not reversing the way you may think(and they're doing a very bad job, if you try any of these apps they collapse very soon for basic workflow things) but rather copying the behaviour by looking at input and output. A clean-room design is called iirc
Maybe it's doing a really good job, but the original code was just held together with scotch tape.
Copyrights and patents are outdated.