A RAW photo editor. RapidRAW's interface and AI, darktable's colour science — harvested one module at a time.
Argentum is a fork of RapidRAW by Timon Käch. His is the interface, the GPU pipeline, the catalogue and very nearly all of the application. Argentum's own work is the colour: what happens to a RAW file between the sensor data and the picture on screen, rebuilt on darktable's methods.
Everything Argentum adds lives in its own files, so RapidRAW's updates keep merging cleanly. That constraint is enforced by a script, not by good intentions — see docs/ARCHITECTURE.md.
Early preview. Argentum is developed and used on Windows, and runs on macOS (Apple Silicon); Linux is not yet proven. Editing is non-destructive — your RAW files are never written to — but keep your own backups, as you would with any young tool.
Argentum is independently maintained and is not affiliated with, nor endorsed by, RapidRAW or darktable. It is a fork, and it says so because their work deserves the credit, not because they have any part in this one.
Early preview, used daily by its author on Windows.
| Platform | State |
|---|---|
| Windows | Tested. The platform it is developed on |
| macOS | Tested on Apple Silicon, after the two one-time steps below |
| Linux | Builds in CI, never run by anyone. Reports welcome |
It is cross-platform because RapidRAW is, and nothing Argentum added breaks that. Windows and macOS have been run; on Linux "compiles" is not yet "works", and nobody has checked.
Grab an installer from Releases
— Windows .exe, macOS .dmg, Linux .AppImage and .deb.
Nothing else to install. The AI models are downloaded on first use, not shipped in the binary, so the download stays small.
(Building from source is further down, and only needed if you want to change the code.)
Argentum is not yet signed or notarized by Apple, so macOS needs two things done once. Only do this with a DMG from the official Argentum release.
1. Let it open. Copy Argentum.app from the DMG to /Applications. Without
this step macOS reports it as "damaged". In Terminal, run:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Argentum.app"
open "/Applications/Argentum.app"2. Let it read your photos. macOS protects Documents, Desktop, Downloads,
Pictures and external drives. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security → Files
and Folders and allow Argentum the folders your photos are in. If Argentum is
not listed there, add /Applications/Argentum.app under Full Disk Access.
Then quit and reopen Argentum. This opens the right page:
open "x-apple.systempreferences:com.apple.preference.security?Privacy_FilesAndFolders"No Terminal command can grant this access; it has to be allowed in System Settings.
Everything here is about colour and RAW decoding. The editing interface is RapidRAW's.
- White balance rebuilt on real colour science. Kelvin and tint, scene-linear Bradford adaptation, and a picker that settles on one answer instead of drifting each time you click.
- Automatic white balance, ported from darktable's illuminant detection.
- Camera profiles. A profile describes how your particular camera sees colour. Argentum reads DCP profiles, fetches one for your body, and keeps the cameras you shoot with under My Gear.
- Highlight recovery. When a bright area clips in one channel, the two that survived say what colour it was — so the channel is rebuilt before demosaic rather than smeared to white.
- A clipping warning that steps through the channels — off, luminance, R, G, B — so you can see which channel is about to lose everything.
- Display colour management. The preview is converted for the monitor's own ICC profile, so what you see matches what you export. Windows only for now; see Known limitations.
- Canon sRAW and mRAW fixed. They came out green with crushed shadows. Both causes found and corrected.
- Automatic lens detection on Canon bodies, read from the MakerNote, so lens corrections apply without picking the lens by hand.
- An RGB readout, so a colour under the cursor can be measured instead of argued about.
Full detail, with the darktable source file and commit for every harvested module, is in CHANGELOG.md. What is planned is in docs/ROADMAP.md.
The screen conversion is Windows-only, and needs a matrix profile. Argentum reads the ICC profile Windows holds for the monitor the window is on and converts the preview for it. On macOS and Linux nothing is read and nothing is converted, and the same is true of a monitor profile built as a lookup table rather than from three primaries. In those cases the picture is shown the way RapidRAW always showed it — correct on an sRGB screen, over-saturated on a wide-gamut one.
Linux is untested. As above: built, never run.
The app also lists what is currently broken in Settings → About → Known issues, which is kept current rather than being a changelog entry that goes stale.
In the operating system's own application-data folder, under
co.argentum.editor:
| Windows | macOS | Linux | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Settings, AI models, presets | %APPDATA%\co.argentum.editor |
~/Library/Application Support/co.argentum.editor |
~/.config/co.argentum.editor |
| Thumbnail cache | %LOCALAPPDATA%\co.argentum.editor |
~/Library/Caches/co.argentum.editor |
~/.cache/co.argentum.editor |
This is not configurable yet. A portable, one-folder installation is on the roadmap and is not built.
The one thing kept outside: .agdata edit files sit next to your photos, so your
edits travel with the pictures rather than living in a database you have to back
up separately.
Only needed if you want to change the code. You need Rust, Node, and a C++ toolchain.
On Windows:
winget install Microsoft.VisualStudio.2022.BuildTools --override "--quiet --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.VCTools --includeRecommended"winget install Rustlang.Rustupwinget install OpenJS.NodeJS.LTSOn macOS install Xcode command line tools, Rust via rustup
and Node; on Linux, your distribution's webkit2gtk development packages plus
the same two.
Then, on any of them:
npm installRun a development window that reloads as you edit:
npm run tauri devBuild an installer for the machine you are on:
npm run tauri buildgit remote add upstream https://github.com/CyberTimon/RapidRAW.gitgit fetch upstream && git merge upstream/mainThis is meant to be boring, and it is the reason for the architecture. If a merge needs real thought rather than "keep both sides", something drifted into a file it should not be in — see ARCHITECTURE.md.
| File | What's in it |
|---|---|
| docs/ARCHITECTURE.md | Code layout, and why upstream updates don't hurt |
| docs/ADDING_A_TOOL.md | The recipe for harvesting a module |
| docs/ROADMAP.md | What is planned, in what order |
| docs/MENU.md | Everything available to harvest, from each source |
| docs/FEASIBILITY.md | The original go/no-go research |
| CHANGELOG.md | Every module, with its upstream source and commit |
| CREDITS.md | Whose work this is built on |
Argentum is other people's work with additions on top. CREDITS.md names them, and the same list is in the app under Settings → About.
Licensed AGPL-3.0, inherited from RapidRAW and unchanged. See LICENSE.