A free RAW photo editor and photo library in a browser tab, laid out the way Lightroom users expect. Import your photos, develop them without touching the originals, export when you’re done. Everything stays on your computer.
G for the grid, E to edit, C to crop, M for masks, \ to see the original. Here is some of what the browser version does.
Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites and Blacks, then Texture, Clarity, Dehaze, Vignette and Grain. Every slider renders through a 32-bit float, wide-gamut pipeline, and pulling Highlights recovers a bright sky without grey halos.
The Tetons and the Snake River — Ansel Adams, 1942
Paint with a brush, drop linear and radial gradients, or select by luminance, colour, sky, subject or background. Combine masks with add, subtract and intersect, and give each one its own 15 local adjustments.
Photo from LightCraft’s generated demo library
Three colour wheels for shadows, midtones and highlights, plus an 8-band Color Mixer for hue, saturation and luminance. White balance has presets, Auto and an eyedropper; Vibrance protects skin tones.
Migrant Mother — Dorothea Lange, 1936
Eighteen built-in presets such as Golden Hour, Teal & Orange and Selenium Tone, each with an Amount from 0 to 200%. Save your own, then copy, paste or sync settings across a whole selection.
Photo from LightCraft’s generated demo library
Albums in folders, smart albums, stacks, ratings from 0 to 5, pick and reject flags, colour labels and a search that understands fields like rating:>3 or iso:>800. In the browser the library is kept in your browser’s own storage.
Photos from LightCraft’s generated demo libraryOpen the AI panel next to LightCraft and paste an OpenAI, Google Gemini or OpenRouter key. Auto develop has a vision model propose Light, Color and Effects values for the selected photo; you check them and apply them as one undoable step.
Requests go from your browser to the provider. We never see your key or your photos, and we add no markup.
How the AI tools workThe editor is the official build, unmodified. Around it we add a few things the bare build doesn’t have.
Each new LightCraft release is checked against its published SHA-256 checksum and deployed here. You are on v0.6.0.
Auto develop and generative retouching with OpenAI, Gemini or OpenRouter models, straight from your browser.
How to edit RAW photos online and how LightCraft compares as a Lightroom alternative.
No account, no watermark, no upload. Your library lives in your browser, not on our server.
LightCraft is in alpha, and its browser version is marked experimental. Keep your original photos somewhere else, and use File › Back Up Library… to save a copy of your library as a zip.
Yes. LightCraft is free and open source, there is no account and no subscription. The optional AI tools use your own API key, so any AI usage is billed by your provider, not by us.
It is the official LightCraft web build, unmodified, published by the ArtCraft team on GitHub. This site is independent: we host that build, keep it on the latest release and add guides and the AI panel around it.
No. LightCraft runs in your browser with WebAssembly. Imported photos, edits and the catalog are kept in your browser’s storage on your device, and exports save as downloads. The only exception is the AI panel, which sends the photo you choose straight to the AI provider whose key you entered.
DNG, Canon CR2 and CR3 (lossless and C-RAW), Sony ARW, Nikon NEF, Fujifilm RAF (including X-Trans), Panasonic RW2 and Leica RWL, Pentax PEF, and uncompressed Olympus ORF and Samsung SRW, plus JPEG, PNG, TIFF and WebP. Support varies by camera; the project keeps a per-camera list. HEIC is not part of the browser build.
Yes. Unlike most browser editors, LightCraft keeps a real library in your browser’s storage, so photos and edits are still there next time. It is experimental: browsers can clear site data, so keep your originals elsewhere and use File › Back Up Library… now and then.
About 20 MB the first time: the app itself (26 MB, compressed in transit) and the font for its Chinese interface. After that your browser only checks for changes.
A current desktop browser with WebGL2. LightCraft’s developers run their browser checks in Chrome and list Safari and Firefox testing as still in progress. Open it in one tab at a time: a second tab shows a notice instead of a second copy of your library.
LightCraft is a clean-room, open-source reimplementation of Adobe Lightroom’s photo library and raw development, in alpha. Its developers put it at about 81% of Lightroom by feature count and nearer 61% as a day-to-day replacement. There is no cloud sync and nothing to subscribe to.
Free, private, and your library is still there next time.