Orion Contact
Fir trees and a cliff face disappearing into fog, as shot. The same frame as the photographer finished it, with the firs and the rock face lifted out of the shadow under the fog.

See every edit at full resolution.

A RAW editor for macOS, with no subscription and no account.

Explore the editorContact

In development for macOS 14 and later

Seven panels around one photograph

Orion's window: the sea stacks with a linear mask drawn across the sky, and the Mask panel holding its exposure at minus 1.60 EV.

Under 20 milliseconds per slider move, at 42 megapixels

95th percentile over an exposure drag, on a 42 MP Sony A7R III raw file at full resolution, on a MacBook Air M4.

A fallen, moss-covered log over a forest trail, rendered by Orion at seven exposures.
Exposure +0.40 EV
DSC09847.ARW, rendered by Orion at seven exposures from −2.0 to +1.6 EV.

Everything in the current build

Tone and color

  • Exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites, blacks
  • White balance, color grading, tone curves
  • Film looks from any .cube file
  • One-click auto-enhance

Detail and repair

  • Haze removal, clarity, shadow recovery
  • Noise reduction, sharpening, color mixer
  • Spot and blemish removal
  • Film grain, and a vignette you can dial in

Geometry

  • Crop, straighten, rotate
  • Distortion and vignetting for 1,558 lenses
  • Perspective and keystone correction

Masking

  • Gradient, radial, brush, brightness and color masks
  • Selecting a subject, a person or a sky
  • Masks combined (add, subtract, intersect) and feathered to real edges

Library

  • Browsing a folder of 300 frames without waiting on it
  • Saved versions of a photograph, to come back to later
  • Presets, and copying settings between photos

Export

  • Export at 8 or 16 bits, resized, sharpened for screen or print
  • Export with your location stripped by default

Not yet

  • Highlight reconstruction: the region fill runs and has a slider, but the detail transfer and the edge falloff are not built
  • Fujifilm X-Trans sensors
  • Windows
  • An assistant that proposes edits for you to approve

Yours to keep

Orion never changes the RAW file. Your edits are saved next to it in a small sidecar, and nothing is uploaded.

DSC09787.ARW the photograph, 85.5 MB, untouched
DSC09787.xmp your edits, 2 KB of plain text

Every filter cites its paper

  1. Haze removalCVPR 2009

    Single Image Haze Removal Using Dark Channel Prior

    K. He, J. Sun, X. Tang

  2. Local contrastSIGGRAPH 2011

    Local Laplacian Filters: Edge-aware Image Processing with a Laplacian Pyramid

    S. Paris, S. W. Hasinoff, J. Kautz

  3. Shadow recoveryWACV 2020

    An Extended Exposure Fusion and its Application to Single Image Contrast Enhancement

    C. Hessel, J.-M. Morel

  4. Film looksAdobe 2013

    Cube LUT Specification, Version 1.0

    Adobe Systems

  5. Mask falloffACM TOG 2002

    Improving Noise

    K. Perlin

  6. Keystone correctionCUP 2004

    Multiple View Geometry in Computer Vision

    R. Hartley, A. Zisserman

  7. Blown highlightsPROCAMS 2012

    Gradient Domain Color Restoration of Clipped Highlights

    M. Rouf, C. Lau, W. Heidrich

  8. Vignette falloffJOSA 1945

    The cos⁴ Law of Illumination

    M. Reiss

MCP-driven workflow

Coming next: Claude edits through Orion's MCP server, and nothing is saved until you approve.

Claude Code v2.1.271
Haiku 4.5 · Claude Max
~/Pictures

  1. Please increase the contrast and give it a more dramatic look.
  2. orion - current_photo (MCP)⎿  DSC09787.ARW
  3. orion - describe_edits (MCP)⎿  Done
  4. orion - propose_edit (MCP)⎿  Proposal saved beside the photo
  5. It's darker and higher in contrast, with cooler light. The proposal is open in Orion for you to approve.
Yours: sea stacks in grey surf, as shot. Proposed: the same frame with black rock, cold blue water and deeper contrast.
Wooden pilings of an old pier standing in calm, pale water, as shot. The same pier as the photographer finished it, in a cooler, deeper blue with darkened edges.

In development

Contact

Public download coming later.