zidage/AlcedoStudio — Gitpedia

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Alcedo Studio is an open-source RAW photo editor and digital asset management (DAM) project. It is designed to provide a new choice to photographers who seek a lightweight, high-performance, and largely industry-compatible workflow for their photo editing and library management needs.

Alcedo Studio is NOT an alternative to the existing commercial software nor other open-source projects.

Screenshots and Demo

<table> <colgroup> <col style="width: 80%" /> <col style="width: 20%" /> </colgroup> <tbody> <tr> <td><img src="docs/demo/welcome.png" alt="Welcome / project loader" width="100%" /></td> <td>Welcome screen — load or create a project from a single branded entry point</td> </tr> <tr> <td><img src="docs/demo/album.png" alt="Library browser" width="100%" /></td> <td>Library browser — folder tree, responsive thumbnail grid, and a Library Overview panel with date / camera / lens facets</td> </tr> <tr> <td><img src="docs/demo/advance_color.png" alt="HSL and CDL color grading" width="100%" /></td> <td>HSL and CDL Lift / Gain wheels alongside a live Waveform scope</td> </tr> <tr> <td><img src="docs/demo/drt.png" alt="Color science switcher (ACES 2.0 / OpenDRT)" width="100%" /></td> <td>Switchable color science — ACES 2.0 or OpenDRT with display colour space, EOTF, and peak-luminance controls</td> </tr> <tr> <td><img src="docs/demo/lut.png" alt=".cube LUT library" width="100%" /></td> <td>.cube LUT library with search, folder scan, and one-click apply</td> </tr> <tr> <td><img src="docs/demo/history.png" alt="Branchable edit history" width="100%" /></td> <td>Branchable edit history — undo, collapse, or branch from any prior state</td> </tr> <tr> <td><img src="docs/demo/output.png" alt="Export queue" width="100%" /></td> <td>Export queue — batch export with format, bit-depth, resize, and metadata options</td> </tr> </tbody> </table>

RAW files are from signatureedits 100% Free Raw Files.

Key Technical Features

High-Performance Core

CUDA, Metal, and OpenCL accelerated image processing paths, with the Windows CUDA preview path reaching 300 FPS at the highest real-time preview resolution on modern NVIDIA GPUs with large RAW files (e.g., 45MP). Even full-resolution 42MP preview generation takes only around 20ms on a mid-range GPU (RTX 3080 Laptop 8GB).
Runtime GPU backend selection for supported operators, including OpenCL coverage for RAW processing, point operators, linear reference conversion, highlight reconstruction, DRT/LMT, lens calibration, geometry adjustment, DNG warp, and scope analysis.
Fine-grained memory management, resolution-separated thumbnail requests, and disk-backed thumbnail caching to optimize memory usage during large library browsing. The average DRAM usage for browsing a library of 786 42MP RAW files is around 767MB while achieving smooth scrolling and instant preview generation.
Written in modern C++20 with a focus on code quality, modularity, and maintainability (unfortunately, still largely a WIP).

Professional Imaging Pipeline

32-bit floating-point processing pipeline.
Support ACES 2.0 Output Rendering and OpenDRT with display color space, EOTF, and peak-luminance controls.
Film-like highlight transition, highlight reconstruction, sigmoid contrast curve, and RCD demosaic support for high-quality RAW reconstruction.
CUBE LUT support for creative color grading, including a curated set of packaged Kodak, Fuji, and Agfa film-emulation LUTs.
Support JPEG/TIFF/PNG/EXR output with metadata write-back.
Unlimited history stack with Git-like version control and branching, log-only versioning, stable project UUIDs, Merkle-tree version hashes, and project checksum validation.
OpenImageIO/Exiv2-based image output with support for various formats and metadata handling.
Planning to support HDR workflow and output in the future.

Asset Management ("Sleeve" System)

A simple but flexible inode-like file system using DuckDB as the storage backend, designed to manage both the original RAW files and the generated metadata (previews, thumbnails, edit history, etc.) in a unified way.
Lean project management with a single project file that contains all the metadata and references to the original files, enabling easy project sharing and backup without worrying about missing sidecar files or broken links.
Collection membership, folder pagination, cache invalidation, duplicate/history handling, and batch database mutation paths for smoother large-project operations.
Advanced search and filtering capabilities, including EXIF facets, fuzzy/exact global search, thumbnail-backed search results, star ratings, and rating filters. Planning to support semantic search and AI-assisted tagging in the future.

System Requirements

Windows 10/11 x64 for the current CUDA editor build, which now defaults to the Qt RHI/D3D12 viewer path.
macOS on Apple platforms for the Metal-backed Qt application build.
NVIDIA GPU with CUDA support (minimum compute capability 6.0 (10-series or later), recommended 7.0+ (20-series or later) for optimal performance) and preferably 6GB+ VRAM for smooth performance with high resolution RAW files (40MP+) on the Windows/CUDA build.
A Metal-capable Mac for the macOS/Metal build.
At least 8GB of system RAM (16GB+ recommended for larger libraries and smoother performance).
500MB of free disk space for the installation and temporary working files.
60+ MB for installation package and partial update support.

Build from Source

Detailed bilingual instructions are in:

docs/build_from_source.md

构建细节（中英对照）已单独维护在：

docs/build_from_source.md

Quick commands:

powershell
# Required submodules for current CMake layout
git submodule update --init --recursive `
  alcedo_studio/src/third_party/lensfun `
  alcedo_studio/src/third_party/libultrahdr `
  alcedo_studio/src/third_party/metal-cpp

# Windows debug (MSVC wrapper + preset)
cmd /c scripts\msvc_env.cmd --preset win_debug -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH="D:/Qt/6.9.3/msvc2022_64/lib/cmake"
cmd /c scripts\msvc_env.cmd --build --preset win_debug --parallel 8

# Windows release
cmd /c scripts\msvc_env.cmd --preset win_release -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH="D:/Qt/6.9.3/msvc2022_64/lib/cmake"
cmd /c scripts\msvc_env.cmd --build --preset win_release --parallel 8
cmd /c scripts\msvc_env.cmd --install build/release --prefix build/install

# macOS debug and packaging
cmake --preset macos_debug
cmake --build --preset macos_debug --target alcedo_main
cmake --preset macos_release
cmake --build --preset macos_release
cmake --build --preset macos_package

Roadmap

Roadmap and ongoing milestones:

docs/roadmap/roadmap.md

Acknowledgements

Alcedo Studio builds on research, open-source implementations, and community data from the wider imaging ecosystem:

Distributed film-emulation LUTs are from JanLohse/spectral_film_lut.
Some camera color matrices are from AcademySoftwareFoundation/rawtoaces-data.
The highlight reconstruction algorithm is adapted from RawTherapee's hilite_recon.cc.
The RCD demosaic algorithm is from LuisSR/RCD-Demosaicing.
OpenDRT is ported from OpenDRT.dctl.
ACES 2.0 support is ported from aces-aswf/aces-core.
The film grain renderer is based on Alasdair Newson, Noura Faraj, Bruno Galerne, and Julie Delon's
Realistic Film Grain Rendering.

License

The v0.1.1 tag and earlier releases remain under Apache-2.0.
Development after v0.1.1 is licensed under GPL-3.0-only, with an additional permission under GPLv3 section 7 for combining/distributing required NVIDIA CUDA components.
See LICENSE and NOTICE.