Lucarne is a free, professional photo editor made for the Mac. This page lists what it needs, the formats it works
with, and its main features, as of the current public beta.
Requirements
System
macOS 26 or later
Mac
A Mac with Apple silicon
Price
Free, with no account
Languages
English, 简体中文, 日本語
Files it opens
RAW
RAW files from major cameras by Sony, Fujifilm, Nikon, Canon, Panasonic, Olympus and OM System, Pentax, Leica, Hasselblad, Phase One, and others, including ARW, RAF, NEF, CR3, CR2, RW2, ORF, PEF, 3FR, and IIQ
Fujifilm X-Trans
Developed with a demosaic designed for X-Trans sensors
DNG
Including DNGs from phones and drones, developed with the colour profile and corrections stored in the file
A RAW and the JPEG (or HEIF) shot with it show as one photo in the library; edits use the RAW
AI features
The AI features process your photos on your Mac, and your photos are not uploaded. A feature that needs a model
downloads it once from downloads.lucarneapp.com, before its first use. The space and memory it needs are shown before
it is installed, and you can remove it when you no longer need it.
Feature
What it does
Model download
AI denoise
Cleans up night and high-ISO photos while keeping their detail
About 160 MB
Super-resolution (faithful)
Enlarges a photo two times and fills in detail, staying close to the original
About 30 MB
Super-resolution (generative)
Enlarges a photo two times, with more detail generated by the model
About 6.8 GB
Object removal
Click or brush over passers-by and clutter to remove them and fill in the background
About 210 MB
Sky and ground selection
Finds the sky or the ground, for a mask
About 240 MB
Subject and people selection
Finds the subject or people, for a mask
Built into macOS
AI assistants and scripts
A built-in MCP server. Connect Claude, ChatGPT, or another AI assistant that supports MCP, and it can find and sort photos,
preview and make edits, apply presets and LUTs, use AI masks, and import and export photos. See
Work with AI.
Turn off Let agents edit photos and the assistant can only look. It exports only to the folder you choose.
The lucarne command-line tool comes with the app, to import, search, edit, and export photos from the Terminal and
from scripts, with JSON output.
Library
Lucarne works with the photo folders already on your computer, without copying or moving files, and adds new photos
as they appear in those folders.
Photos on a disk you have unplugged stay in the library, with their thumbnails and edits.
Ratings from 1 to 5 stars, Pick and Reject flags, and tags.
Filter by folder, camera, tag, flag, and rating; search by file name, tag, camera, and lens.
Sort by capture time, import time, file name, or edit time.
Virtual copies, snapshots, and a full history of each photo’s changes, keeping 500 steps by default (adjustable from
50 to 5,000).
Compare before and after: on its own, split, or side by side.
Editing tools
Edits are saved separately, and the original files stay untouched.
Light
White balance, exposure, tone, tone curve, RGB curves, highlight recovery
Colour
Vibrance, saturation, and brilliance; HSL for 8 hues; colour grading with 4 wheels
Detail
Dehaze, texture, clarity, sharpening, noise reduction (standard and AI), super-resolution, hot pixels
Optics
Lens corrections for distortion, vignetting, and chromatic aberration, from the lens data the camera writes into the file, with manual adjustments too
Geometry
Guides: draw along edges that should stand upright or lie level, and the angle and perspective are corrected (up to two each way); vertical, horizontal, and aspect by hand; crop (free, original, 1:1, 3:2, 4:5, 16:9), rotation up to ±45°, and quarter turns
Effects
Film simulation (20 film stocks and 8 print papers, in 35 mm, 6×7, or 4×5, with halation), LUTs, grain, vignette
Retouching
Heal, clone, and AI object removal
Local adjustments
AI masks
Select the subject, people, the sky, or the ground in one click
Drawn masks
Linear gradient, radial gradient, and a brush that can keep to edges
Range masks
Colour range and lightness range
Image masks
Use a picture as a mask
Combining
Build a mask from several parts, added, subtracted, or inverted; each mask has 14 adjustments
Colour and HDR
Photos are processed in linear Rec.2020 at 32-bit floating point, so highlights are not clipped while you edit.
On a Mac screen that supports HDR, photos are shown in HDR while you edit.
LUTs in .cube format, and Hald CLUTs as PNG or TIFF. You can set a LUT’s input and output encoding, including sRGB,
Rec.709, Display P3, and common log formats (ACEScct, ARRI LogC3, Sony S-Log3, Fujifilm F-Log and F-Log2,
Nikon N-Log, DaVinci Intermediate).
Export
Formats
JPEG, HEIF, PNG (8 or 16-bit), TIFF (8 or 16-bit)
Colour spaces
sRGB, Display P3, Adobe RGB (1998), Rec.2020; linear versions at 16-bit
HDR
HDR JPEG or HEIF with a gain map, with 0 to 4 stops of HDR headroom; the same file looks right on standard screens
Size
Original size, or by long edge, short edge, megapixels, or percent
Output sharpening
None, low, standard, high
Frames
A white or black border or band, which can show the capture data and time
Watermarks
Text or a picture, in 9 positions, with size, inset, and opacity
More
Camera, lens, and capture data written to the file; file names from your own pattern; export presets; add the exports to the library
Interface
Night and Day appearances; the backdrop behind photos can match, be neutral grey, or be the opposite.
A command palette: type a name to find and run any command.
Updates
Lucarne checks for a new version once a day, and you decide whether to install it. You can also have new versions
installed automatically, in Settings.
