happy-photon

Happy Photon is an open-source desktop application for browsing, developing and exporting photographs. It aims to keep the workflow approachable while retaining a serious photographic pipeline: originals stay untouched, the catalog stays local, and no account or subscription is required. The workflow is organized around three decisions and three matching workspaces. Browse is for culling a shoot in place, comparing candidates side by side and narrowing selections with flags, ratings, color labels and filters. Develop shapes composition, light, color, tone, detail and finishing effects using non-destructive global controls and local masks. Export produces the required size, format, color space and sharpening without altering originals. Version 0.2.5 adds linear gradient and radial masks with per-mask Exposure, Temperature, Tint and Saturation plus feathering, numeric or drag placement, and mask controls grouped beneath the histogram. It also notes an unsigned Windows x64 ZIP fallback on GitHub Releases alongside the recommended Microsoft Store distribution. Processing features described include a 16-bit linear Rec.2020 working space with OKLCh color processing and color-managed export to sRGB or Display P3; scene-referred AgX tone rendering; as-shot white balance; highlight reconstruction; DCP camera profiles; monochrome RAW support; and lens corrections from embedded prescriptions or the bundled Lensfun database covering distortion, chromatic aberration and vignetting. Color and tone tools include Kelvin/tint, auto and eyedropper white balance, exposure, highlights, shadows, contrast, saturation, skin-aware vibrance, an eight-band HSL mixer and RGB tone curves. Detail tools include capture sharpening, wavelet luminance and chroma denoising, crop, horizon straightening, perspective correction, vignette, film grain and output sharpening. Scopes include histogram, luminance waveform, RAW sensor histogram, clipping overlays, zoom, loupe, compare and before/after views. Other capabilities mentioned are Lightroom Classic import of ratings, flags, color labels and supported crops with opt-in XMP sidecars; J+R grouping of same-name RAW and JPEG files; up to eight labeled versions per file; a persistent Develop history; and export to JPEG, PNG, WebP or 16-bit TIFF with embedded ICC profiles, normalized EXIF, optional GPS stripping and collision protection. Supported systems are Windows x64, Linux x64 and macOS 14 or newer on Apple Silicon. Standard formats include JPEG, PNG, BMP, GIF, TIFF and WebP; RAW support is verified for CR2/CR3, NEF, ARW, DNG, RAF and RW2, with NRW, ORF and PEF opening through the same decoder but not in the verified set. RAW decoding uses LibRaw 0.22.2, and the README cautions that a listed extension does not guarantee support for every camera model or compression variant. HEIC/HEIF read support is probed at runtime and may vary. The project states it does not currently include layer compositing, HDR output or custom output color profiles, and Intel macOS is not a supported public target. It is licensed GPL-3.0-or-later.