About RawCut

A published photograph is a flat file. Whatever was done to it — the exposure decisions, the tone curve, the way the greens were pulled down so the skin would separate — is gone by the time you see it. You can admire the result and you cannot learn from it. Asking how a look was made gets you a comment thread and a guess.

But the information often still exists. Lightroom and Camera Raw write their edits to an .xmp sidecar, a plain XML file sitting next to the RAW. It holds every slider value, every curve point, every mask. It is completely readable, and almost nothing reads it back to you in a form you can see rather than a list of numbers.

RawCut renders it. Drop a sidecar into the Studio and the edit is replayed in stages — RAW, light, curves, colour, masks, finish — so you can watch a look being assembled instead of reading its settings.

This is the genuinely unusual part, and it is a deliberate architectural choice rather than a slogan. Your photographs, RAW files, sidecars and LUTs are read by your browser using the local File API and rendered on your own GPU through WebGL. Nothing is uploaded. There is no processing queue, no server-side copy of your work, and no account required to use any of it.

Two things follow from that. The good one: a 30 MB RAW file converts instantly, because it never travels. The honest one: the tools are limited by what a browser can do, which is why the RAW preview you see is the JPEG embedded in the file by the camera rather than a full demosaic of the sensor data.

• The Studio — opens an .xmp sidecar and shows the edit inside it, stage by stage, against the original.
• Free converters and utilities — Lightroom presets to 3D LUTs and back, LUT resizing and strength adjustment, EXIF reading and stripping, palette extraction.
• Learn — written guides to the file formats and the colour work: what a .cube file contains, how LUTs differ from presets, how to install them in DaVinci Resolve.
• The Academy — practice lessons that ask you to rebuild a grade one stage at a time rather than watch someone else do it.

It is not a Lightroom replacement, and it does not claim to recover an edit history. Lightroom does not write its history steps to the sidecar — only the final state of every setting. The stages you see in the Studio are the renderer’s own pipeline order, which is a property of how the image is reconstructed, not a recording of the order the photographer worked in. That distinction is explained in full on the Studio page, because a reader who is not told it would reasonably conclude the site is overclaiming.

RawCut is built and operated by Luke Tan, an independent developer. It is a personal project rather than a company product, which is why it is free, why there is no upsell, and why the roadmap is driven by whatever turns out to be broken.

Corrections are genuinely welcome — particularly on the format articles, where a wrong detail about how a camera writes its RAW files is worse than no article at all. Write to wizi2727@gmail.com or use the contact page.