SilverNode | The last RAW photo editor you'll need

The last RAW photo editor you'll ever need.

Photo editing software today is painfully inefficient for photographers taking several hundreds or thousands of pictures on an event. Many hours are lost sitting behind a computer editing the albums we shoot. Me personally, would like to take more pictures, and edit less.

SilverNode will take away frustration, and give you back the freedom to shoot photos, without worrying about editing them.

I want SilverNode to …

be an extremely fast photo editor on every computer.
have an elegant workflow.
predict your desired edit settings by learning your style.
produce high-quality photos.
be intuitive, yet powerful.
reduce your editing time by 80% or more.

See the Features section for more details.

Get the first version

Screenshots

@shauniguns

@ryckeboer_fotovideo

SilverNode Develop Workspace while Cropping

SilverNode Develop Workspace while Zoomed In

Features

Extremely Performant

SilverNode's primary goal is and always will be to deliver high-quality and fast software. It should run on almost all hardware from 2014 and onwards, delivering unprecedented performance, resulting in a joyful and refreshing user experience. We get the most out of your hardware, by carefully crafting handmade software!

Most of SilverNode's image processing tasks are powered by hand-optimized Halide pipelines, which were built from the ground up with speed in mind. If you have a GPU supporting CUDA, OpenCL, Vulkan, or Metal, SilverNode will take advantage of that in an unprecedented way.

Artificial Intelligence Guided Editing

The SilverNode AI will learn your style and will make better and better initial guesses for your adjustments. You will cruise through your photos with unprecedented speed, as the amount of manual tweaks required diminishes dramatically. SilverNode's auto-edit abilities are all carefully hand-crafted and engineered by Martijn.

Catalogueless

SilverNode intentionally does not build a catalogue from your photos. You are in complete control of your photos and folders. SilverNode creates one additional (plain-text) file next to the original RAW file, containing all necessary information (which you can even check in in git!).

Blender-style controls

Elegant controls have the potential of speeding up your workflow a lot. SilverNode takes inspiration from Blender to edit and navigate your photos:

Left hand on the keyboard to select effects to adjust.
Right hand on the mouse to for precise control over the selected effect.

Fully Cross-Platform

SilverNode is built with SDL3 to run on all platforms: Linux, macOS, and Windows. It comes with support for OpenGL, Vulkan, Direct3D, and Metal, thanks to bgfx and Halide. Finally a high-quality fully cross-platform RAW photo editor!

Development

This project started in 2016, during my university years as a proof-of-concept. Today, SilverNode is under full-time development since Januari 2024! Below you can find a table of the most important photography-related features and their development status.

	⭐ Feature	❓ Status
Grid	Grid Functionality	Grid Rate Reject
	Develop from Grid	Rotate Basic Editing Apply Presets Lens Corrections
	Filtering	Basic Rating/Reject Advanced
	Burst Stacks	Planned
	Export	JPEG Naming Resize Watermark
Develop	Basic Editing	Color Correction Curves (Local) Contrast Color Balance HSL Primary Calibration Improve UI
	Presets	Done
	RAW Luma Denoising	Done Improve Quality
	Sharpening	Done Improve Quality
	Chroma Denoising	Done Improve Quality
	Highlight Reconstruction	Mostly works Improve Quality Improve Reliability
	Crop & Straighten	Done Improve UI
	Lens Corrections	Distortion Vignetting TCA Save your own lenses Apply in Batch
	Local Adjustments	Linear Gradient Radial Gradient Brushing Improve UI
	Chromatic Aberration Reduction	Planned
	Histogram	Done
AutoEdit	Color Correction	Mostly working Improve Reliability
	Straighten	Planned
	Gradient Placement	Planned
	Selection Suggestion	Planned
Core	EXIF Metadata	Export to JPEG Load Nikon Canon
	RAW File Loading	Bayer Sensor X-Trans Sensor Non-Square Pixels Black & White Pictures
	Platform Support	Windows macOS Linux x86_64 arm64/aarch64
	GPU support	Vulkan Metal OpenCL CUDA Direct3D 12
	Thumbnail Database	Done
	Custom Ultra-Fast RAW Loading	Nikon NEF Canon CR2

This, and many more things have been done, and will be done. For more details, check out the CHANGELOG. To stay tuned, check out the mailing list or the social media platforms below.

Camera Support

Camera support in SilverNode is powered by several decoder libraries. Each library has a list of supported cameras. However, SilverNode is not supporting all cameras of those providers yet. There are some additional conditions for your camera to be supported:

Square pixels: your camera must have a sensor that has square pixels.
3-channels: your camera must have a sensor records light in 3 color channels: red, green, blue.
Either LibRaw or RawSpeed supports your camera. Considering that Darktable uses the same decoders, you may check out the list here: Darktable > camera support for a first indication of potentially being supported.