AutoShade

Describe the picture. Keep the RAW.

AI decides what to change — a deterministic Rust engine does it.
An editable, Lightroom-ready recipe instead of AI pixels.

Download v1.17.1  ·  Website  ·  Manual  ·  Showcase  ·  In depth

_{Straight conversion → generated target → recovered recipe on the 61 MP RAW → same recipe after AI denoise. Bottom row: 1:1 crops.}

Tip

The generated picture is a target, never the delivery. An image model paints the look you describe; AutoShade fits an editable develop recipe to it and renders that recipe on the full-resolution RAW. The recipe carries the look, the sensor carries the detail — and in the recipe path, the AI never touches a pixel.

Two AI paths, kept apart in the app, the command line and this page:

• AI generation & reverse-fit — an image model paints the picture you describe from your own frame (reimagine), and the reverse fit recovers that look as an editable recipe on the full RAW (match). The generated pixels are only ever a target.
• AI analysis & auto develop — a vision model looks at the photo and proposes the recipe directly (analyze, auto), guided by your reference library or a typed direction; AI adjust sends the develop you are looking at with a request ("darken the sky a little") and gets the complete adjusted recipe back, with any part it names selected by a content mask cut locally.

Highlights

🎯 Reverse-fit any look reimagine generates the picture from your frame; match recovers a recipe from it — or from any finished rendition of the same shot. Look error 0.161 → 0.023.	🌌 A RAW denoiser trained here Cleans the sensor mosaic before demosaic. Keeps 98.70 % of 17,817 faint stars on a real ISO 2500 frame.
📐 Every slider is a written law Tone, Texture, Sharpening, masks and lens geometry are closed-form laws with named constants, each pinned by its own test.	🔁 Round-trips through Lightroom Sidecar XMP is merged byte for byte; the full develop survives a Lightroom rewrite and reopens exactly.
🖼️ Your library is the style guide Point it at finished photos you love; each develop sees the 3 closest as a reference. Embeddings run locally.	🧩 Local AI masks, no API key Subject, sky and point-prompted objects (BiRefNet, OneFormer, SAM 2.1), plus HDR, focus and noise stacking.

Showcase

_{Reverse-fit. Prompt: “a clearer afternoon, a little more contrast, a slightly deeper blue sky.” The recipe renders the look on the 9504 × 6336 RAW; the generated frame carries neither the detail nor the resolution.}

_{One RAW, four looks. Straight conversion, then moody, golden and vivid — only the direction text changes.}

_{ISO 2500 star field, 1:1. AutoShade with no denoise, then its own denoiser at 71 %. Clean colour, natural grain, faint stars intact.}

_{Every number and prompt → Showcase}

What is new here

Six techniques you will not find in another RAW developer. Each is written up in full — equations, figures, refused training runs — in AutoShade in depth.

	Technique	In one line
1	Generate, then reverse-fit	An editable recipe from any finished look, solved at the distribution level
2	Evidence-gated local fit	A divergence score D picks full solve or bounded mode; every local move must earn its place
3	Style by retrieval	SigLIP 2 search over your own finished photos, not a preset
4	Every slider is a written law	Tone, Texture, Sharpening, masks and lens geometry as closed-form laws, each pinned by its own test
5	A denoiser with pre-written pass marks	Trained on this project's data; two later runs failed their marks and were refused
6	The camera's own look	A per-photo base curve read from the embedded preview, like with like

How it works

• One engine, three front ends — desktop app, CLI and loopback web UI share one Rust library and one per-user develop store.
• Local first — eight Python sidecars (masks, two denoisers, correspondence, descriptions, embeddings, depth for the lens blur, faces) run on your machine; pixels leave it only for an AI operation you ask for.
• Non-destructive — your photo library stays read-only; generated pixels always land on their own labelled card.

_{Diagram generated from autoshade.architecture.json · zoom it online · full design in ARCHITECTURE.md}

Measured numbers

What	Measured
Automated test battery	1837 library / 26 CLI / 297 GUI / 2+2 contract tests
RAW coverage	24 extensions · 725 camera bodies · nine-camera zoo 9/9
Reverse-fit, stone viaduct	look error 0.161 → 0.023 at confidence 0.63
Reverse-fit, desert canyon	look error 0.129 → 0.048 · sky ΔE 3.8
Faint stars kept through the denoiser	98.70 % of 17,817 stars on an ISO 2500 frame

_{The full table — 20+ rows with conditions and sources — is in AutoShade in depth; scripts/check_docs.py re-derives the pinned claims.}

Install and quickstart

Platform	Get it
Windows	AutoShade-Setup-1.17.1.exe — per-user, no admin. Or the portable autoshade-1.17.1-windows-x64.zip
macOS	AutoShade-1.17.1-macos-universal.zip (Apple silicon + Intel), or -macos-cli.zip
Linux	AutoShade-1.17.1-linux-x64.zip — command line only

All on the v1.17.1 release page. Python 3 is needed only for the local AI sidecars; model weights download on first use.

Note

macOS: the app is ad-hoc signed, not notarised — on first launch use System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway (once per machine).

Desktop app — it starts on a mode page (Landscape, Portraits, Normal; see Choosing a mode); then open a photo (Ctrl+O), move a slider, export with Ctrl+Shift+E. The original is never touched. Normal is a short one-click panel for phone and jpg photos (Normal mode).

CLI

# manual develop
autoshade apply photo.ARW recipe.json -o developed.tif

# AI develop, end to end
autoshade auto photo.ARW --guidance "natural color; protect highlights" -o developed.tif

# describe a look, then recover it as an editable recipe on the RAW
autoshade reimagine photo.ARW --prompt "a clearer afternoon, deeper blue sky"
autoshade match photo.ARW out/photo.reimagine.png --render

Upgrades, silent installs and every command: User manual.

Release assets and checksums

Built by GitHub Actions from the tag; checksums.txt carries every SHA-256. The RAW denoiser weights are uploaded by hand to the release the sidecar pins — releases/download/v1.6.0/autoshade-raw-denoise-v2.pth, mirrored byte-exact on Hugging Face — and refused unless size and SHA-256 match the pin in python/denoise_raw.py.

File	Size	SHA-256
autoshade.exe (CLI)	24,015,872 bytes	a5a57e052dfe0134217e837df226602ad5134080b93586d68fc9827b62e9f6b4
autoshade-gui.exe (desktop app)	31,383,040 bytes	36602ae941ce37a001a6d9f30b4f41db4216855a2fe38164b741fbe1b70b081d
AutoShade-Setup-1.17.1.exe (installer)	15,969,132 bytes	86208119428a8087ef6c8eb8d9f21d80f1345d44436efce6ce99eaa571902b54
autoshade-1.17.1-windows-x64.zip (portable archive)	21,596,081 bytes	9ba7b9fdfdd9303aba849a305cff2314eeaf2d1a09f5fab104659baeccd8c32b
AutoShade-1.17.1-macos-universal.zip (macOS app bundle)	43,332,847 bytes	ad298e4364f8642bce06685183e8b6aac3382810814c1768b212a7336b60fb94
AutoShade-1.17.1-linux-x64.zip (Linux command line only)	10,356,162 bytes	8a94f6a3b23a31125620e49f9df04efe25892cac12a7ea5d9dcaa7907c4cd100
AutoShade-1.17.1-macos-cli.zip (macOS command line only)	18,730,867 bytes	93489661312aba489802ae4ae9972443ad96ca1cc15dd17555230888ddfc940e
autoshade-raw-denoise-v2.pth (RAW denoiser weights, fetched on demand from the v1.6.0 release)	130,590,559 bytes	ffafa40a53f52092149db2fcf03636117ad6855e1068142d4f6b03b634e9f9c4

Build from source

Rust edition 2024, rustc/cargo 1.94.

cargo build --release                                   # CLI
cargo build --release --features gui --bin autoshade-gui  # desktop app

Local AI tools need Python packages (weights download on first use):

Tool	Packages
Subject mask (BiRefNet)	torchvision timm einops
Subject fallback (U²-Net)	rembg
Sky / objects (OneFormer, SAM 2.1)	transformers torch
AI denoise	torch opencv-python numpy einops requests

Supported formats

.cr2 · Canon EOS 40D	.cr3 · Canon EOS R6	.nef · Nikon D700
.arw · Sony α7 III	.orf · Olympus E-M5	.rw2 · Panasonic DMC-GX85
.pef · Pentax K-5	.dng · Ricoh GR II	.raf · Fujifilm X-S10 — X-Trans, approximate

_{Nine real CC0 files, fully decoded and neutral-rendered — not embedded previews.}

Camera RAW — 24 extensions

arw, dng, raw, raf, nef, cr2, cr3, orf, rw2, pef, srw, 3fr,
fff, iiq, mef, mos, erf, kdc, dcr, dcs, crw, nrw, mrw, ari

Decoded by rawler 0.7.2, which carries 725 camera models. No embedded preview: 12 of the 24 formats store none. They are orf, srw, nrw, mef, mos, kdc, dcr, dcs, erf, iiq, crw, and ari; AutoShade renders its own neutral version instead.

Baked rasters — 8 extensions: jpg jpeg png tif tiff bmp webp gif, with ICC conversion.

Tech stack

Rust (rustc/cargo 1.94, edition 2024) · rawler · image · qcms · rayon · egui/eframe · tiny_http — Python sidecars on PyTorch.

RAW decode, 24 formats, 725 bodies · deterministic f32 develop engine · hand-rolled XMP layer (no XML crate) for byte-exact Lightroom merges. The current battery is 1837 library (1822 pass + 15 #[ignore]d forensic probes) / 26 CLI / 297 GUI / 2+2 contract tests. Per-subsystem notes: In depth → Implementation · equations and provenance: TECH_STACK.md.

Status and limitations

• Release gates at v1.17.1 cover the CLI, desktop GUI, sidecar contracts, format fixtures and the deterministic renderer.
• Not in scope: Adobe's rendering (AutoShade is its own develop engine; a sidecar carries the same settings to Lightroom, which renders them its own way), an exact X-Trans demosaic, a notarised macOS build, a Linux desktop app.
• Honest markers: AI masks are local re-creations, not Adobe's pixels; the macOS app is CI-verified but has no reported interactive users yet.
• Release ledger and rulings: ROADMAP.md.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Showcase photographs © 2026 skymanbp, all rights reserved (not MIT).

Models, fonts and samples

Model weights download separately and remain their authors' property; every pinned model also has a byte-exact mirror on Hugging Face (Azng0/autoshade-mirror-*), checksum-verified either way — table in python/_mirror.py.

Model	Purpose	License
SCUNet	AI denoise (baked sources)	Apache-2.0
DRUNet-colour (DPIR), fine-tuned here as autoshade-raw-denoise-v2.pth	AI denoise (RAW mosaic)	MIT; fine-tuning pairs from RawNIND, CC BY-SA 4.0
BiRefNet	Subject segmentation	MIT
U²-Net	Subject fallback	Apache-2.0
OneFormer ADE20K	Sky segmentation	MIT
SAM 2.1	Point-prompted object masks	Apache-2.0
MoGe-2 ViT-L (code in python/_moge/)	AI lens blur depth map	MIT (DINOv2 backbone code Apache-2.0)
MediaPipe Face Landmarker (BlazeFace + Face Mesh V2)	Portraits mode face and eye outlines	Apache-2.0
SigLIP 2	Style embeddings	Apache-2.0
Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct	Local look descriptions	Apache-2.0
Stable Diffusion 2.1	DIFT correspondence field	CreativeML Open RAIL++-M

Fonts: subset Noto faces (SIL OFL) and a Lucide icon face (ISC) — texts in assets/fonts/. RAW samples: the nine format-grid files are from raw.pixls.us under CC0 1.0, SHA-256-verified.

Thanks to the rawler, image, qcms, rayon, clap, serde, ureq, egui/eframe, tiny_http and local-model communities.

_{Made for photographers who want to know what the AI changed — in numbers.}