What advantages does this offer over Darktable, the long standing FOSS lightroom alternative?
Edit: One criticism of Darktable is that it emphasizes its "scene-referred workflow" as opposed to a "display-referred workflow" like Lightroom does, making it not a true Lightroom alternative. Seems like this also happens to be written in C++ and also uses a scene-referred workflow? Quite the coincidence. How much of the important design decisions (or implementation) are just copied from Darktable?
More familiar UX and better performance on macOS are two major pluses.
Fair question. The scene-referred design is modelled on darktable’s, and darktable deserves the credit for it. My very first prototype ported some of darktable’s algorithms, and I replaced that with an independent implementation before releasing. Both projects are GPL-3.0, and the README now credits darktable directly.
I built Rembrandt because darktable’s learning curve kept me from using it, not because it’s worse; it has far more control. The goal here is approachability: fewer, broader controls, on-device AI for masks and denoise, and Lightroom catalog import.
Stack: the engine is JavaScript with WebGL/WebGPU shaders, in a small Rust (Tauri) desktop shell. LibRaw (C++) decodes RAW files.
Edit: corrected my earlier reply. I wrongly said it was written in C++, and I overstated the darktable answer.
The only surprising thing in your comment is that the day's latest vibe coded app actually got upvoted.
I mean really, you had to ask Claude whether the workflow was Darktable-inspired. The people in this thread who read Claude's README probably know more about how "your" software works than you do.
Hate more.
I think it's great that the era of bespoke software is here. I have always had a political stance against intellectual property and I think AI will cause an explosion in self directed learning.
I think it's asinine that HN of all places upvotes every vibe coded bespoke app and with a straight face compares it to decades old projects whether open or closed source.
I could have my own version of this app for the effort I've put into writing comments about it.
I too hate how intellectual property has been abused by capital to exploit labor. However, what I hate more then intellectual property is straight up theft of labor. Vibecoders are doing the latter.
I will admit that all in all darktable has a more comprehensive set of controls over editing. However, it is harder software to use.
The scene-referred workflow is vastly superior because it makes all the adjustments before the full Raw data is converted to the display space.
You don't even need to know what that means for it to be useful. In practice, it just means less artifacts, less weird stuff that happens with color near clipping highlights, etc. You use the software in exactly the same way you'd use the display-referred workflow, except that under the hood, the modules are working with the linear Raw data.