Your RAW files, the way your camera saw them.
Slaty measures your camera's rendering curve from the JPEG it embeds, then applies every adjustment as a physical operation on the sensor's linear light.
Free during pre-release · Unsigned binary, see below
"Why does my RAW look worse than the preview on the back of my camera?"
Because your camera applies its own rendering — Picture Control, Picture Style, film simulation — and third-party software has no idea what it is. So it opens your files with a generic curve, and you spend the first ten minutes getting back to something you had already seen.
Your camera's rendering, measured rather than guessed.
Every RAW file contains the JPEG the camera produced from the same exposure, manufacturer rendering included. Slaty pairs the two and derives the body's actual transfer curve — once per model, then cached.
Open a Canon after a Nikon and you get Canon's rendering. No profile to download, no preset to apply.
darktable has an equivalent tool, but it is manual and lives outside the application. No editor does this automatically on open.
Real mathematics, not filters.
No tonal adjustment goes through a CSS filter or an 8-bit approximation. White balance is a per-channel gain applied before the camera's colour matrix — the colorimetrically correct order, which plenty of tools get backwards. Exposure is a physical stop, multiplicative in linear light.
- Sensorraw data
- DemosaicRust
- White balanceper-channel gain
- Colour matrixto linear sRGB
- Exposuremultiplicative
- Camera curvemeasured
- Display
Demosaicing runs in Rust; everything after it runs on the GPU in WebGL2, in floating point, on every frame. That is what makes highlight and shadow recovery genuinely possible rather than cosmetic.
Your edits stay with your photos.
A .slaty file next to every RAW. No catalogue database to corrupt, no library to lose, nothing to re-import.
Move a folder to another drive and the work follows. Open that folder six months later and it is all still there.
- DSC_0420.NEF DSC_0420.NEF.slaty
- DSC_0421.NEF DSC_0421.NEF.slaty
- DSC_0422.NEF DSC_0422.NEF.slaty
A few kilobytes of readable JSON. You can open it, version it, and back it up alongside your photos.
What is in the application.
Tone
- Exposure in physical stops
- Contrast, highlights, shadows
- Whites and blacks
- Clipped highlight reconstruction
Colour
- White balance as per-channel gain
- Saturation and vibrance
- 8-band HSL
- Point tone curve
Local adjustments
- Linear and radial masks
- Up to 8 masks per photo
- 7 adjustments per mask
- Invert and duplicate
Framing
- Free or fixed-ratio crop
- Straightening with a grid
- Quarter-turn rotation
- Automatic EXIF orientation
Culling and library
- Fast thumbnail filmstrip
- Star ratings and pick flags
- Filter by rating and flag
- Copy and paste settings
Output
- JPEG, WebP and PNG export
- Batch export
- Reusable presets
- Undo / redo
Fast enough to work through a shoot.
610ms
Full RAW decode
24 MP NEF
300ms
Thumbnail
4 in parallel
810ms
Camera rendering measurement
once per model
Nikon NEF, 24 MP (6000 × 4000), on a Windows desktop.
What Slaty does not do.
Slaty is a pre-release and does not yet replace a full editor. Here is what is missing, so you know before installing it rather than after.
- No brush masks — linear and radial only
- No optical corrections: distortion, chromatic aberration, lens vignetting
- No per-channel R/G/B curves
- No three-wheel colour grading
- sRGB output, no ICC display management
- Windows only — no macOS, no Linux
- Basic noise reduction, not enough at very high ISO
- The interface is in French only for now
The decoder handles the major raw formats. Only Nikon NEF has been verified against real files so far — the others should work, and your feedback is what confirms it.
Try it on your own files.
Free during pre-release. No account, no data sent anywhere: the application works entirely offline.
See downloadsWindows 10 / 11 64-bit
No release published yet. The first one is on its way — this button will link straight to the installer as soon as it is live.
Windows will show a warning
The installer is not signed with a paid certificate. On launch, Windows will show "Windows protected your PC", with "Don't run" offered by default. This is not a virus detection: it is the absence of a signature.
- 1 Click "More info"
- 2 Then click "Run anyway"
A signing certificate will be in place before any paid version. In the meantime, the SHA-256 checksum is published on every release so you can verify the file yourself.