A night of sky, stacked over a sharp foreground.

Six steps, one window. Each screen shows why, not just what.

• Import

  Drop a folder of RAW files. Pictor finds the runs, sets aside lit and overexposed frames, and checks lens, colour, memory and disk space before anything is written. Cancel at any time and resume from the last finished stage.

• Frames

  See why each frame was used or left out: lit, lost, how far it drifted, and a blink against the reference.

• Sky & ground

  Tint the sky and its boundary over the result with O, then paint corrections as sky or ground with S and G.

• Scene

  Build a hero composite around one frame, or a moment from a short window of the night, and open it straight away.

• Compare

  Two renderings side by side. Space swaps them in place, S splits the view, and 200 % crops take A, same or B verdicts.

• Look & export

  Tune the look live, then export a linear 32-bit master, a 16-bit TIFF, a JPEG or an HDR JPEG, with an HDR preview on displays that show light above paper white.

The same engine on the command line. For batches and scripts.

pictor process ~/Nights/2026-10-12 ~/Nights/2026-10-12-out

One command checks the folder, picks the recommended run, aligns, stacks and renders final.jpg and final.tif. Run it again into the same folder and it carries on where it stopped.

Details. Private by design.

Status

In development; no public build yet

Runs on

macOS 12 or later, Apple silicon and Intel; Linux and Windows later

Reads

Camera RAW files

Writes

32-bit linear master, 16-bit TIFF, JPEG, HDR JPEG

Privacy

Works entirely on your Mac: no account, no cloud, no telemetry

Licence

MIT or Apache 2.0