happy-photon

Happy Photon - Photo Editing, Simplified.

A calm workflow backed by a serious photographic pipeline.

Happy Photon is an open-source desktop application for browsing, developing, and exporting your photographs.

It's meant to be a fast, friendly, fun and easy to use application that reduces editing overhead to a minimum.

Originals stay untouched, edits are non-destructive, the catalog stays local, and no account or subscription is required.

The Happy Photon workflow

A fast and easy workflow separates a shoot into three decisions, and the application into three matching workspaces: Browse, Develop, and Export.

1. Which photographs are worth keeping? Browse your downloaded photos in place, compare candidates side by side, and use flags, ratings, and filters to narrow the shoot.
2. What should each keeper look like? Shape composition, light, color, tone, detail, and finishing effects with non-destructive global controls and local masks.
3. What output do you need? Select the finished photographs and export the required size, format, color space, and sharpening without changing the originals.

Follow the complete workflow, from opening a shoot to exporting it.

Pro-level processing, Happy Photon simplicity

Happy Photon pairs its three-decision workflow with a deep image engine.

• Cull quickly. Lightroom-familiar shortcuts, a full-size Loupe, synchronized Compare of two to four photos, and RAW+JPEG pairs handled as one capture. Bring ratings, flags, labels, and crops over from Lightroom Classic, and write XMP sidecars when you need them.
• Edit a whole shoot. Sync one photo's settings across a selection, paste chosen groups with Paste Settings, start from built-in looks or your own presets, and keep up to eight versions of each photo.
• Wide-gamut color. A 16-bit linear Rec.2020 working space, perceptual OKLCh processing, and color-managed preview and export to sRGB or Display P3.
• A RAW pipeline for real cameras. AgX tone rendering, highlight reconstruction, DCP camera profiles, monochrome RAW, and lens corrections from embedded data or Lensfun, with a manual lens picker when matching needs help.
• Tone and color. Auto and eyedropper white balance, Whites and Blacks, Texture and Clarity, skin-aware Vibrance, an eight-band HSL mixer, and RGB tone curves.
• Local adjustments. Linear, radial, and brush masks, limited by luminance or hue range, adjust exposure, whites and blacks, white balance, and saturation in part of the frame.
• Spot removal. Heal or clone dust and blemishes, and paste the repairs onto other photos from the same camera.
• Geometry and detail. Crop with Auto straighten, perspective correction, capture sharpening, wavelet noise reduction, vignette, and film grain.
• Scopes for decisions. Histogram, waveform, RAW histogram, clipping overlays, press-and-hold 1:1, before/after, and a mid-gray assessment surround.
• Export without a detour. JPEG, PNG, WebP, or 16-bit TIFF with embedded ICC profiles, proofed in a dedicated Export workspace, with optional watermarks, location stripping, and screen or print sharpening.

Every edit is non-destructive, saved automatically, and kept in a browsable history. The catalog is backed up weekly and can be restored from Settings. Every shortcut and gesture also has a visible control, so nothing hides behind a key you have to know.

Supported systems

• Windows x64, from the Microsoft Store or as an unsigned ZIP from GitHub Releases
• Linux x64
• macOS 14 or newer on Apple Silicon

Standard formats include JPEG, PNG, BMP, GIF, TIFF, and WebP. RAW support is verified for CR2/CR3, NEF, ARW, DNG, RAF, and RW2. NRW, ORF, and PEF open through the same decoder but are not part of the verified set. RAW decoding uses the bundled, audited LibRaw 0.22.2 generation, so a listed extension does not guarantee support for every camera model or compression variant—especially newer bodies. The in-app workflow provides global adjustments, linear, radial, and brush masks, and spot removal. Lens corrections apply to RAW files only, from embedded prescriptions in a qualified subset of DNG and Fujifilm RAF files or from an exact camera and lens match in the bundled Lensfun database.

HEIC/HEIF read support is probed at runtime and can vary with the bundled codec. Intel macOS is not a supported public target.

Project

• Build from source
• Workflow guide
• Architecture
• Image pipeline
• Design guide
• Contributing
• Security
• Trademark policy
• Release engineering
• Third-party notices

License

Happy Photon is licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later. Contributions are accepted under the same terms without a contributor license agreement or copyright assignment. Third-party components retain their own licenses.