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Umbra

A RAW developer for the Mac, built for how I edit: cull from the keyboard, dodge and burn in layers, print in black and white.

The brief

One app for three jobs I used to split across Lightroom, Capture One and Bridge: developing RAW files, culling a shoot, and managing the files on disk. For one photographer, a Fujifilm X100VI, a Leica Q2 and a Sony A7R III, on a MacBook Air M4.

Four rules. Shadow is where the detail is, so the tools for the dark end come first. The original file is never changed. It has to feel fast. No subscription, no cloud, no telemetry.

Browse in the Sheet view: fourteen frames on a contact sheet, with the flag, star and colour filters across the top, the folder tree on the left and the metadata panel on the right.Browse in the Sheet view: fourteen frames on a contact sheet, with the flag, star and colour filters across the top, the folder tree on the left and the metadata panel on the right.
Browse. A folder of fourteen frames on a contact sheet, with pick, reject and rating filters across the top.

Your files stay where they are

Umbra has no catalog. You open any folder, on the Mac or an external drive, and browse it without importing anything. Edits live in a small file next to each photo, so the work moves with the photos; the search index can be thrown away and rebuilt from the files.

Import copies by date, reads every copy back before it counts, never overwrites a different photo with the same name, and never changes the card. Every write goes to a temporary file first and is renamed into place, so a crash leaves the old file or the new one, never half of one. A folder of 5,000 files lists in 0.17 seconds.

Linear light, and dodge and burn as the main tool

The develop engine works in linear light on the GPU, so exposure, contrast and colour behave the way light does. What the canvas shows is what the export writes: a colour audit put the canvas and a 16-bit P3 export 0.01 apart.

A dodge or a burn is a layer with its own mask (brush, radial, linear, a luminosity range, a colour key, or a subject found on the Mac) and its own exposure, contrast and saturation. Hold Option while dragging a control and the canvas shows what it touches.

Develop on the Dodge and Burn tab: a dodge layer selected, its radial mask drawn on the canvas round a lit window in a dark ruin, the mask controls and the layer's own exposure below.Develop on the Dodge and Burn tab: a dodge layer selected, its radial mask drawn on the canvas round a lit window in a dark ruin, the mask controls and the layer's own exposure below.
Dodge and Burn. A dodge layer on the window, its radial mask on the canvas, and the burn waiting under it.

Black and white, printed

In black and white the panel changes to the darkroom’s tools, named as a printer names them: a lens filter and an eight-band mix, development from N-3 to N+3, Paper grades from 00 to 5 or split grade, a flash for the highlights, toning with sepia, selenium or gold.

The Zones overlay shows the picture as eleven grey regions. Place a tone on a zone; place a second and Umbra sets the contrast to match.

The Tone tab in black and white: Paper set to glossy, grade 3, flash 0 percent, then Levels and Curves, over a night frame of power lines and the moon.The Tone tab in black and white: Paper set to glossy, grade 3, flash 0 percent, then Levels and Curves, over a night frame of power lines and the moon.
The Toning tab: a sepia highlight toner at 40 percent, a selenium shadow toner at 50 percent, and the balance between them.The Toning tab: a sepia highlight toner at 40 percent, a selenium shadow toner at 50 percent, and the balance between them.
Paper grade 3, glossy. Then sepia in the highlights and selenium in the shadows.
The Zones overlay: the dusk street as flat grey regions, the scene zones strip above the canvas, and the placement wedge open on the lit wall with zone V picked.The Zones overlay: the dusk street as flat grey regions, the scene zones strip above the canvas, and the placement wedge open on the lit wall with zone V picked.
The Zones overlay, with the placement wedge open on the lit wall. Zone V, and Exposure moved by the difference.

I changed the panel three times

I got the tools panel wrong first. Every control was a card with a large readout and a ruler: 13 sections in one column, the first screen ending at Exposure, and Layers, my main tool, tenth of thirteen.

The column became seven tool tabs, in the order I work: Base, Tone, Dodge & Burn, Colour, Look, Detail, Crop. Most cards became slider rows, because a card costs 116 pt open and a row 34. Base, the tab I open first, now fits the page.

Develop on the Colour tab: the seven tool tabs as a row of glyphs, the Shadows wheel open at red minus 4 and blue plus 4, the highlights row at red plus 3 and blue minus 3, and slider rows below, over a dusk street.Develop on the Colour tab: the seven tool tabs as a row of glyphs, the Shadows wheel open at red minus 4 and blue plus 4, the highlights row at red plus 3 and blue minus 3, and slider rows below, over a dusk street.
The Colour tab. Seven tabs in a row, one card open, the rest as rows.

Where it stands

It runs on my Mac every day as a release build, reads all three cameras, and exports JPEG, HEIC, TIFF and PNG. The App Store build is signed and sandboxed; the store record, the price and the support pages are what is left. The film-scan tools have only met synthetic negatives, and dust detection finds between a fifth and two fifths of the specks.