The missing darkroom for session photographers on macOS. Tethered capture, fast culling and real RAW development — in a single window that stays out of your way.
Free while in beta. No catalog. No cloud. Your folder is the session.Real photographs from a real session — culled and developed in RawStage.
A grid that opens instantly and never stutters. Rate, flag and filter with one hand on the keyboard. No import, no catalog — point it at a folder and start.
White balance, exposure, curves, levels, color — the full traditional toolset, rendering as fast as you can move a slider. Every edit lives in a small sidecar file next to your RAW: portable, readable, yours.
Plug in your camera and every frame lands in the session, develops with your session look, and is ready to judge in about a second. Unplug, replug, let the camera sleep — the session doesn't care.
Because right now you're paying rent on one app that
does too much, or juggling two that each do half. Session work needs
exactly three things — capture, selection, development — and needs
them fast, in one place, without a catalog database between you and
your files.
We're building that. Nothing else.
Native USB tether for Fujifilm X / GFX (tested end-to-end on a GFX100S — sleep, cable pulls, bursts). Hot-folder tether for any brand. Instant culling grid with keyboard ratings, flags, color tags and filters. The full classic develop panel: white balance with eyedropper, exposure to blacks, luma + RGB curves, levels, clarity, vignette, sharpening and noise reduction, single-pixel (hot pixel) removal, crop with corner rotation. Copy/paste settings across selections. Session look that follows your edits in tether. Export to JPEG, PNG, TIFF-16 and HEIC.
Film-style LUTs and presets (coming to the Pro engine), masks, color wheel, dehaze. UI is English for now — Portuguese is on the way. Native tether is verified on GFX100S; other recent X / GFX bodies should work over the same protocol — that's part of what this beta is for. Beta builds expire after ~60 days; grab the newest one here.
Plug in your camera body and tell us if tether works — the model name is half the report. Run one real session end-to-end: shoot, cull, develop, export. If anything feels slow, stutters or surprises you, use Help → Send Feedback in the app — Help → Export Logs attaches the technical story in one file.
Signed and notarized. Requires macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later. Built and measured on Apple silicon; the binary is universal, so Intel Macs run it too — untested, brave owners welcome. Free while in beta — no license key. Leave your email and the download unlocks; we'll also ping you when new builds land.
Your email goes to us and nowhere else — build announcements only.A LUT engine with looks designed by a working photographer — applied automatically per film-simulation setting read from your files, if you want. Save your own presets and carry a signature look across sessions.
A proper color grading wheel, the first local adjustments (linear and radial masks), dehaze, and export recipes — several outputs from one export, the way delivery actually works.
Everything above ships as RawStage Pro: a one-time purchase, no subscription, ever. Culling, tethering and the classic develop panel stay in the free version. Beta testers get founder pricing at launch — that's the thank-you.
I shoot sessions on a Fujifilm GFX. For years my workflow was a tether utility taped to a subscription editor — two apps, two philosophies, neither built for the way a session actually flows. So I'm building the tool I kept looking for: one window, three rooms, everything measured in milliseconds.
— Frederico van ZellerLeave your email and you'll get a short note when a new beta build lands — and founder pricing when RawStage launches. Nothing else.
No spam. One click to leave. Your email goes nowhere else.