Glassine Beta soon

Photo catalogue & raw developer

Nothing you do touches the photograph.

A desktop application for photographers who keep their own files on their own disks. Every adjustment is written beside your photograph, never into it — so any edit can be undone years later, and the original is always the original.

A shaft of afternoon light falling across a road through a redwood forest

Glassine is the translucent paper that interleaves prints — the sheet that protects without hiding.

That is what the application does. Your photographs stay in the folders you made, on the drive you chose; Glassine keeps its own account of them — ratings, keywords, collections and every slider you have moved — in one catalogue file you can copy, back up or throw away without losing a frame. The icon is a sheet laid over a print with one corner turned back, because the original is under there at full strength, and the sheet comes off.

Three modules

Find it, develop it, print it.

The Library grid: rows of thumbnails with the filter bar above them

Library

Where the photographs live, and how you find the one you meant.

  • Import by adding in place, copying or moving, with renaming and duplicate detection
  • Grid, loupe, compare and survey, all sharing one selection
  • Ratings, flags, colour labels and keywords, applied across a whole selection at once
  • Collections, smart collections, stacks and virtual copies
  • A drive can move and the catalogue still knows where everything is
The Develop module: a photograph open beside the histogram, the Basic panel and the tone curve

Develop

Every control a raw file needs, and an undo that reaches all the way back.

  • White balance, exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites and blacks
  • Tone curves, an eight-band colour mixer, colour grading and calibration
  • Crop, straighten, perspective and lens corrections
  • Local adjustments — brush, gradients, luminance and colour range
  • Presets, copy, sync, history and a before view
The Print module: a photograph laid out on an A4 sheet beside the page setup

Print

Colour-managed output, on paper and off it.

  • Single photograph, contact sheet and repeating-cell layouts
  • Soft proofing, so you see the paper before you spend it
  • Export to JPEG, TIFF or PNG with resizing and output sharpening
  • A watermark, and control over what metadata leaves with the file
Runs on
macOS and Linux
Opens
Camera raw, JPEG, TIFF, PNG, HEIF
Speaks
English and Svenska
Licence
Free software, GPL-3

Where it is

In the final phase before beta.

The Library, Develop and Print modules are built. Glassine is in the last stretch of development before it reaches beta — there is no download yet, and this page will carry one the moment there is something worth installing.