The Idea

The Motivation

As a photography enthusiast, I often found existing software to be sluggish and resource-heavy on my machine. Born from the desire for a more responsive and streamlined photo editing experience, I set out to build my own. The goal was to create a tool that was not only fast but also helped me learn the details of digital image processing and camera technology.

The Challenge

I set an ambitious goal to rapidly build a functional, feature-rich application from an empty folder. This personal challenge pushed me to learn quickly and focus intensely on the core architecture and user experience.

The Process

The foundation is built on Rust for its safety and performance, and Tauri for its ability to create lightweight, cross-platform desktop apps with a web frontend. The entire image processing pipeline is offloaded to the GPU via WGPU and a custom WGSL shader, ensuring that even on complex edits with multiple masks, the UI remains fluid.

I am immensely grateful for Google’s Gemini suite of AI models. As an 18-year-old without a formal background in advanced mathematics or image science, the AI Studio’s free tier was an invaluable assistant, helping me research and implement concepts like the Menon demosaicing algorithm.