How I built RevelRaw, a native Sony RAW editor for macOS 📸
Scene detection with Apple Vision, GPU adjustments with Metal, and a deliberate decision to support exactly one camera brand.
I shoot a Sony Alpha and edit on a Mac, and for years my workflow was a subscription I resented and a catalog I never wanted. So I built the tool I was missing: RevelRaw, a native macOS editor that reads Sony .ARW files, figures out what kind of photograph it's looking at, and puts the right starting points in front of you. This post covers what it does and the engineering decisions behind it.
What RevelRaw does
You drop in an .ARW file. RevelRaw decodes it on-device and classifies the scene with Apple's Vision framework, then ranks its 40+ curated presets so the looks that suit that image surface first: Golden Hour for a backlit field, Kodak Portra for skin, Silver Gelatin for black and white. From there you fine-tune with the usual controls (exposure, tone curve, HSL, color grading, grain), compare before and after, and export JPEG, PNG, TIFF or HEIF with presets sized for Instagram, print or web. Export also embeds your metadata: author, copyright, Creative Commons license, caption, keywords and GPS, written to standard EXIF and IPTC fields.
The decisions behind it
Sony only, on purpose
General-purpose editors support hundreds of camera models, and that breadth costs them depth. Supporting one mount means the decoding pipeline, the presets and the testing all target the same files photographers actually produce. It also means the app has an honest answer to "is this for me": if you shoot Canon, it isn't.
Scene detection through Apple Vision
Every photo runs through VNClassifyImageRequest, which scores the image against a taxonomy of roughly 1,300 labels. RevelRaw maps those classifications to its 15 preset categories, so a night street scene pushes Starlight and Gritty Street to the top while a portrait surfaces Soft Portrait and Rembrandt Light. Vision ships with macOS, runs on-device and costs the user nothing, which fits the next decision.
Everything local
RAW decoding, classification, editing and export all run on the Mac. There is no account, no cloud and no telemetry. Beyond the privacy argument, this keeps the architecture simple: no backend to run, no sync conflicts to resolve, no photo of yours on a server of mine. The App Store handles the one thing that needs a network, payments.
Metal for the editing loop
Slider adjustments render through GPU pipelines with full undo and redo, because a RAW editor lives or dies by the latency between moving a control and seeing the result. Native Swift plus Metal was the whole point of building for one platform instead of shipping a cross-platform wrapper.
What it costs and what it leaves out
The download is free and includes one full-quality export, so you can run a real file through the entire workflow before paying. Pro is $4.99 a month, $29.99 a year, or $119.99 once for lifetime access. It requires macOS 26 or later, and it deliberately skips catalogs, layers and local masking; if you need those, a heavier tool like Capture One earns its price.
You can read more on the RevelRaw blog, including guides on opening ARW files on a Mac and getting the film look from Sony RAW, or grab it from the Mac App Store.
FAQ
What is RevelRaw?
A native macOS photo editor for Sony Alpha cameras. It decodes .ARW files on-device, classifies each scene with Apple Vision, and ranks 40+ curated presets so the right looks surface first. Everything runs locally, with no cloud and no account.
How much does it cost?
Free to download with one full-quality export. Pro unlocks everything for $4.99/month, $29.99/year or $119.99 lifetime, purchased in-app through Apple.
Which cameras does it support?
Sony Alpha and its .ARW RAW format. That constraint is a feature: one pipeline, tested against the files it will actually see.
Does it send my photos anywhere?
No. Decoding, editing and export happen on your Mac. The only network involvement is the App Store purchase for Pro.