Chiaro

Chiaro is an open-source toolkit for browsing and processing Light L16 captures. It is intended to provide a portable alternative to parts of the proprietary Lumen workflow. Linux is currently the primary supported platform.

Applications

• Chiaro Gallery browses local or camera-resident .lri captures, previews individual camera modules, and runs export pipelines.
• Chiaro Hotpixel extracts corrected 16-bit per-camera frames for astrophotography and stacking workflows.
• Chiaro Fuse aligns the modules of a capture and synthesises one high-resolution frame.
• Chiaro Stack denoises every temporal camera burst and combines the resulting modules through calibrated multi-camera fusion.

Feature comparison

✅ Available · 🟡 Limited/baseline · 🚧 Planned · ❌ Not available

Feature	Chiaro	Light Lumen
Desktop support	✅ Linux is primary; Windows and macOS release builds	✅ Windows and macOS
Access to captures	✅ Browse folders or a connected L16 directly over PTP/MTP	✅ Import captures from the camera
Individual camera views	✅ Contact sheet and full-resolution preview for every module	❌ Not exposed
Captures without companion .lris files	✅ Builds a colour-calibrated preview from LRI RAW data	❌ Not detected or processed
Local catalog	✅ Inspectable SQLite capture, thumbnail, and export history	✅ Proprietary imported-photo library
Per-camera batch export	✅ Corrected 16-bit RGB or Bayer PNG stacks; five demosaicing methods	❌ Not exposed
Night-mode denoising	🟡 Gallery and CLI export with gyro-seeded, motion-aware temporal and multi-camera fusion	✅ Integrated night processing
Computational fusion	🟡 Calibrated global and dense depth alignment, locally verified multi-camera subpixel reconstruction, and up to 82 MP PNG synthesis	✅ Depth-aware multi-camera fusion
Depth and focus editing	🚧 Planned	✅ Focus adjustment, depth effect, and depth-map repair
Finished-image formats	🟡 Fused 16-bit PNG; JPG and DNG planned	✅ JPG and DNG
Best fit	Open browsing, inspection, research, and per-module workflows	Finished-photo fusion and depth editing

The fusion pipeline builds a calibrated multi-view cost field, uses semi-global matching to seed a finer direct-measurement pass, and accepts only finite depths reproduced by independent camera evidence. Distant, ambiguous, or unsupported regions safely retain the global warp rather than receiving completed depth. Per-camera local refinement and reference-guided robust blending protect object boundaries from double edges. Motion seen differently by every exposure can still lose detail. A classical, bounded-memory resolution stage matches modules at common bandwidth, selects the finest locally verified optical tier, and combines its multiscale coefficients. A denser tele observation can transfer real detail directly; same-resolution reconstruction still requires coherent subpixel phases. Night captures can be processed with temporal and multi-camera fusion in Gallery or Chiaro Stack.

Installation

Download a prebuilt Linux archive from GitHub Releases, or install individual applications with Cargo:

cargo install --git https://github.com/shinf1x/chiaro.git chiaro-gallery
cargo install --git https://github.com/shinf1x/chiaro.git chiaro-hotpixel
cargo install --git https://github.com/shinf1x/chiaro.git chiaro-fuse
cargo install --git https://github.com/shinf1x/chiaro.git chiaro-stack-app

To build the complete workspace:

cargo build --workspace --release

The resulting binaries are written to target/release/.

Workspace

Package	Purpose
chiaro-gallery	Native gallery and export application
chiaro-hotpixel	Per-camera extraction and correction CLI
chiaro-fuse	Multi-camera fusion CLI
chiaro-stack	Motion-aware night-frame stacking CLI
chiaro	Shared LRI parsing, metadata, and preview decoding
chiaro-hotpixel-core	Reusable RAW correction pipeline
chiaro-fusion	Alignment and synthesis library
chiaro-stack	Temporal RAW denoising library
chiaro-proto	Recovered Light metadata bindings

Acknowledgements

Chiaro builds on Light L16 format research from ookami125/lri-cpp, gennyble/lri-rs, and dllu/lri-rs. The latter recovered the original Protocol Buffer definitions from Lumen.