Before you get your hopes up
Seven reasons to use something else.
Every one is real, and each names a specific tool that does the job better.
The competitor facts below — prices, platforms, what each tool does — were read off those vendors' own sites on . Each one is sourced and dated on the alternatives page, which links back to every vendor.
You cull on exposure, not on the picture
There is no histogram in Lamplit. No focus peaking, no highlight recovery preview, no exposure analysis of any kind.
Use FastRawViewer — It renders the actual RAW rather than the embedded JPEG, and it is $23.99 paid once.
Your workflow ends in a printed sheet
Lamplit does not generate contact sheets or proof sheets, at all.
Use Photo Mechanic — Contact sheet generation is built in. This one is a hard stop, not an inconvenience.
You need one catalogue across many drives
Lamplit has no database. It reads the folders on your disk and writes standard metadata back into them. That is a deliberate design choice and it is also a missing feature.
Use Photo Mechanic Plus — It catalogues images across multiple storage locations, which is exactly the thing we decided not to build.
You want the first pass made for you
Lamplit has no AI culling. It will not find the sharpest eyes, group your bursts, or rank a scene. Every call is yours.
Use Aftershoot or Narrative Select — Both do automated selection properly, and if you shoot volume portrait or wedding work that is a real workflow we do not serve.
You will not rent software
Lamplit is $79 a year. There is no perpetual licence and we have not committed to one.
Use FastRawViewer or Photo Mechanic — One is paid once and kept; the other sells a perpetual licence outright. If renting is a line you do not cross, that settles it.
You are on Linux
There is no Linux build and none is planned. Lamplit runs on macOS 10.15 or newer and Windows 10 or newer only.
Use RapidRAW or darktable — Both are free and both run on Linux.
You need it today
Lamplit is in closed beta. There is no public build, no checkout, and no licence system. You cannot buy it and you cannot download it.
Use Photo Mechanic or FastRawViewer — Both are on sale right now and you can be working in ten minutes. Shipping software beats unshipped software.
Why this page exists
Because the alternative is worse
Lamplit is in closed beta. We have no users to quote, no reviews, no awards and no press, and we are not going to invent any of them. That leaves exactly one way to earn your trust before you have run the software: tell you the things that argue against us, in more detail than anyone would if they were not true.
So this page is not modesty. It is the only evidence we have. If you find something missing from it — a gap we have not listed, a case where another tool is plainly the right answer — that is a bug in this page and we want the report.
What is left, once all seven of those are true of someone else: you shoot a lot of frames, you want to make every call yourself, you need the shoot moved from the card to the client with the metadata intact, and you would like the interface to have been designed this decade. That is who this is for. It is a narrower group than our marketing would prefer, and it is the accurate one.