A simpler Photoshop and Affinity alternative for the Mac.
Photo editing and compositing without the bloat, the subscription or the sign-up. Open source, ready for agents,
and under 50 MB.
Website · Features · AI agents · Building · MIT License
Most image work comes down to the same handful of things: retouch a photo, cut something out, put a few layers together, add some text, export.
Lamina is built for exactly that: the tools you reach for every day, laid out like Photoshop, Affinity and similar
editors, with the names, shortcuts and layer model you already know, in a native Mac app under 50 MB, with no
subscription and no account. Projects are plain folders of PNG layers and a manifest, so nothing is locked in, and AI
agents can work on them too: through the lamina command-line tool, as an MCP server, or by writing a project while
you watch it update. Vector layers are next.
- The layout you know from Photoshop, Affinity and similar editors: tools in a column at the left, the active tool's options bar above the canvas, and panels docked at the right
- Tools grouped as you'd expect, with flyouts: hold or right-click a slot for its other tools, or press Shift with the tool's key to step through them
- Commands under the names and in the menus you'd look for: Free Transform on ⌘T, Levels under Image › Adjustments, Liquify… under Filter, Layer Style under Layer
- Properties shows what's selected: the document's canvas and rulers, a layer's transform and alignment, a type layer's character and paragraph settings, an adjustment layer's controls, or a mask's
- The Adjustments panel adds an adjustment layer in one click
- Light and dark, following your Mac or set in Lamina › Settings… (⌘K), drawn with native controls
- A status bar with an editable zoom, the document's size and resolution, and a hint for the active tool
- Multiple projects in tabs, each showing its zoom, active layer and mode
- History in the panel column: every undo step by name, click one to go back or forward to it
- Familiar keyboard shortcuts throughout, remappable or removable in Edit › Keyboard Shortcuts… (⌥⇧⌘K), where any menu command can also be given one
- Drag a number's label to scrub its value
- Layers and groups, with opacity and the full set of familiar blend modes in their usual order; a group's opacity dims everything inside it
- Layer masks: paint, fill, invert, blur and feather them anywhere on the canvas, past the layer's own pixels; link or unlink them to transform a mask on its own
- Clipping masks and group masks
- Adjustment layers, edited live in Properties: Levels, Curves, Exposure, Hue/Saturation, Color Balance, Black & White, Invert, Gradient Map and Grain, plus Gaussian Blur, Motion Blur and Add Noise as filter layers
- Layer styles in one Layer Style dialog: Blending Options, Stroke, Inner Shadow, Inner Glow, Color Overlay, Outer Glow and Drop Shadow, rendered on the GPU and editable at any time; each effect has its own row and eye in the Layers panel
- Merge Down, Merge Layers and Merge Group (⌘E), Merge Visible (⇧⌘E) and Flatten Image
- Layer Mask › Apply, Copy, Paste and Clear Layer Style, and Hide All Other Layers
- Layer locks as in Photoshop: lock a layer's pixels, its position or everything from the Layers panel's Lock row or Layer › Lock Layers… (⌘/); a group's locks hold for what it contains
- Duplicate, rename inline, reorder and nest by drag and drop; Option-drag to duplicate; a right-click menu in the Layers panel
- Copy and paste whole layers and groups (⌘C/⌘V with no selection), within a project or between projects, or drag them between projects
- Free Transform (⌘T): move, scale, rotate and flip without losing resolution, however small you make an image
- Distort from Edit › Transform or by ⌘-dragging a handle, with Shift to lock to an axis
- Transform several layers, or a whole group, together
- Snapping to canvas and layer edges and centers, with guides
- Exact position, size and angle in the Free Transform bar, around a reference point you choose, and in Properties
- Edit › Transform › Flip Horizontal and Flip Vertical, and Image › Image Rotation › Flip Canvas
- Align and Distribute layers by the pixels they show, to each other, the selection or the canvas, from the Move tool's options bar, Properties or the Layer menu
- Rectangular and Elliptical Marquee (M), Lasso and Polygonal Lasso (L), Object Selection, which traces whatever you click, and Magic Wand, which selects by color (W)
- Select › Subject and Color Range…, and Expand, Contract and Feather under Select › Modify
- Add to and subtract from selections, move the outline, or move and duplicate the pixels inside
- Edit › Stroke…: a line along the selection's outline, inside, centered or outside, in the foreground or background color, on pixels or masks
- Edit › Fill…: the foreground or background color, any color, black, white, 50% gray or Content-Aware, with an opacity
- Select › Load Selection…: a layer's pixels or a mask as a new selection, or added to or subtracted from the one there is
- Content-Aware Fill…, which can also extend an image past its edges
- Brush (B) and Eraser (E) with size, hardness, opacity, flow and smoothing, and Shift for straight lines
- Dodge and Burn (O) lighten or darken the shadows, midtones or highlights by an exposure
- Pen pressure for size and opacity, on a graphics tablet
- Brush settings and colors carry over to new documents and later launches
- Spot Healing Brush (J), content-aware
- Clone Stamp (S), aligned or not, sampling one layer or all of them
- Blur (on pixels or masks) and Smudge (R), and Filter › Liquify… (⇧⌘X), whose strokes you commit or cancel
- Gradient and Paint Bucket (G): the bucket fills similar colors by tolerance, contiguous or not, from one layer or all of them, anti-aliased, on pixels or masks
- Rectangle (rounded too), Ellipse and Line tools (U), which stay editable rather than being rasterized
- Horizontal Type Tool (T): inline multiline editing in draggable, resizable paragraph boxes, with per-letter colors and faces; family, style, size, alignment and color in the options bar, leading and tracking in Properties; transform text and use it as a clipping mask
- Eyedropper (I) and a full color picker
- Filter › Camera Raw Filter… (⇧⌘A): light, color, curves, color mixer, color grading, detail, optics and geometry, in a panel beside the canvas; each section resets to its defaults from its header, and settings can be saved as named presets
- Image › Adjustments: Levels (with Auto), Curves, Exposure, Hue/Saturation, Color Balance, Black & White, Invert, Gradient Map and Grain
- Gaussian Blur and Motion Blur that spread past a layer's edges
- Add Noise, Dither, Vignette, Bloom / Glow, Tonal Contrast, Lens Correction and Layer › Remove Background…
- Unsharp Mask (Amount, Radius, Threshold) and High Pass
- Filter dialogs with a zoomable preview, and live previews on the canvas, limited to the selection when there is one
- Last Filter (⌃⌘F) runs the last filter again with the same settings
- File › New from Clipboard (⌥⌘N) opens the copied image, or image files copied in Finder, as a new project
- Rulers (⌘R), guides dragged from them, a layout grid with adjustable spacing and subdivisions, and Snap To for guides, grid, layers and document bounds
- Crop with snapping, ratios including 3:4, 9:16 and any you type in (they are remembered), and Option for symmetric cropping; with a selection, the crop starts at it
- Canvas Size, Image Size and Trim; Image Rotation (90° either way and 180°), which turns layer pixels losslessly
- Sharp high-quality downsampling when zoomed out, and a pixel grid when zoomed in
- Open or place JPEG, PNG, HEIC, WebP, TIFF, SVG, camera RAW (with a develop step first) and Photoshop PSD and PSB (8-bit RGB; not CMYK). Photoshop groups, masks, blend modes, fill rectangles/ellipses, and simple horizontal text stay editable; other vectors and vertical text become pixels. A conversion report is shown before anything is applied.
- Large documents: the memory budget scales with your Mac, and a Photoshop file too big to open has its layers cropped to the canvas instead
- File › Export › Quick Export as PNG, or Export As… (⌥⇧⌘W) to PNG, JPEG, HEIC, AVIF, WebP, TIFF or PDF with a preview and each format's settings (only the formats your Mac can write are listed); Edit › Copy Merged
- Keep working while a project saves
- Automatic updates for signed releases
- AI agents and scripts can build and edit projects directly: a
.lamproject is a folder of PNG layers and a manifest, and an open project updates live as it's written. See Writing Lamina projects - They can also drive the running app with the
laminacommand-line tool: list open projects and their layers, select layers, apply filters and adjustment layers with settings, undo, export and render previews. See The lamina command-line tool
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| Camera Raw Filter, in dark | Adjustment layers in Properties, in light |
The app ships lamina in its bundle. Put it on your PATH with a symlink:
ln -s /Applications/Lamina.app/Contents/Helpers/lamina ~/.local/bin/lamina # any folder on your PATHIt controls the app while it's running (it never starts it):
lamina list-documents # open projects and their layers, with short ids
lamina apply-filter --document 3f2a --layer 9c1b --kind gaussian-blur --settings radius=4
lamina add-adjustment-layer --document 3f2a --kind exposure --settings exposure=0.5,gamma=1.1
lamina export-document --document 3f2a --output ~/Desktop/poster.jpg --quality 0.9
lamina undo --document 3f2a
lamina --help # every command; lamina help <command> for its optionsEach edit is one undo step in the app, and edits are refused while you're in the middle of something there (typing
text, a transform, an open dialog). Output is text, or JSON with --json. lamina sends the app Apple Events, so the
first command asks whether the app you run it from (Terminal, your editor, an agent) may control Lamina; that
choice is in System Settings › Privacy & Security › Automation. Only your own processes on this Mac can send commands,
and the app's sandbox entitlements are unchanged: lamina itself writes the exported files. With the Dev build
running, use lamina --dev … (or the copy inside build/Lamina Dev.app).
lamina mcp offers the same commands as MCP tools over stdio, one tool per command. Register it with your MCP host:
claude mcp add lamina -- /Applications/Lamina.app/Contents/Helpers/lamina mcp # Claude Code
codex mcp add lamina -- /Applications/Lamina.app/Contents/Helpers/lamina mcp # CodexFor Claude's desktop app, add "lamina": {"command": "/Applications/Lamina.app/Contents/Helpers/lamina", "args": ["mcp"]} under mcpServers in its claude_desktop_config.json. Add --dev after mcp to drive the Dev build.
It speaks MCP 2026-07-28 (stateless, with server/discover) and, for hosts that still open with initialize,
2025-11-25 and earlier. Checked with Claude Code 2.1.288 (2025-11-25 by default, 2026-07-28 with
MCP_PROTOCOL_NEGOTIATION=auto) and Codex 0.160.0 (2025-11-25 by default, 2026-07-28 with --enable mcp_2026_07_28
and CODEX_MCP_PROTOCOL_VERSION=2026-07-28 in the server's environment).
- macOS 26 or later on Apple silicon
- Xcode 26 or later to build (Swift 6.2, and actool for the icon)
Get the DMG from the latest release: signed with Developer ID and
notarized by Apple, and it updates itself. Each release lists SHA-256 checksums; check a download with
shasum -a 256 -c SHA256SUMS --ignore-missing.
git clone https://github.com/itsjavi/lamina.git
cd lamina
make install # builds build/Lamina.app and copies it to /ApplicationsOther targets: make app (release build only), make dev (a debug build with its own id, sandbox container and
preferences, and no updater), make test (unit tests; make test-ui also runs the ones that show windows).
The app is App Sandboxed: its preferences and recent projects live in ~/Library/Containers/com.itsjavi.lamina
(….dev for the Dev build). See AGENTS.md for the project layout, build variants and tests, and
docs/releasing.md for publishing a release.
MIT. Lamina began as a fork of Robbie Tilton's Compositor (MIT), and keeps its own project format, identity and update feed.