[opensourcedex]

photon is a free, open source photo & video editors project written in Rust and released under Apache-2.0. It has 3,897 GitHub stars, 189 forks and 49 open issues, and was last pushed 14 days ago. On this registry it ranks #33 of 57 tracked projects in Photo & Video Editors, with 5 head-to-head comparisons available.

What is photon?

photon is an open-source Rust library that compiles to WebAssembly for fast image processing in the browser, on Node, or natively, aimed at developers who need to apply image effects from their own applications.

What it is

photon is a high-performance, cross-platform image processing library written entirely in Rust, published on Crates.io as photon_rs and on NPM as @silvia-odwyer/photon-node. Because the whole codebase is Rust, the same core code runs in three environments: natively for command-line and desktop applications, in the browser through WebAssembly, and on Node through WebAssembly. The project is licensed under Apache-2.0, is marked active in its README, and exposes 96 customisable functions for image effects, documented at docs.rs/photon-rs.

The problem it addresses is performing image manipulation at near-native speed inside web and Node applications without shipping large native dependencies or moving image data to a remote service. Instead of calling out to a separate processing backend, a developer loads the library as WebAssembly and applies corrections, resizes, and filters directly in the runtime they already use. It also serves Rust projects natively, so one codebase covers both native and web targets.

Key capabilities

  • Image correction across colour spaces, including hue rotation, sharpening, brightness adjustment, saturation adjustment, and lightening or darkening.
  • Resizing of images both natively and on the web.
  • Convolution operations such as Sobel filters, blurs, Laplace effects, and edge detection.
  • A duotone filter with preset duotone effects, added in version 0.3.2.
  • Image rotation and a dithering filter, both introduced in version 0.3.2.
  • Image cropping, with a crop fix delivered in PR #100.
  • Decoding and encoding of PNG, JPEG, BMP, ICO, TIFF, and WEBP files.

Who uses it and how

  • Web developers who load the WebAssembly build in the browser and call the library from JavaScript with the npm package, keeping image work client-side at near-native speed.
  • Node applications that apply image effects server-side through the @silvia-odwyer/photon-node package.
  • Rust developers building command-line apps or native photo editing tools, using the crate directly for cross-platform development.
  • The AI assistant OpenClaw, which uses photon through Rastermill, and the Pi coding agent (@earendil-works/pi-coding-agent), which also uses it as its image processing library.
  • Contributors working on the project through initiatives such as Hacktoberfest, with issues tracked publicly on GitHub.

Getting started

Install the crate from Crates.io as photon_rs or the npm package as @silvia-odwyer/photon-node, then follow the getting started guide and tutorials at silvia-odwyer.github.io/photon/guide.

How it compares

The facts supplied for this project name no comparable open-source tools and no list of paid products it replaces, so photon stands alone in this registry; readers evaluating it should compare it against whatever image processing option they currently depend on.

When to use it — and when not

photon is a library rather than a standalone application, so a user must be comfortable integrating a Rust or WebAssembly dependency into their own build and wiring up decoding, encoding, and file handling themselves; it is not a ready-made editor with a user interface. Anyone needing a packaged desktop or web editor, or a tool that requires no code integration, should look elsewhere. The project also carries 49 open issues, which is worth reviewing before committing to it.

project readme (upstream, from github) — read inline

photon

Photon banner, showing the Photon logo on a dark background

Photon

Status GitHub Issues Gitter Chat NPM Monthly Downloads GitHub Workflow Status

Crates.io License X (formerly Twitter) Follow

High-performance, cross-platform Rust/WebAssembly image processing library

📝 Table of Contents

Photon is a high-performance Rust image processing library, which compiles to WebAssembly, allowing for safe, blazing-fast image processing both natively and on the web.

You can run Photon:

  • natively
  • in the browser with WebAssembly
  • on Node with WebAssembly

Features

  • Fast: On the web, Photon's high-performance allows it to run at near-native speed. Benchmarks can be found here.
  • Call with JS: Want to use Photon on the web or with Node? Using a simple npm package, you're good to go. Get all the benefits of WebAssembly with zero-cost abstraction.
  • Use Natively: For command-line apps, native photo editing apps, and so forth, Photon's core codebase is in Rust, allowing for cross-platform development.
  • Pure Rust - Unlike other libraries, 100% of the library's codebase is written in Rust, so security and safety is guaranteed.

Featured in

Photon is the image processing library used in the AI assistant OpenClaw through Rastermill.

It is also the image processing library used in the Pi coding agent also.

Live Demo

View the official demo of WASM in action.

Photon In Action

Imgur

Version 0.3.2 Release

Version 0.3.2 has been released on Crates.io and NPM, with new features including:

  • A duotone filter and preset duotone effects
  • Image rotation
  • Dithering filter
  • Image cropping update (fixed in PR #100)

Supported Image Formats

The following image formats are supported:

  • PNG
  • JPEG
  • BMP
  • ICO
  • TIFF
  • WEBP

Get Started

Getting Started Guide

Check out Photon's getting started guide, complete with tutorials, installation instructions, and more

📚 Documentation

View the official documentation.

Functions

96 customisable functions are available, for varying image effects.

Functions include:

  • Image correction: Hue rotation, sharpening, brightness adjustment, adjusting saturation, lightening/darkening all within various colour spaces.
  • Resizing: Resize images both natively and on the web.
  • Convolutions: Sobel filters, blurs, Laplace effects, edge detection, etc.,
  • Channel manipulation: Increasing/decreasing RGB channel values, swapping channels, removing channels, etc.
  • Transform: Resize, crop, rotate and flip images.
  • Monochrome effects: Monochrome tints, greyscaling of various forms, thresholding, sepia, averaging RGB values
  • Colour manipulation: Work with the image in various colour spaces such as HSL, LCh, and sRGB, and adjust the colours accordingly.
  • Filters: Over 30 pre-set filters available, incorporating various effects and transformations.
  • Watermarking: Watermark images in multiple formats.
  • Blending: Blend images together using 10 different techniques, change image backgrounds.
  • Special effects: Film grain, vignette, Bayer dither effects + many more (in repo, will be released through NPM/Crates.io in next library release in 2026)

Get Started Natively

Install

Add the following line to the dependencies section of your Rust project's Cargo.toml:

Cargo.toml
[dependencies]
photon-rs = "0.3.2"
Using Photon Natively

The following code opens an image from the filesystem, applies an effect, and outputs it as a PNG.

Here is a code sample to get you started:

extern crate photon_rs;
use photon_rs::native::{open_image, save_image};

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
    // Open the image (a PhotonImage is returned)
    let mut img = open_image("test_image.PNG")?;

    // Increment the red channel by 40
    photon_rs::channels::alter_red_channel(&mut img, 40);

    // Write file to filesystem.
    save_image(img, "raw_image.JPG")?;

    Ok(())
}
See More Examples

For more examples, check out the guide on how to get started with Photon natively.

Building WebAssembly package

In order to build the WebAssembly package you will need wasm-pack. Check the wasm-pack installation guide on how to install it. Then you can run the command:

wasm-pack build ./crate

Get Started With WebAssembly

Using a Bundler?

Installing Photon

If you're using Webpack or a bundler to build your project, install Photon via npm:

npm install @silvia-odwyer/photon

You can run Photon directly in any web browser that supports WebAssembly, which includes Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge.

Get Started with Photon on The Web

To get started, check out the guide.

Using NodeJS?

If you're intending to use Photon with NodeJS, you can install the NodeJS version of the library:

npm install @silvia-odwyer/photon-node

See the NodeJS tutorial, which shows how to use Photon with NodeJS.

Using Cloudflare Workers?

If you're using Cloudflare Workers, you can install the following library to use Photon with Cloudflare Workers:

npm install @cf-wasm/photon

The full usage steps are provided here.

Modules

Photon contains a series of modules, which include:

  • effects: Various image effects, including adding offsets, thresholding, duotoning, solarization, etc.
  • channels: Functions related to increasing/decreasing the red, green, and blue channels of the image data.
  • transform: Resize, crop, flip, and rotate images.
  • filters: Preset filters, which alter the rgb channels of the image. Contains over 20.
  • conv: Laplace, Sobel, emboss; image proc functions which require image convolution.
  • noise: Noise generation of varying tints and hues.
  • multiple: A module for dealing with multiple images, such as watermarking images, etc.,
  • correction: Hue rotation, adjusting saturation, lightening/darkening: all techniques available in multiple colour spaces, which lead to varying effects.

Quick Start Example

Clone this repo:

git clone https://github.com/silvia-odwyer/photon

Run the binary, which will perform an image processing function on an image:

cargo run --release

Compare the original image with the outputted image, and you'll see the desired effect has been applied.

Latest Updates

  • Bayer dither, film grain and vignette effects - Added in PR #216
  • 3 way color grading and functions for making adjustments/corrections to images - Added in PR #214
  • Halftoning effect for WASM - Added in PR #184

Including Photon

If you've built a project with Photon and would like to be included in the list, just submit a PR!

Got Questions?

If you have further questions about this library, you can ask them on Gitter or Spectrum, and I'll get back to you!

If there are any issues involving running/using the library, make sure to open an issue, it would be greatly appreciated, and will help improve the library.

Additional Notes

Functions have been designed with flexibility in mind, so that full customization of effects and filters can be utilised; for every function, hundreds of differing image effects/tints/hues can be created, just by changing parameters slightly, so with every function comes the ability to fully experiment.

For developers who would like to work with high-level constructs can do so, such as applying effects to imagery (eg: Laplace or Sobel) or filters; this library provides a complete suite of functions to do so, as well as in-built filters and presets.

photon can be thought of as a high-level wrapper to the Rust image crate, but conversely also includes functions which provide low-level access to pixel and channel manipulation, perfect for developers who wish to work with this data directly.

Contributing

Photon is always accepting new filters and functions. In that vein if you'd like to contribute to Photon please submit a Pull Request or add new issues for investigation. Our community is our lifeblood, and we appreciate all the support we get from individuals like you.

To Do

  • Blend images using browser-specific functions for WASM version of library.
  • Vintage images with light leaks, etc.
  • Tests in a headless web browser for WebAssembly version of library

Contributors

This repository continually receives new filters and updates from fellow contributors, for which I'm very grateful for! Thanks to the generous contributions of others, there are even more cool effects available in this library.

I'd like to extend my gratitude to all of you!

Contributors include (be sure to add yourself to the list if you submitted a PR):

License

This project is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License - see the LICENSE.md file for details.

Frequently asked questions

Is photon free to use?

photon is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. There is no licence fee and no seat count — you can self-host it or, where the project offers one, pay a vendor for a managed version instead.

What does photon do?

⚡ Rust/WebAssembly image processing library

What is photon written in?

photon is primarily written in Rust. Its source is publicly available at https://github.com/silvia-odwyer/photon, and it has 3,897 GitHub stars.