Lamina
Lamina app icon

Free & open source · macOS 26 · Under 50 MB

Photo editing and compositing,
without the bloat.

Lamina is a native Mac image editor with the tools you reach for every day: layers, masks, adjustment layers, Camera Raw, brushes, healing and text, laid out like the editors you already know, with their names and shortcuts. No subscription, no account, and AI agents can work on your projects too.

Download for Mac View on GitHub

Latest release · macOS 26 on Apple silicon · MIT licensed

The Lamina window in dark appearance: an oil-painted seascape at sunset on the canvas, the toolbar at the left, Properties showing the Warm varnish Curves adjustment, and the Layers panel with a Sun glow layer, a Surface group with varnish sheen, impasto relief and canvas weave, and a Paint group with accents, detail strokes, body strokes and block-in.

  • 23MB

    Tiny download

  • 0.7s

    Opens instantly

  • 69MB

    Light on memory

Measured on a MacBook Pro with M1 Max.

Why

The image editor you reach for, minus everything you don't.

Most image work comes down to the same handful of things. Lamina is built for exactly those.

Why Lamina

Retouch a photo, cut something out, put a few layers together, add some text, export. That is most of what I open an image editor for, so Lamina keeps those tools, laid out the way you already know, in a native Mac app under 50 MB.

Projects are plain folders of PNG layers and a manifest, so nothing is locked in, and AI agents can work on them too. Vector layers are next.

  • Layers, masks and adjustment layers
  • Camera Raw, brushes, healing and text
  • A familiar layout and shortcuts
  • Plain project folders, no lock-in
  • Agents via the command line or MCP
  • No subscription, no account

Javi, author of Lamina

Features

Layers first. Every edit stays editable.

A layout you already know

Tools in a column at the left, the active tool's options above the canvas, and Properties, Adjustments and Layers docked at the right, as in Photoshop, Affinity and similar editors. Commands sit where you'd look, under the names you'd look for: Free Transform on ⌘T, Levels in Image › Adjustments, Liquify in Filter.

Properties shows whatever is selected, from a layer's size and alignment to a type layer's character settings. It's drawn with native Mac controls, in light and dark.

The Lamina window in dark appearance: a sunset composition with its text title selected by the Move tool, the toolbar at the left, the Move tool's options bar above the canvas, Properties showing the type layer's transform and character settings, and the Layers panel with a Curves adjustment, a group holding the text layer, a masked lake, hills and a sun with an outer glow.

Develop photos with Camera Raw

Light, color, curves, the color mixer, three-way color grading, detail, optics and geometry, in a panel beside the canvas with a live histogram. Each section resets from its header, and settings save as named presets.

Camera RAW files open with a develop step first, and JPEG, HEIC, WebP, TIFF, SVG and Photoshop PSD and PSB files import with their layers.

The Camera Raw Filter beside the canvas in dark appearance, with its histogram, Light and Color sliders and color grading wheels, applied to the sky layer.

Adjustments that stay adjustable

Curves, Levels, Hue/Saturation, Exposure, Gradient Map, Black & White, Color Balance, blurs and noise as adjustment layers, one click away in the Adjustments panel. Change them any time in Properties, mask them, clip them to a layer or tone them down with opacity and blend modes.

Layer styles work the same way: stroke, shadows, glows and color overlay in one Layer Style dialog, drawn on the GPU and editable whenever you like.

Lamina in light appearance with the Warm grade Curves adjustment layer selected, its curve shown in the Properties panel above the Layers panel.

Ready for agents

The lamina command-line tool drives the running app: list projects and layers, apply filters and adjustment layers, export and render previews, each edit one undo step. lamina mcp offers the same commands to Claude, Codex and other MCP hosts.

Or let an agent write a .lam project directly: it's a folder of PNG layers and a manifest, and the open canvas updates as the files change. 

lamina list-documents
lamina add-adjustment-layer --document 3f2a \
  --kind exposure --settings exposure=0.5
lamina export-document --document 3f2a \
  --output ~/Desktop/poster.jpg

claude mcp add lamina -- \
  /Applications/Lamina.app/Contents/Helpers/lamina mcp

Details

And the small things that add up.

  • Selections that think

    Marquees, lassos, Object Selection and the Magic Wand, Select Subject and Color Range, and Content-Aware Fill that can also extend an image past its edges.

  • Paint and retouch

    Brush and Eraser with flow and pen pressure, Dodge and Burn, Blur and Smudge, Spot Healing, Clone Stamp, Gradient and Paint Bucket, on pixels or masks, and Liquify.

  • Live text

    Paragraph boxes edited right on the canvas, with per-letter colors and faces, that stay editable through transforms and masks.

  • Non-destructive transforms

    Move, scale, rotate, flip and distort without losing resolution, with snapping, rulers, guides, a layout grid, and layer locks to keep what's done in place.

  • Export anything

    Quick Export as PNG, or Export As… to PNG, JPEG, HEIC, AVIF, WebP, TIFF and PDF with a preview, plus Copy Merged and tabs for several projects at once.

  • Native and light

    SwiftUI, AppKit and Metal in light and dark, App Sandboxed, History for every step, and familiar shortcuts you can remap. All under 50 MB.

Get it

Download Lamina.

A disk image for macOS 26 on Apple silicon, signed and notarized by Apple. Updates arrive inside the app, and every release lists SHA-256 checksums.

Download Lamina

Or build it yourself with Xcode 26: make install builds the app and copies it to /Applications. 

git clone https://github.com/itsjavi/lamina.git
cd lamina
make install