Specular

Open source · Version 1.0 · macOS, Windows, Linux

Open a whole shoot, keep the good ones, send them on.

Try it below Platforms

DSC_2207.NEF

Nikon D800 · 7360 × 4912

16 mm · f/4 · 30 s · ISO 1000

Adobe RGB (1998) · Photo by @v2osk on Unsplash

Photo by @v2osk on Unsplash

AMAZYNKCatalogue 2026 — Edition 01

Try it

Cull a shoot right here.

Fourteen real photos, from a 30-second aurora exposure to a 1/1600 s hummingbird. Pick the keepers, then send them to another computer with Zynk.

DSC_4182.NEFPuffin in flight

Pick★★★★★

FitNikon Z 9

Double-click or pinch to zoom, drag to pan.

Specular + Zynk

Picked here. Already there.

Specular has a Send with Zynk command. It hands your picks to the Zynk app on your computer, which sends them to your editing machine, your phone or a friend without a detour through a cloud drive.

Direct. Photos go from this computer to your other device, directly whenever the network allows.
Encrypted. End-to-end encrypted, so nothing in between can read them.
No limits. No cloud upload and no size cap, which matters when every frame is 60 MB of RAW.

Get Zynk

Speed

First pixel, then every pixel.

Specular puts an image on screen before the whole file is decoded. Large images are cut into a tiled pyramid: an overview arrives first, then the full-resolution tiles you are looking at, then the rest.

DJI_0081.DNG · 4823 × 3612

0 / 112 tiles

Move your cursor over the photo to choose which tiles load first.Tap the photo to replay. Shown slowed down.Photo by @tomqtom on Unsplash

01Overview
A small preview is on screen first.
02Tiles where you look
Full-resolution tiles decode nearest your view.
03Everything else
The rest fills in while you are already looking.

130ms

from launch to a 24-megapixel JPEG on screen, median of cold starts

66fps

panning a 200-megapixel JPEG at 100% zoom, with peak memory of 421 MB

22.6ms

to decode a 61-megapixel lossless Sony RAW on the CPU, across all cores

0% CPU

while a still image is on screen

Measured on Linux during 0.1 development, on a laptop with an AMD Radeon 860M. Start-up, panning and idle figures come from a headless session on a machine busy with other work. The RAW decode runs on the CPU alone. macOS and Windows numbers will follow.

Formats

One viewer, every kind of light.

Specular opens over 350 file formats, from phone photos and camera RAW to telescope frames, slide scans, 3D models and maps. Most decoders are written in Rust and ship inside Specular, so there are no codec packs to install.

350+

File formats · 14 categories

A beam of white light passing through a glass prism and spreading into a spectrum

Photos and web

JPEG · PNG / APNG · HEIC / HEIF · AVIF · JPEG XL · WebP · TIFF · GIF · JPEG 2000 · JPEG XR · JPEG XS · JPEG-LS · MPO stereo

Camera RAW

DNG · Canon CR3 / CR2 / CRW · Nikon NEF / NRW · Sony ARW / SR2 / SRF · Fujifilm RAF · Olympus ORF · Panasonic RW2 · Pentax PEF · Leica RWL · Hasselblad 3FR · Phase One IIQ · Sigma X3F · GoPro GPR · ARRI

HDR and film

OpenEXR · Radiance HDR · PFM · DPX · Cineon

Layered and painting

Photoshop PSD / PSB · GIMP XCF · Krita · Procreate · Affinity Photo / Designer / Publisher · Clip Studio · Paint.NET · PaintShop Pro · OpenRaster · Sketch · Figma

Icons, textures and classics

BMP · ICO / CUR · Apple ICNS · DDS · KTX / KTX2 · Valve VTF · ASTC · Basis Universal · QOI · Netpbm · Targa · PCX · Amiga IFF · Mac PICT · SGI · PlayStation TIM · JBIG2

Drawings and CAD

SVG · Illustrator · EPS · DXF · DWG · CorelDRAW · Visio · CGM · EMF / WMF · HP-GL · Gerber · Excellon · KiCad · IPC-2581 · GDSII

3D and point clouds

glTF / GLB · USD / USDZ · FBX · OBJ · STL · PLY · 3MF · COLLADA · 3DS · Blender · SketchUp · Rhino 3DM · STEP · IGES · IFC · LAS / LAZ · E57 · Gaussian splats

Maps and geodata

GeoTIFF · GeoJSON · Shapefile · GeoPackage · KML / KMZ · GPX · OpenStreetMap · MBTiles · PMTiles · FlatGeobuf · GeoParquet · GRIB · SRTM · DTED · ECW · MrSID

Astronomy and space

FITS · fpack · XISF · SER planetary video · VICAR · PDS · ASDF

Microscopy and medical

DICOM · NIfTI · Aperio SVS · Hamamatsu NDPI · MIRAX · OME-TIFF / OME-Zarr · Zeiss CZI / LSM · Nikon ND2 · Leica LIF · Olympus OIR · Imaris · MRC · Gatan DM · NRRD · MINC · FreeSurfer

Medical formats are for viewing only. Specular is not a medical device.

Lab and science data

HDF5 · NetCDF · Zarr · NumPy · MATLAB · CERN ROOT · NeXus · VTK · SEG-Y · mzML · JCAMP-DX · FCS · PDB / mmCIF · FLIR thermal

Documents and archives

PDF · EPUB · Kindle · DjVu · XPS · FictionBook · Word / Excel / PowerPoint · Pages / Numbers / Keynote · OpenDocument · Fonts · ZIP / CBZ · RAR / CBR · 7z / CB7 · TAR (.gz, .bz2, .xz, .zst) · ISO

Office and iWork files show the preview they store.

And audio + video.

Video

MP4 / MOV · MKV / WebM · AVI · MPEG-TS · MPEG-PS / VOB · MXF · WMV / ASF · FLV · 3GP · DV · Ogg · Blackmagic RAW

Codecs include H.264, HEVC, AV1, VP9 and ProRes.

Audio

MP3 · AAC / M4A · FLAC · WAV · AIFF · Opus · Ogg Vorbis · WavPack · Monkey's Audio · Musepack · AC-3 / E-AC-3 · DTS · AMR

Counted from the file types Specular opens, with each format counted once however many extensions it has. A few need a library you install yourself: DWG (ODA File Converter), STEP and IGES (OpenCASCADE), Zeiss CZI (libCZI) and Blackmagic RAW (the Blackmagic RAW SDK).

Keyboard

Made to run from the keyboard.

Press a key, or hover oneTap a key

The common actions are one key.

Default keymap from Specular 1.0. Cull mode adds its keys on top of the viewer's, and you can switch to Vim, Lightroom-style or Photo Mechanic-style presets, or remap anything in keymap.toml. Scroll sideways to see the whole keyboard.

settings.tomlYour own commands

[[commands]]
name = "Edit in GIMP"
program = "gimp"
args = ["{file}"]
key = "Ctrl+Shift+G"
reload = true

Bind any program to a key. Specular starts it directly with the file, without a shell unless you ask for one, and can reload the image when the program exits.

TerminalScriptable

# Open a folder
$ specular ~/Pictures/Trip-2026
# Cull a file list, then print the picks when you close the window
$ find ~/Shoot -name '*.ARW' -print0 \
  | specular -0 --print-marked - > picks.txt
# Drive a window that is already open
$ specular --remote open ~/Shoot/_DSC4182.ARW
# Export RAW files for the web without opening a window
$ specular develop export ~/Shoot/*.ARW \
  --preset web --folder ~/Export

Under the hood

Built like a tool you leave open all day.

wgpu · WGSL

Drawn on the GPU

Images are drawn through wgpu, which talks to Metal on macOS, Vulkan on Linux and Direct3D 12 on Windows.

mmap

Files are mapped, not copied

Anything over 64 KB is memory-mapped, so a 105 MB file is ready to decode in a fraction of a millisecond.

Sandbox

Risky parsers are fenced off

Third-party C and C++ decoders run in a separate locked-down process, so a bad file cannot take the viewer down.

Rust

Unsafe code is denied

The whole codebase denies unsafe code. The few places that need it are listed and justified one by one.

ICC · OCIO

Colour managed

Embedded profiles such as Adobe RGB, ProPhoto and Display P3 are converted for your display.

Private

Quiet by default

There is no account. The update check stays off until you turn it on, and AI models download only when you ask.

On every desktop.

Specular 1.0 is tested on macOS, Windows and Linux. Download links will be posted here.

macOS

One universal build for Apple Silicon and Intel Macs.

.dmg

Tested · draws with Metal

Windows

Windows 10 and 11 on x64, as an installer or a portable folder.

.msiportable .zip

Tested · draws with Direct3D 12

Linux

x86_64 with glibc 2.35 or newer, on X11 or Wayland.

AppImageFlatpak.tar.gz

Tested · draws with Vulkan

Requirements: On x86_64, Specular needs AVX2 (x86-64-v3): most Intel Core processors from Haswell (2013) on, and AMD Zen or newer.
Licence: Specular is free and open source, for personal and commercial use.

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Photos on this page are by Unsplash photographers, credited on each photo.