HEELER / PHOTO EDITING FOR YOUR DESKTOP

The whole scene is yours to shape.

Heeler brings familiar adjustments and a full node graph together, so you can shape the light, depth, and color in every frame. Built for photographers on macOS, Windows, and Linux.

Download Heeler View the source

Free and open source. No account, no purchase. Your photographs and edits stay on your machine.

Fetching your pictures

Heeler's editing window with a lightning photograph in the viewport, a thumbnail library on the left, and exposure controls on the right. — A familiar layout. Room to explore.

FreeEvery feature, no account or cloud

Open sourceUnder the Mozilla Public License

Edit locallyYour photos stay on your machine

TWO WAYS INTO THE SAME EDIT

Start with sliders. Follow the graph.

Develop is the linear workflow: sliders, top to bottom, the way you expect. Underneath, every section you touch is a node. The Canvas shows the graph under the hood, drawn over the photograph, and lets you build on it.

The Develop workspace: Exposure, Color, Detail, Color Wheels and Vignette set with sliders on a photograph of Devils Tower. — **Develop**An edit made with sliders: Exposure, Color, Detail, Color Wheels and Vignette.

The Canvas workspace: the same edit as nodes over the photograph, with two masks branching off to steer Detail and Color Balance. — **Canvas**The same edit as nodes, grown into what sliders cannot do: a Luminance Mask keeping Detail to the bright rock and a Hue Range Mask keeping Color Balance to the sky.

NOT ANOTHER COPY OF THE EDITOR YOU KNOW

The sliders are a graph you can open.

Every edit in Heeler is a node, from the RAW decode to the export. Open the graph at any time to see exactly what runs, in what order, and rewire it: add a node anywhere, route a mask into any adjustment, blend in a second photograph, or save a piece of the graph as a recipe you reuse.

Recipes like Sharpening and Skin Softening are not sealed effects. They are groups of ordinary nodes you can open and change.

Explore the graph

The Graph workspace: two masks steer a Detail and a Color Grade, and the inspector shows the selected node's controls.

DEPTH-AWARE EDITING

It knows how far away everything is.

Heeler estimates a depth map for any photograph, with a model that runs on your own computer. Depth Lighting relights the scene with lights you place on it, Fog thickens into the distance, Depth of Field blurs by distance, and any adjustment layer can be limited by depth. Rendering from a 3D package? A Z or mist pass in an OpenEXR becomes the depth map, exact to the pixel.

See how each scene is set up

A woodland path with a wooden Narnia sign and hanging lantern, before the depth-based variations shown here. — 01 / THE SCENEStart with the photograph.

Grayscale depth map of the same woodland scene, with the sign and lantern separated from the distant trees. — 02 / DEPTH MAPFind the distance in the frame.

The same woodland photograph with the Narnia sign and lantern sharp and the background trees softened by depth of field. — 03 / REFOCUSShift attention after the shot.

The same woodland photograph with the foreground sign and lantern in color and distant trees largely desaturated by a depth-aware recolor edit. — 04 / RECOLORGrade foreground and distance apart.

Devils Tower, its depth map, and the same frame relit by a low warm sun raking across the columns. — **Depth Lighting**A low warm sun added after the shot, landing on the columns by their relief.

Badlands ridges, their depth map, and fog that leaves the near ridges clear and thickens into the distance. — **Fog**Clear on the near ridges, thickening ridge by ridge into the distance.

A red hill behind cottonwoods, its depth map, and the trees held sharp while the hill and the grass fall off by distance. — **Depth of Field**The cottonwoods sharp, the hill behind and the grass in front falling off by distance.

BLACK AND WHITE

From the film and the filter.

The black and white treatment works the way a darkroom does: a film stock's curve, a Wratten filter in front of it, a second filter for the far end of the depth map, and true infrared stocks, where foliage glows and skies go dark. The Zone System is built in: place a shadow on Zone III, then develop for the highlights.

Explore black and white

COLOR

Color tools that route, not just push.

Recolor routes one color component into another with curves, including a curve that reads the depth map. Relight reshapes the light across the tonal range with an edge-aware curve. Color Sets pick a range of color off the photograph and grade it on its own, and Color Checker calibrates the camera from a photographed chart.

Explore Recolor

Recolor routing hue into saturation, with the Neutral guard strip and the photograph's own colors drawn behind the curve.

ROOM FOR THE FULL WORKFLOW

From first look to final export.

Many photographs into one

Merge brackets to HDR, average a sequence into a long exposure, remove what moved, build star trails, and stitch panoramas, from a handful of frames to thousands.

Layers and masks

Adjustment layers in Develop and a Finish stack for retouching and compositing, with brushes, smart selections and a depth mask on any layer.

Takes

Keep versions of an edit side by side, with notes and ratings, so a new idea never has to erase the first one.

Scripting and batch

A built-in Python console and a local scripting API drive the whole app, and a headless batch mode runs scripts with no window at all.

Private by design

The models behind depth, subject and sky selection and denoising run on your machine. No account, no subscription, no cloud.

Broad RAW support

RAW files from most cameras and phones, and export to JPEG, WebP, PNG, TIFF, EXR and DNG, with Bake to Image freezing any result into a new DNG.

YOUR PHOTOGRAPHS, YOUR PACE

Free, all of it.

Every feature is in every build: no time limit, watermark, resolution cap or upgrade. Heeler is open source under the Mozilla Public License, and if it earns a place in your work, you can support it on Ko-fi.

Download Heeler Support on Ko-fi