Lightroom Classic
Kovex Rawify
Same photograph. Same subject mask. Drag to compare.
Lightroom stops at the bird's outline — every breast plume is left behind.
A serious RAW editor for wildlife and wedding photographers. Works on a laptop in a hide with no signal. No subscription, no account, no cloud — your photographs stay on your disk and nothing is ever uploaded.
Perpetual licence · Three computers · Free updates within v1
Lightroom Classic
Kovex Rawify
Same photograph. Same subject mask. Drag to compare.
Lightroom stops at the bird's outline — every breast plume is left behind.
Not a feature list. The things that change how a week of editing feels.
A hide with no signal. A hotel with hotel wifi. A plane. Kovex Rawify never asks the internet for permission — cull, edit and export a whole shoot on a laptop that has been offline for a fortnight.
No account, no sync, no telemetry. Your photographs, your catalogue and your edits sit in your own folders on your own disk. Client work stays client work.
There is no subscription to lapse and no card on file to expire. Buy it once and it is yours — which also means your back catalogue stays openable, however long you leave it.
Around 2 GB of memory in normal editing. Adobe ask for 8 GB minimum and recommend 16, and their own forums are full of Lightroom Classic climbing past 30. You do not need a new machine for this one.
measured: 2.2 GB peak, full sessionThe masking exists because a heron's breast plumes would not select. The denoisers exist because ISO 12800 is normal at dawn. It is aimed at the photographs that are actually hard.
Desktop, laptop, and the machine in the office. Move a seat between them yourself whenever you like — no email to support, no waiting.
Built to be understood while you use them.
Subject, sky, background, object, brush, linear, radial, sun, a typed description — and Long Fur & Feather, for edges made of hair.
Add, subtract or intersect any of them. Every step stays separate afterwards: click one to bring its handles back, move it, or remove it, and the mask rebuilds around what is left.
And the whole editor works inside a mask — forty-four adjustments, including all three denoisers, chosen per mask. Run detail-preserving denoise on a bird at full strength and leave the background grain exactly as it was.
Every other editor gives you a histogram to read and sliders to move. Here they are the same thing: the plot is divided into blacks, shadows, exposure, highlights and whites, and dragging a region moves that control directly.
You look at the part of the curve you want to change and change it there — instead of reading a shape, working out which of five sliders governs it, and looking away to find it.
Underneath: eight colour bands drawn in the colours they move between, and a sharpness score for the frame.
Push contrast, shadows, highlights or exposure to their limits and a colour stays the colour it was. Most pipelines slide reds toward orange and blues toward purple as you work them, and you only notice once the photograph is finished.
The whole path runs in 32-bit floating point, end to end. Nothing quantises your photograph on the way through, so a blown wing still has detail to recover at the far end.
measured: 0.00° hue drift across every tone control
Place a watermark anywhere, at any size, turned to any angle — on one photograph or five hundred. 150 presets to start from, saved looks of your own, and presets that can be applied to a single mask rather than the whole frame.
Focus stacking, HDR merge and panorama stitching happen in the same window. No round trip to another program and back with a file that has lost half its latitude.
Lightroom and Capture One are fine programs. These are the places where this one is a different proposition.
| Kovex Rawify | Lightroom Classic | Capture One | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | $100 once | From $120/year | $299 or $180/year |
| Edit on a plane with no wifi | ✓ Always | Until it wants a check-in | Until it wants a check-in |
| Account required | ✓ None | Adobe ID | Capture One ID |
| Anything uploaded about your work | ✓ Nothing, ever | Account, sync, usage data | Account, usage data |
| Memory while editing | 2.2 GB measured | 8 GB min, 16 recommended | 8 GB min, 16 recommended |
| Masking hair and plumage | ✓ Dedicated mode | General subject | General subject |
| Adjustments inside a mask | 44, including all three denoisers | A subset | A subset |
| Computers per licence | 3 | 2 | 3 |
| If you stop paying | ✓ Keeps working | Stops | Perpetual option |
Competitor pricing and terms as published at the time of writing.
No renewal, no tier, nothing that expires.
Kovex Rawify v1 · Windows
Roughly what a subscription costs for ten months. Except it does not stop.
Install it on three machines at once — a desktop, a laptop, and whatever is in the office. If you replace one, release its seat from inside the app and use it somewhere else. No email to support, no waiting for someone to reset it.
Nothing. There is no renewal date, no card on file, and no way for the software to stop working because something expired. Photographs you edited five years ago open exactly as they did.
Every release in version 1, free, for as long as we publish them. Version 2 will be a separate purchase when it arrives — $50 if you already own v1 — and your v1 licence carries on working whether or not you take it.
Photographs you edit are yours. We claim no rights over your images and take no cut of what you sell. Wedding work, client delivery, prints, stock — the licence is the same one.
The one moment the software needs the internet: entering your key. After that it works with the network unplugged, forever. Nothing about your photographs is sent, then or ever.
Fourteen days, full refund, no questions asked. Buying software from someone you have not heard of is a risk, and that risk should be ours rather than yours.