Aegis Photo Atelier | Local AI Photo Editing

The Workbench

You load a small set of photos, work on one at a time, step backwards and forwards through your edits freely, and write out a finished file when you are happy. The window is four panels, each of which you can show or hide.

Working Set

The handful of photos loaded into this session — not your whole library. Click a thumbnail to make it active. The set is restored when you reopen the app, so an interrupted session picks up where it left off.

Live View

The active photo with zoom, pan and fit controls, live previews while you drag a slider, and a before/after toggle on the \ key. A status line tells you the current dimensions and how many edits deep you are.

Workbench Tools

Six searchable tool palettes, the settings for whichever tool you are using, Undo, Redo and the full History list. Press Ctrl+F to search every palette at once.

AI Assistant

A chat panel that drives the same tools you would have clicked. Hidden until you switch it on under View.

Your Original Is Never Touched

Every edit is written to a working copy in a scratch folder. The file you imported stays exactly as it was on disk unless you deliberately commit or export over it.

History You Can Walk Back

History is kept per photo, so switching between thumbnails brings each undo stack with you. Click any entry to jump straight back to that point — including the untouched original.

Twenty-Nine Tools, Six Palettes

Darkroom

Exposure in stops with contrast, highlights, shadows, whites and blacks. White balance with grey-point picking. An eight-band HSL tuner you can drag directly over the image. Tone curve with per-channel editing and presets. Edge-aware sharpening with masking. Resize.

Workshop

Magic Eraser paints out an unwanted object. Privacy Blur obscures faces, text and number plates, with AI-assisted detection to find them for you. Neural De-noise separates luminance and colour noise. Sky Replace swaps a flat sky with automatic horizon detection.

Lens Kit

Rotate and flip. Crop & Level with aspect presets or exact coordinates. Smart Crop, where the vision model proposes framings and explains its reasoning. Perspective Fix for converging verticals. Lens Profile for distortion, vignetting and colour fringing.

AI Generate

Four generative tools powered by FLUX.2 Klein running on your own graphics card: Inpaint, Composite, Style Match and Text Edit. They need an NVIDIA GPU; everything else in the app does not.

Files and Formats

Save As to JPEG, JPEG XL, PNG, WebP, HEIC, HEIF, AVIF or TIFF, one photo or the whole working set at once. Text watermarks in nine positions. A metadata editor for title, artist, copyright and rating. Library Search pulls photos straight out of Aegis Photo Voyager.

Analysis

Describe, Quality and Composition ask a local vision model to read the photo and report back, drawing grids, subject boxes and leading lines over the preview. Meta Data shows file properties, EXIF, GPS and the photo's Voyager record. None of them change a pixel.

Tell It What You Want

Plain Language, Real Tools

"Make this warmer." "Lift the shadows without blowing the highlights." "Blur every face." The assistant maps everyday wording onto the actual controls and applies them.

Its Edits Are Ordinary Edits

Anything the assistant does goes through the same machinery as a button click. It lands in your History, Undo reverses it, and you can simply ask it to undo its own work.

Three Declared Modes

Every reply states which route it took — precision tools, generative AI, or the vision model answering in words. When it picks wrong, force the choice with a Technical Edit: or AI Vision: prefix.

It Can Look, Too

"What's in this photo?" "Is this sharp enough to print?" "Show me where the faces are." It answers in words and can draw its findings over the live preview.

Across the Working Set

"Switch to the beach one." "Apply that same exposure to all of them." "Find photos of Elena from last summer" searches your Voyager library and loads the matches.

Your Model, Your Server

It talks to Ollama or LM Studio running on your own machine. You choose the multimodal model, and you can edit the analysis prompt it uses.

Generative Editing, Locally

Where Magic Eraser patches a hole with material borrowed from nearby, the AI Generate tools invent new pixels from a description you write. The model is FLUX.2 Klein, and it runs on your graphics card — not on someone else's server.

AI Inpaint

Mask an area and describe what should be there instead. Strength controls how completely the masked pixels are rewritten.

AI Composite

Build one image from several, referring to your reference photos by number: "place the person from image 1 on the beach in image 2".

AI Style Match

Borrow another photo's colour grading, grain, contrast and lighting while your own composition stays put.

AI Text Edit

Replace the wording on a sign, storefront or label, with a font-style hint to match the lettering already there.

What It Needs

An NVIDIA GPU with CUDA — there is no CPU fallback. Roughly 6 GB of video memory for the 4B model, 10 GB for the 9B. Weights download once and are cached. Without a supported card these four tools simply stay unavailable and nothing else is affected.

Use It Honestly

These tools produce photorealistic content of things that never happened. The FLUX.2 models carry their own licences from Black Forest Labs, and the 9B variant is non-commercial. Say so when it matters.

Where Your Photos Go

Nowhere

Editing, vision analysis and generative work all execute on your own hardware. Your photos and your edit history are never uploaded, synced or transmitted.

One Exception, Stated Plainly

Voice dictation in the AI Assistant sends the eight-second recording to an online speech service to be transcribed. It is Linux-only, entirely optional, and the only feature that leaves your machine.

No Telemetry

No analytics, no usage reporting, no account. Settings and working files live in your own home directory where you can inspect or delete them.

Pairs With Aegis Photo Voyager

One Library, One Darkroom

Voyager manages the library; Atelier perfects the individual photo. Library Search queries your Voyager catalog by scene description, person or date range and drops the matches straight into the Working Set, and the Meta Data tool shows a photo's Voyager record alongside its EXIF. Neither app requires the other — but together they cover the whole workflow.

Explore Photo Voyager

Get the Beta

Aegis Photo Atelier is in Beta and free to download while it is. We are looking for feedback from photographers and enthusiasts who will put it to real work.

On Linux you can install it in one command:

sudo snap install aegisphotoatelier

LINUX

Snap or Debian

On the Snap Store for all major distributions, or as a standalone .deb for Debian and Ubuntu.

Download for Linux

MACOS

Apple Silicon / Intel

A native DMG installer for macOS.

Download Apple

WINDOWS

Windows 10 / 11

A standard .exe installer for Windows desktops.

Download Windows

Note on licensing: Aegis Photo Atelier is free to download during the Beta and no license purchase is available or required yet. The software is proprietary and licensed, not sold; the full License and Terms are included in the application under Help → License and Terms. The AI models you run with it are licensed separately by their own authors.