NodeMangler

NodeMangler is a free, open-source node-based image editor and procedural texture generator — similar to Substance Designer and Material Maker, but not built on top of a game engine. Written entirely in Rust: small, fast, and native on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Build graphs in the desktop app, or run them headless from the command line — both share the same JSON graph format, so anything you design in the GUI can be automated from scripts, CI, or LLM agents.

What's inside

• 440+ nodes across images, numbers, colors, text, curves, and logic — and any pipeline can be packaged into a reusable subgraph node.
• Procedural generation — 47 noise generators (fractal, cellular, structural, grunge, process) plus physical simulations: hydraulic erosion, river meandering, hillslope diffusion.
• PBR materials — normal, AO, curvature, and bevel from height maps, a live 3D material preview, and channel-packed export presets for Godot, Unity, and Unreal.
• Photo editing — camera raw development (CR3, NEF, ARW, DNG and ~20 more), shadows/highlights, 8-band HSL mixer, tone mapping (Reinhard, ACES, filmic), 3-way color grading, Kelvin white balance with a grey-card eyedropper, denoise, and per-channel curves.
• Color — 14 color spaces (sRGB, Lab, Oklab, Oklch, ...) and 17 blend modes.
• Floating-point pipeline — images stay 1-4 channel f32 from input to output; 17 file formats including HEIC read and EXR/HDR write.
• Resolution independent — design at 512px, render at 4K: spatial parameters scale with output size, same result.
• Batch & tethered — sweep a folder of images through a graph, or watch a folder and auto-develop each new photo as it lands.

Free & open source

Licensed MIT or Apache-2.0, at your option. Source code on GitHub — more at nodemangler.com.