NITF · GeoTIFF · SAR
Gigapixel imagery, instantly clear.
Klar is a desktop viewer for NITF and GeoTIFF imagery. Scenes are tiled into a pyramid and decoded across a worker pool, so the image is on screen in moments — and every adjustment you make after that lands in real time, because none of them re-decode a single pixel.
Product screenshot
- 1.24 s → 11 ms
- Fit-view read on a 16 000 px GeoTIFFonce overviews are built
- 16-bit
- Native sample depth carried to the GPUnot truncated to 8
- 1 installer
- Self-contained, GDAL runtime bundlednothing to pre-install
Capabilities
Built for the formats you actually receive
Klar reads real products, not just clean test data — and it does the parts an analyst repeats a hundred times a day without making them wait.
NITF and GeoTIFF, as delivered
Decoding runs through GDAL, including JPEG 2000-compressed NITF, TREs, RPCs and projections. Image support covers Umbra SAR, Maxar ARD and ICEYE products, verified end to end on real Umbra SAR NITF.
Adjustments that never re-decode
Dynamic-range stretch, brightness, contrast, gamma, band-to-RGB mapping and single-band colormaps all run in a fragment shader. Drag a slider and the image responds on the frame — the decoded pixels are never touched.
Native bit depth to the GPU
Tiles are uploaded in their native depth rather than crushed to 8-bit on the way in. The full dynamic range of the sensor stays available to every adjustment you make.
Read the pixels, not an impression
A histogram panel over the visible pixels, automatic dynamic-range adjustment, digital-number readout under the cursor, and a world-coordinate readout you can copy straight out of the viewport.
Open from wherever it lives
Local files, http(s) URLs, or S3 — including on-premises S3 endpoints, with credentials entered in-session and never written to disk.
Loading never costs you the frame
Every open builds its scene on a background thread. The image you are working on stays up and interactive until the new one is ready, and a failed open leaves your session exactly as it was.
How it works
Decode once. Adjust forever.
Most viewers re-run the decode when you touch a slider, which is why they stall on large scenes. Klar splits the two: pixels are decoded once and uploaded at full depth, and every display control after that is a shader parameter.
- 01
Tile
The scene becomes an image pyramid. Only the tiles inside the viewport, at the level matching your zoom, are ever requested.
- 02
Decode
Requested tiles are decoded in parallel on a worker pool, reading reduced resolution directly where the level allows it. An LRU budget keeps residency bounded.
- 03
Upload
Tiles go to GPU memory in their native sample depth, so nothing is quantised away before you have looked at it.
- 04
Adjust
Stretch, brightness, contrast, gamma, band mapping and colormap are evaluated per-pixel in the fragment shader — every frame, at no decode cost.
Deployment
Made for networks that do not reach the internet
Klar is built for classified and disconnected environments, where the tool has to work with no dependency it did not bring with it.
- Runs disconnected
- No account, no licence server to call, no cloud round-trip in the imagery path. Klar opens files from the machine or the network you point it at.
- One self-contained installer
- The Windows installer carries the GDAL runtime with it and registers NITF and TIFF file associations, so the target machine needs nothing pre-installed.
- On-premises object storage
- Point Klar at your own S3-compatible endpoint. Credentials are held for the session only.
- Windows today, Linux and macOS from source
- The packaged installer is Windows. The application itself is cross-platform and builds from source on Linux and macOS.
Get started
See Klar on your own imagery
Email us and we will arrange a walkthrough. If you have a product that has been giving other tools trouble, that is the one we want to open.
Useful things to mention
- The formats and sensors you work with
- Typical scene sizes and bit depth
- Where your current tooling slows you down
- Whether the machines are connected or disconnected
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