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Develop basics

The Develop module is where you edit a photo — tone and colour, cropping, retouching and local adjustments. Every edit is non-destructive: your original file is never changed, and you can undo or reset at any time.

Opening Develop

Select a photo and press D, or click Develop in the module bar (⌥⌘3). The photo fills the canvas in the centre, with a tool strip and adjustment panels down the right and the filmstrip along the bottom for moving between photos.

Basic adjustments

The Basic panel is where most edits happen:

  • White balance — Temperature and Tint, or click the eyedropper and then a neutral grey in the photo to set it automatically.
  • Tone — Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites and Blacks.
  • Presence — Texture, Clarity and Dehaze.
  • Colour — Vibrance and Saturation.

Double-click any slider to reset it to its default.

The other panels

  • Tone Curve — precise control over the tonal range with a curve.
  • HSL / Colour — adjust the hue, saturation and luminance of individual colour ranges.
  • Detail — sharpening and noise reduction.
  • Lens Corrections — correct distortion and other lens characteristics.
  • AI — on-device Denoise and Super Resolution. See AI tools.

Scopes

At the top of the right panel is a switcher between three scopes — the histogram (tonal distribution, with highlight and shadow clipping warnings), the vectorscope (colour balance and skin tone) and the RGB parade (per-channel exposure and white balance). See Scopes for how to read each one.

The tool strip

Above the panels sits a row of tools that work directly on the image:

  • Crop & Rotate (R) — recompose, straighten and set an aspect ratio.
  • White Balance eyedropper — sample a neutral tone to set white balance.
  • Red Eye Removal — fix red-eye from flash.
  • Spot Removal — remove dust and blemishes, in Heal (blends with the surroundings) or Clone (copies from another spot) mode.
  • Masking — paint a brush mask, or use a linear or radial gradient, to apply adjustments to just part of the photo.

Copying edits & history

To apply one photo's look to others, use Photo ▸ Develop Settings ▸ Copy Settings… (⇧⌘C), then Paste Settings (⇧⌘V) across a selection. The History panel lists every change you've made and lets you step back to any earlier state. Nothing is ever baked into your original — Reset returns the photo to how it was imported.

Virtual copies

Want to try a different treatment without losing the first? Create a virtual copy and edit that — it shares the original file but keeps its own edits, at no extra disk cost.