Where you edit a photo. This page is the reference for every tool and panel; for a start-to-finish first edit, see Develop basics.
Open Develop by pressing D on a selected photo, or (⌥⌘3). The layout has the image on a central canvas, a tool strip above it, the scopes and adjustment right panel on the right, and the filmstrip along the bottom for moving between photos.
Editing is fully non-destructive: your original file is never changed, and every adjustment is stored in the catalogue. All edits are gated by an active licence — see Licensing.
Click the image to zoom to 100% and drag to pan; click again to fit. The canvas fits the photo automatically when you enter and when you move to another frame. Press V to toggle a quick black-and-white preview (desaturate) without changing your settings.
Above the canvas are the local tools. Selecting one changes what a click on the image does; click the tool again (or press its key) to put it away and return to global adjustments.
In crop mode, drag the edge and corner handles to reframe, drag just outside a corner to rotate/straighten, and use the aspect-ratio control to lock a ratio. Flip horizontally or vertically from . Your crop is applied when you leave crop mode.
The core tone and colour controls: white balance (Temp / Tint, with an eyedropper and an Auto button beside it), Exposure, Contrast, and the tone sliders Highlights, Shadows, Whites and Blacks, plus Saturation and vibrance. The tone sliders are tuned to keep skin tones neutral as you recover highlights and lift shadows.
A parametric and point tone curve for precise contrast shaping, with per-channel red/green/blue curves for colour work.
Adjust Hue, Saturation and Luminance for eight colour bands independently — for example deepening a blue sky without touching skin.
Sharpening and noise reduction controls. For heavy noise, the AI Denoise tool in the AI panel does more than the classic slider.
Manual correction of geometric distortion and vignetting.
Automatic per-lens profile corrections (keyed to your camera and lens) are planned — the panel shows a placeholder for them today. The manual controls above work now.
Creative finishing, each with its own on/off toggle: Grain (film grain), Glow (a soft highlight bloom) and Halation (a warm-tinted highlight halo, à la film).
On-device AI tools: Denoise, Super Resolution (Enhance) and Lens Blur. Each runs entirely on your Mac and downloads its model once on first use. Full detail, including the AI Select masking tool, is on the AI tools page.
Convert a scanned film negative to a positive: turn on Convert, then use the film-base eyedropper (or Auto) to sample the orange film base so it's removed and colours land correctly. This panel is hidden by default — turn it on from the panel options menu.
The right-panel sections are drag-to-reorder (grab the grip on a header). The options menu above the stack — and a right-click on any header — gives you Solo Mode (only one panel open at a time), Show / Hide panels, and Reset Panel Order.
Masks let you edit part of a photo. Create a Brush mask by painting, a Radial or Linear gradient, or an AI Select mask — click a subject and the on-device model selects it for you (see AI Select). Once a mask exists, the local sliders affect only the masked area.
The spot tool removes blemishes and sensor dust in two modes: Heal (blends the sampled area into its surroundings) and Clone (copies a source patch exactly). The Red-eye tool fixes red pupils with a click.
The scope area above the panels switches between Histogram, Vectorscope and Parade, and can be popped out into a floating window for a second monitor. Full detail is on the Scopes page.
Every edit is recorded. Step backward and forward with ⌘Z / ⇧⌘Z — which work for sliders, Auto tone and Auto white balance alike — or jump to any earlier state from the History panel on the left.
Copy a photo's develop settings and paste them onto a selection to apply the same look in one step, choosing which groups of settings to carry across. AI Denoise can be pasted across a batch and processes in the background with a progress bar.