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What's New

Release notes for Lumidex Studio, newest first. The app updates itself automatically — Help ▸ Check for Updates… forces a check. Purchases include 12 months of updates; the version you own keeps working forever.

1.19.0 LatestAugust 2026

  • Your Lightroom edits, preserved — photos migrated from Lightroom Classic now open in Develop and Loupe looking exactly as they did in Lightroom — the finished edit, not the untouched original. Every kind of adjustment comes through: exposure and tone, colour and white balance, black-and-white conversions, crops and straightening, and object and spot removal. Bring them across from Library ▸ Analyse Photos ▸ Import Develop Settings from Lightroom…, or right-click a photo ▸ Develop Settings ▸ Import from Lightroom…, and point it at your .lrcat catalogue — it's read only, so Lightroom is never touched. Your library keeps the look you spent years building, and any new adjustments you make layer on top of it.
  • Right-click anywhere — the full photo context menu is now available in Loupe view too, not just the grid and filmstrip, so rating, flagging, keywords, stacking and the rest are always one right-click away. The Library menu's batch tools are tidied into Maintenance, Find Duplicates and Analyse Photos submenus.

1.18.2August 2026

  • Recover blown highlights from RAW — a new RAW Latitude switch at the top of Develop's Basic panel. Turn it on for a RAW photo and pull the exposure back to bring detail back into blown skies and highlights that the standard preview had already thrown away. It's opt-in per photo, so your clean shots stay clean and crisp until you actually need the extra range.
  • True RAW white balance — white balance now behaves like a real RAW temperature, anchored to your camera's as-shot Kelvin (shown as a live readout beneath the sliders) rather than a fixed nudge. Warm and cool shifts hold together properly, and the white-balance eyedropper and Auto White Balance both neutralise accurately on RAW files.
  • Find your clipped highlights — a new scan flags every photo with blown highlights: a badge on the grid, a Clipped filter in the toolbar, and a prompt in Develop. Recover a photo and its flag clears automatically, so the filter doubles as a to-do list of shots still to fix. Run it from Library ▸ Scan for Clipped Highlights; new imports are checked automatically.

1.18.1August 2026

  • Import from cloud storage — the Import window now lists your cloud drives — iCloud Drive, Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive — as sources you can browse and import from directly. Photos that live only in the cloud, including iCloud "Optimise Mac Storage" placeholders, are shown and downloaded on demand as they're imported, so nothing is missed just because it isn't on your Mac yet.
  • Fuller local adjustments — the Graduated, Radial, Brush and AI Select masks now include Texture, Dehaze and Vibrance alongside the existing controls, arranged to mirror the Basic panel. Shape a single area — a sky, a face, a background — with the core toolset in full. The mask panel fits its sliders without scrolling.
  • Scrub through your edit history — the History panel gains a movable slider: drag back to any earlier point in a photo's history to see how it looked at that stage. Carry on editing from there and a fresh line of history continues from that point, discarding the states you rolled past — the same way Lightroom's history works.

1.18.0August 2026

  • White balance, fixed properly — Temp and Tint now move the way every other editor does: drag Temp right to warm the image, and +Tint adds magenta. Tint is far less sensitive, so small corrections stay small. The white-balance eyedropper now sets an absolute balance — clicking a neutral tone always lands the same result and no longer stacks on top of Auto White Balance.
  • Sharp and clean at 100% on RAW — zooming in to inspect a RAW file now stays clean instead of revealing raw sensor grain; the full-resolution view uses the camera's own image, so pixel-peeping looks right.
  • Live histogram — the Develop histogram now updates continuously while you drag a slider, instead of only when you let go, so setting a precise black or white point is much easier. It also reads more clearly, with a log scale that keeps the whole distribution visible and cleanly blended colour channels.
  • Tone curve handles — the black-point and white-point handles are now always visible and draggable on the Develop tone curve.
  • Grading module polish — the colour plot now matches a broadcast vectorscope (skin tones sit around 11 o'clock), and the panel is sized to match the rest of the app.

1.17.1August 2026

  • Full-resolution zoom in Develop — zoom past 100% and Develop now shows true full-resolution detail decoded straight from the RAW or DNG for the part of the frame you're viewing, instead of upscaling the fast preview. Pixel-level inspection is genuinely sharp — a noticeable difference for DNG libraries — while everyday editing stays fast.
  • Navigator zoom works in Develop — the Navigator's zoom presets and percentage readout now drive the Develop canvas (they previously only controlled the Library loupe), and the readout tracks pinch-zoom.

1.17.0August 2026

  • Colour Grading module — a dedicated grading workspace (⌥G): balance shadows, midtones and highlights on colour wheels, drag pins on a hue/chroma plot to retarget specific colours, match the look of a reference image, or mix a black-and-white conversion. A tonecaliper-style toolset that reaches well past Lightroom's Color Grading panel.
  • Photo Merge — Focus Stacking & HDR — combine a focus-bracketed set into a single fully-sharp frame, or blend an exposure bracket into one natural-looking HDR, entirely on-device. The merged photo is catalogued and stacked with its originals.
  • Much stronger AI Denoise — the on-device denoiser now genuinely cleans high-ISO noise all the way through to full export resolution, with an Amount slider so you can dial in exactly how much smoothing you want and keep skin and fine detail looking natural.
  • AI keywords in the sidebar — the descriptive tags the on-device auto-tagger finds now appear as a dimmed, searchable section beneath your own keywords (View ▸ Show AI Keywords), with a tighter, more reliable tagging pass.

1.10.0August 2026

  • HEIC export — export finished photos as HEIC in 8- or 10-bit, using Apple's native encoder, so the photos you share stop devouring storage the way high-quality JPEG does. It reuses the whole export pipeline — quality, colour space, resize, rename and metadata all carry across.
  • Export straight to Apple Photos — a new Export To choice at the top of the Export dialog sends your exports directly into the Photos app, leaving no stray files on disk, with an option to open Photos when it finishes.

1.9.0August 2026

  • RAW + JPEG pairs — shoot RAW+JPEG and Lumidex keeps the two files together as a single photo, with a per-picture switch (⇧⌘J, or right-click) to choose which one you browse, edit and export from. Rate, flag, colour, keyword or add a pair to a collection once and it applies to both. Nothing in Lightroom or Lightroom Classic offers a per-picture RAW/JPEG switch — an Aperture-style workflow especially loved by Fujifilm film-recipe shooters. Pair up shots already in your library with Library ▸ Find RAW + JPEG Pairs.

1.8.1July 2026

  • Scope refinements — a rotatable sampler region, a matte that blacks out everything but the sampled area, a smoother vectorscope, and tear-off drag to pop the scopes into a floating window.
  • Import — Locked / Protected filter — scope the import browser to only the in-camera protected files (or only the unprotected ones), with lock badges.
  • Jump to folder after import — an optional preference to jump straight to the destination folder when an import finishes.

1.8.0July 2026

  • Pop-out scopes — tear the Histogram / Vectorscope / Parade off into a resizable floating window, ideal on a second monitor.
  • Sampler region — restrict the scopes to a movable, resizable region of the image for skin-tone and white-balance checks.
  • Filmic grain — luminance-responsive grain applied over the whole edit, strongest in the midtones rather than a flat overlay.
  • Per-panel Develop switches — toggle Basic / Tone Curve / HSL / Detail / Lens / Effects on and off for one-click A/B.

1.6.0July 2026

  • Develop scopes — the histogram area now switches between three scopes: the Histogram, a Vectorscope (colour balance and skin-tone reference line) and an RGB Parade (per-channel exposure and white balance). A genuine Lightroom gap — Adobe's plug-ins can't reach pixel data, so no third party could add a real vectorscope. See Scopes.
  • In-app Help — the Help menu now opens hosted documentation for every module, plus this release-notes page.

1.5.0July 2026

  • Focus-point overlay in the Loupe — see exactly which AF point the camera used, over the image (View ▸ Show Focus Points).
  • Assisted culling — surfaces the sharpest frame in a burst and flags soft shots.
  • Library maintenance tools — Find All Missing Photos, Validate DNG Files, and Build Standard Previews, each with a background progress bar.

1.4.0July 2026

  • Lens Blur — on-device AI depth-of-field: an estimated depth map drives a synthetic background blur with tap-to-focus. See AI tools.

1.3.0July 2026

  • Super Resolution — on-device AI upscaling at 2× and 4× (or a custom long-edge size), producing a new stacked photo. See AI tools.
  • AI Select masking — click a subject and an on-device model (SAM 2.1) selects it for a local adjustment, snapping to the real edges — no manual brushing.

1.2.0July 2026

  • AI Denoise — on-device noise reduction in the Develop AI panel, copyable and pasteable across a selection as a batch.

1.1.0July 2026

  • Natural-language search — describe what you remember ("yellow guitar", "red door") and find matching photos across the whole catalogue, entirely on-device.

1.0.0July 2026

  • First release. Import from Lightroom Classic, a familiar Library, non-destructive Develop, tethered Capture, Export and Print — a direct-download app you buy once and own forever.