Develop controls

Develop (d) shows one photo with the development panel beside it. ⇧D hides and shows the panel. This page is about the panel itself; the choice between its two engines is in The two engines.

The panel has a header and five tabs.

• The header carries the photo’s name and four small buttons: detach the panel into a window of its own (and dock it back), a clipping warning, a caption overlay on the photo, and close.
• Dev: the engine and its controls. Most of this page.
• Crop, Presets, Editorial and Export are the other four tabs. Editorial holds the photo’s caption and tags, and is covered in Stories; Export is in Export.

Nothing here is ever written into the original. Every change is saved per photo, and takes effect as you make it.

Reading the photo

At the top of the Dev tab sits a small scope. Click it to cycle through five views: an RGB histogram, a luminance histogram, a luma waveform, an RGB parade and a vectorscope. The histograms live in a thin strip; the waveform views grow to the room they need.

The clipping warning (the half-circle button, in the header) marks the parts of the photo that are blown out or crushed, so you can see them without reading a histogram.

Photo Size is how large the photo sits in the canvas, from 40% to 200% (75% by default). It changes what you see, not the photo.

Sliders

Every engine control is one of a few kinds, and they all behave the same way.

• Drag a slider to change it; the photo follows.
• Reset one control by double-clicking its name, or by focusing the name and pressing Enter or Space. It returns to the engine’s default.
• Reset all with the Reset button at the bottom of the tab, which puts the photo’s whole recipe back to its default, not just the controls on screen.
• Menus, such as the film and the paper, and switches, such as Auto exposure, sit among the sliders and work as you would expect.
• Related controls are folded into groups that open and close.

A few controls are shaped for their job instead of being plain sliders:

• Color Mixer (Rapid) is eight colours with three sliders. Pick a colour, then adjust its hue, saturation and luminance.
• Zones (Rapid): above the controls, Global, Ombres, Moyens and Lumières are four layers carrying the same adjustments. Global applies to the whole photo; each zone is a luminosity mask (the darks, the mid-tones or the lights) with its own full set of sliders, tone curves and colour mixer, applied on top of the global result. A zone you have not touched costs nothing to render. Only the stages that belong to the whole image (input encoding, the AgX look, LUT stacks, vignette and grain) stay global.
• LUT stacks and the tone curve are described below.

The curve

Rapid has a tone curve with four channels: Luma, Red, Green and Blue.

• Press on the line to add a point; keep dragging to place it. Adding and placing is one gesture.
• Drag a point to move it.
• Double-click a point to remove it.
• Reset returns a channel to a flat line.

Crop

The Crop tab has three parts.

• Proportions: Original, Free, 1:1 Square, 3:2, 4:3 and 16:9. Reset clears the crop.
• Straighten: straightens the horizon, from −45° to 45° in half-degree steps. 0° resets it.
• Orientation & Mirror: flips the photo horizontally or vertically.

While the Crop tab is open, the photo shows its crop frame and a grid.

Presets

A preset is a saved set of development settings.

• Save current stores the photo’s settings under a name.
• Click a preset to apply it to the current photo; ⌥-click applies it to the whole selection. Resting the pointer on a preset previews it on the photo before you commit.
• The star on a preset makes it the one applied to every photo as it is imported. Click it again to unset.
• Import .xmp presets… brings in presets saved as .xmp files. Reveal tells you which settings it could not carry over, since not every setting has an equivalent here.

LUTs

A LUT is a colour lookup table, a .cube file. Rapid applies LUTs in two stacks: Pre-Lut, before the grade, and Post-Lut, after it. Each stack is a list of layers; every layer has a LUT and an Opacity, so a LUT can be mixed in rather than all or nothing.

Only 3D .cube files work; a 1D file is rejected. LUTs come from the folder you set in Settings, plus the ones Reveal ships. Spektra does not use LUTs: its film and paper are the grade.