What's new in Photo Developer

Turning an adjustment off now sticks

• Switching an adjustment off stays off. Turning an adjustment off, or resetting a panel to its default, did not always survive saving and reopening the photograph — the old setting came back. It stays off now.
• A photograph already saved that way will still open with the old setting the first time. Reset it once more and save, and it stays.

Snapshots stay on screen

• Choosing a snapshot keeps it on screen. A snapshot could appear for a moment and then fall back to the current edit. It stays now — and so does a preset preview, including when you zoom to 100%.

Sliders move the picture as you drag

• Sliders move the picture as you drag, instead of catching up when your hand stops. Nothing about your edits changes — only how soon you see them.
• The fit-view preview is rendered at your window’s size, so it is faster on every Mac. On a 4K display at native resolution the fit view reads a touch sharper; at 100% nothing changes.
• Browse presets from the keyboard. In the Preset Manager, the arrow keys move through the grid and each step previews on your photograph as you go; hold a key to scrub through the library. Escape puts the photograph back, Return applies.
• Entering or leaving crop mode no longer stretches the photograph for a moment, and entering it at 100% no longer leaves the cropped frame sitting under the crop box — or the box missing after a pan.

The histogram stays put

• The histogram stays put. It now sits above the adjustment panels instead of scrolling away with them. Press H to fold it down to its title when you want the room back; it opens again every time you launch.
• Bloom and Diffuse Glow reach all the way to the edge of the frame. A rim just inside the border used to get a little less glow than the rest of the photograph, most visibly on skies. It no longer does. If you use either effect, the edges of those photographs will render slightly differently from now on, toward what the rest of the image was already getting — the recipe stays the same; the engine reading it is more careful at the border (see a note on how your edits age).
• Release notes are one click away, under Help.

Ready for macOS 27

• Ready for macOS 27. Photo Developer now keeps every photograph on the RAW decoder your edits were made with, so a macOS update cannot quietly change how your files render. On today’s macOS nothing looks different — and that is the point.

Snapshots stay with their photograph

• Snapshots now stay with the photograph they belong to. Copying develop settings from one photograph and pasting them onto another could replace the second photograph's snapshots with the first one's. It no longer does. Each photograph keeps its own — including the ones Photo Developer records for you automatically when you export.
• Paste Settings to All works the same way, photograph by photograph. Every open photograph takes the copied edits and keeps its own snapshots; one that had none still has none.

The honest baseline

• Your raw files open cleaner than before. Two settings deep in the raw decode were working against Photo Developer; both are corrected. Every photograph benefits, and the noise reduction sliders still start at zero — nothing is hidden below them.
• That zero is the point. Most raw editors open with their own denoising already applied at a strength you cannot inspect. Photo Developer shows you the raw with as little pre-adjustment as possible, and from there every slider tells you the whole truth about what has been done. A high-ISO file may look noisier here on first open than it does elsewhere; in exchange, nothing is hidden.
• Smart Develop now handles noise for you, if you ask it to. Press ⇧⌘D and it sets noise reduction scaled to the photograph's ISO — gently at 800, near the top of its range past 25600 — and puts the values on the sliders where you can change or remove them. It used to decide from how dark a photograph looked rather than how noisy it was, so a high-ISO portrait or landscape got none at all.
• Colour noise is treated more generously than luminance noise, deliberately. Coloured blotching survives the resize down to a screen or a print; fine grain mostly averages away. And smoothing luminance is the half that costs real edge detail.
• A save that could not be completed now says so. If another application had rewritten a photograph's sidecar, Photo Developer could in some cases no longer update it — and gave no warning. Closing it then discarded the edits. It now tells you when a save cannot be completed, keeps the photograph marked unsaved, and asks before closing rather than discarding your work. The specific sidecar shape that brought this to light — one rewritten by another raw editor — now saves normally.
• Coloured fringes on fabric or screens are moire, not noise — a pattern beating against the sensor grid. Its control lives in the Lens panel, and it stays a decision you make by looking: nothing in a photograph's metadata reveals whether the scene contains a repeating pattern.

Because the decode itself changed, photographs edited in earlier versions render slightly differently when reopened. The settings are untouched — the starting point beneath them improved.

The highlights you thought were gone

• Recover Highlights. A blown sky, or a window blazing out of an interior, usually still holds detail in the raw file — the decoder was discarding it before Photo Developer ever saw it. Switch Recover Highlights on and it stays. It is per photograph and off by default: Light panel, top of the tone group, or press I.
• Where it earns its place. Recovery is not automatically better. Shoot into the sun and a blank bright disc is often the photograph you meant to take. It earns its place when the blown area is the subject rather than the light — a bright exterior seen from a shaded room, a white wall in full sun beyond a colonnade.
• Nothing changes until you ask for it. With the switch off, a photograph renders exactly as it did in 1.6 — identical, not approximately.
• Quieter sidecars. Opening and closing a photo without editing it now leaves the sidecar completely untouched, and files written by other applications keep their own formatting.

This is the second half of the highlight work that started in 1.6. 1.6 restored the transition into the highlights; this release gives you back what was inside a clipped one — real sensor data the decoder was discarding, not invention.

The XMP engine, reworked

• What other apps wrote into your sidecar stays where they put it. Saving edits the sidecar in place and leaves everything Photo Developer does not own exactly as it found it — Lightroom's own settings, face regions, keyword hierarchies, drone flight data. The rule is checked with exiftool, not with our own code: a save may differ from the file that went in only by the properties Photo Developer owns.
• Photos from other editors open the way you left them. Photo Developer was reading settings out of presets and history stored inside the file rather than the photo's own values. Photographs that opened in black-and-white now open in colour, and white balance no longer arrives from a preset you never applied.
• Damaged sidecar files are repaired instead of ignored. A sidecar with broken markup used to be unreadable, and everything in it was lost to you. The common kinds of damage are now repaired when the file is opened.
• A save that changes nothing writes nothing — opening a photo and closing it again no longer rewrites the sidecar or touches its modification date.
• The crop readout says what focal length would have framed the crop — cropped from 150mm, same framing as ≈ 225mm. Framing and perspective, not detail and not depth of field.
• Your edit history, where you can see it. First developed, last opened, how many sessions — under the shooting data in the inspector. A photo it has never edited shows nothing at all.

Photos already developed may open differently if they were picking up a setting from a preset stored inside their own file. Your edits are untouched; what changed is where Photo Developer looks for them.

Highlights that stay in the highlights

• Pulling highlights down now moves the highlights, and not everything below them. The Highlights slider used to take a wide band of the upper midtones with it, so bringing a bright sky back flattened the whole top half of the picture. It now works on the bright end only, and lets go well before it reaches middle grey.
• Highlights hold their colour on the way down. The old control pulled the red, green and blue channels separately, which walks a saturated highlight toward grey as you pull — a warm sky came back washed out. It now holds the colour it started with, so a sunrise comes back down as a sunrise.
• And they keep their texture. Cloud structure and fabric detail survive the pull instead of smoothing out as the slider moves.
• The same fix in all three places you can reach for it — the Light panel, the Curves panel and Tone EQ. Each has been rebuilt for its own job rather than sharing one behaviour, because the two you drive most are often driven in opposite directions on the same photo.
• Tone EQ's Highlights no longer crushes the top of the picture into a flat band. At its extreme it used to collapse everything from middle grey to white into a narrow range — the spike you could see at the right-hand end of the histogram. It now compresses the bright end gently and stops well short of the midtones.
• A brighter part of the picture can no longer come out darker than a dimmer one. Every Tone EQ band could invert at strong settings: push a slider far enough and highlights ended up below the tones beneath them. That inversion is gone.
• Lifting now does as much as lowering. Positive Whites, Blacks and Shadows were quietly weaker than their negative directions — the same number on the slider delivered less. They have been re-timed to match, so +30 and −30 are finally the same size of move.
• The adjustment panels take a text size now. Settings → Inspector → Text size, in three steps. The labels and values in the panels can be sized to your screen instead of to a 13-inch laptop, and the panel column widens to match so nothing gets squeezed. It sets the panel text; the macOS controls and the curve and histogram displays keep their standard size.
• Photos you have already developed will look different if they use these controls. Highlights in any panel, Tone EQ, and positive Whites/Blacks/Shadows all render differently — that is the point of the release, since the old behaviour was the fault. Your original files and your saved settings are untouched; only the rendering changes. Worth reopening any edit you care about that leaned on Highlights.
• Some film presets shift, a few noticeably. 34 of the built-in presets touch changed controls. Platinum moves most, and the four Printing Bench presets all re-render. Whether they read as corrected or as changed is a matter of taste — worth a look at any you use regularly.
• What this release does not do: areas that are genuinely blown out — pure white with nothing left in them — stay blown. This release restores the transition into the highlights, not the detail inside a clipped one. That is the next piece of work.

Film frames, warmer edges, and repairs that read as skin

• Repairs that leave skin looking like skin. Healing now looks for a patch that genuinely matches the spot it is fixing — brightness, colour and texture together — and rejects one carrying a blemish of its own. Moles, dust and specks come out without the pale smudge or the transplanted freckle a repair could sometimes leave. Spots you have already placed keep their exact source, so older edits open unchanged.
• Retouched photos keep up. A photo carrying dozens of repairs redraws around ten times faster; adding another spot or reaching for a slider no longer means waiting for the picture. Placing a new spot takes a beat longer, because the source search now does more work up front.
• A warmer edge. The lightening vignette fades corners to a soft, warm cream rather than a flat, cold grey — the aged edge of a print. Existing edits that use a lightening vignette come back warmer and more corner-weighted; darkening vignettes are unchanged.
• Export your photo inside a film frame. Three styles, drawn at export time: Negative Carrier (35mm colour negative, sprocket holes and amber edge print), 120 Rebate (a quiet medium-format border), and Contact Caption (a black surround with a step wedge and a caption line beneath the image). Pick one from the Frame popup in the export sheet — it defaults to None, and exports without a frame are unchanged. The frame is drawn last, at full output resolution, so it is never sharpened or resized, and the photo inside keeps the size you asked for.
• The frame prints the name of the preset you used. Develop a photo with Sabattier and the edge print reads SABATTIER, like the markings along a real strip of film. If you carry on editing and move away from the preset, it says SABATTIER · ADAPTED instead. With no preset applied it falls back to your camera model. The caption line is editable, and blank means no caption.
• Deeper colour in point-curve edits. The per-channel point curves now keep their full precision all the way to the finished image. In strong curve edits — most visible in some of the black-and-white looks — gradients that used to step in faint bands are now smooth. Existing edits with point curves will render very slightly differently, by less than one level of brightness.

The preview and the export agree

• The zoomed-out preview now matches the export. Bloom, diffuse glow, dehaze and shadow detail used to spread a little wider at fit view than in the exported file. They now preview exactly as they export, so fit view reads a touch tighter than before. Nothing got weaker — the preview just stopped exaggerating. Judging at 100% is unchanged.
• Sidecar vignettes now speak Adobe's language. The vignette value written to XMP sidecars now matches Adobe's convention, so a photo developed in Photo Developer shows the same vignette in Lightroom and anything else that reads Camera Raw settings — and a Lightroom-authored sidecar now renders its vignette correctly here too (both directions used to arrive inverted). Existing sidecars keep rendering exactly as they did and quietly convert the next time you save. One caveat for mixed setups: a sidecar saved by 1.5.3 shows an inverted vignette if opened in an older Photo Developer.
• Retouched photos respond faster. Clone spots no longer re-measure their luminance match on every slider movement — dragging sliders on a photo with several clone spots is noticeably snappier.

An honest vignette

• The vignette was rebuilt from scratch. The whole slider range finally does something — values past ±50 used to have no effect at all. Darkening now falls off like a real lens, smooth into the corners with highlights still punching through, and lightening fades gently toward white instead of clipping. Midpoint places the effect; Feather purely controls how hard or soft its edge is — the edge no longer wanders when you change it. Existing edits that carry a vignette will render a little differently; strong ones are worth a quick look after updating.
• Square crops no longer confuse the ones that follow. Passing through 1:1 used to flip the orientation later aspect ratios applied in — landscape photos suddenly getting portrait crops — and switching between ratios shrank the crop a little with each pick. Both fixed: ratio picks re-fit generously from the whole image, in the orientation you were working in.
• The Suggested view stopped mistaking street scenes for portraits. A crowd of small, distant people no longer qualifies — a portrait suggestion now requires a face that actually fills part of the frame.

The preset library

• Presets travel. Export any preset as a .pdpreset file and hand it to someone — or drop files you've been sent onto the Preset Manager to import them. Presets that belong together arrive together, filed under their own category, and one unreadable file in a batch doesn't stop the rest from importing.
• The new Suggested view reads the photo in front of you and surfaces the looks that suit it — a portrait finds portrait-friendly looks, a backlit frame finds the backlit one. A photo with no clear character gets an honest "Nothing Obvious" instead of a guess.
• Your arrangement of the library finally survives updates. Starring, categories and keyboard shortcuts on built-in presets used to be silently reset whenever the built-ins were updated; now they stick. Built-ins can be hidden (a new Hidden view collects them) and duplicated to make an editable copy of your own; new presets save straight into a category from the Save sheet. The inspector's preset dropdown becomes a real shortlist — six starters ship starred instead of nearly the whole library.
• Two new film looks — Kodachrome 64 and Superia 400 join the built-in stocks, and nine existing stock-named presets were re-checked against the films they're named after (Gold 200, T-Max 100 and Ektar 100 re-tuned).
• Three new looks fill previously bare ground for Suggested: Contre-Jour (backlit), Field Study (macro detail), Concrete & Glass (architecture).

White balance finished, and the brush overhauled

• The white-balance eyedropper is now truly one-click. It samples the RAW decode itself instead of the processed image, so a single pick lands the full correction — and picking the same spot again changes nothing. Auto White Balance now judges the camera's original capture too, so re-running it no longer drifts, and it ignores whatever white balance a sidecar arrived with.
• Detect Edges brushing. A new toggle on the Adjustment Brush confines each dab to pixels similar to the colour under the crosshair — keep the crosshair on your subject and the brush can overlap an edge without spilling across it. Press E to flip it mid-stroke; strokes with it off behave exactly as before.
• Brush strokes commit near-instantly — big-radius strokes that used to take seconds to land now register in a blink, at every zoom level, and painting at 100% no longer stutters.
• The eraser finally honors flow and hardness. A soft, low-flow eraser blends paint away gradually instead of cutting a hard-edged hole. Existing edits with soft erasers now get the feathered edges those sliders were supposed to give in the first place.
• HSL Saturation −100 now removes a colour completely. The negative side used to bottom out at half strength, so saturated lights and signage survived "full" desaturation — and a shared sidecar rendered greener in Photo Developer than in Lightroom. Edits using strong negative values will render less saturated than before.
• Duplicate a mask from its right-click menu — the copy lands selected below the original, ready for the duplicate-then-invert workflow. And duplicating a Person or Subject mask now copies the mask itself, instead of briefly applying the adjustment to the whole image.
• Opening an edited photo shows your edit first. No more flash of the undeveloped default look before the settings snap in. Switching tabs between photos of different shape no longer stretches the outgoing photo while the next one loads.
• Under the hood, rotate, flip, straighten and crop now share one geometry engine. You shouldn't notice anything — files round-trip unchanged with older builds — but it removes a whole family of bugs where masks and spots could shift when rotation and other edits combined.

White balance that corrects the right way, and editing with the panels closed

• The white-balance eyedropper corrects toward neutral — and stops drifting. Picking a neutral spot now accounts for the white balance you already set, so it pulls a colour cast out instead of compounding it, and clicking the same spot twice no longer creeps warmer or cooler each time. Auto White Balance is steadier across repeated runs.
• The Target Adjustment Tool works with the inspector closed — more room for the photo. Press T and drag on the image to move the slider that matches the spot under your cursor; Cmd-1–6 choose which panel it drives without opening anything; and the new D key cycles the current panel's dimension — HSL between Saturation, Hue and Luminance, Color Grade between Saturation and Hue. You can now dial a Color Grade zone's hue straight from the image.
• Check the photo on a different background. Cycle the canvas between the standard dark grey, a neutral mid grey and near-white — press B, use the View menu, or right-click — a quick presentation check for how it'll read matted or on a white page. Dark grey stays the default.
• Export is on the toolbar now, next to Open — the open-develop-export path without a trip to the menu.
• Press K for a fresh brush mask, every time. The brush shortcut now always starts a new brush mask instead of reopening an existing one — paint to add, hold Option to erase, and select an existing brush in the Masks panel to resume it.

Compare, and a mouse-first workflow

• See your edit against the original, side by side. A new compare view puts the untouched original and your edited version next to each other at matching framing — crop, straighten and rotation apply to both. Enter it from the View menu, by right-clicking the image, or with the C key. The inspector stays live: move a slider and the edited side updates while the original holds still.
• Right-click the image for the common actions — Smart Develop, Copy/Paste settings, Show Before/After, Compare, Set White Balance Here, Rotate/Flip, New Snapshot, Export, Reset. Fewer trips to the menu bar.
• Type exact slider values. Value fields accept numbers only now, and the Tone EQ zones are editable like every other slider — click to type, double-click the label to reset.
• Small things: adding a local-adjustment mask is one tidy "＋ Add Mask" menu; the White Balance picker gained a menu home and the W key; the inspector header's expand/collapse is one edit-aware button; the in-app Panel Guide documents the slider gestures and the right-click menu.

The editor that keeps up with you

• The editing loop was rebuilt for speed. The RAW decode is cached between adjustments instead of re-running on every slider tick, and rendering happens entirely off the interface thread. On photos stacked with AI masks, sliders respond two to three times faster — at full preview quality while you drag, no downsampled interim.
• 100% zoom stays 100% while you work. At 1:1 the app renders exactly the region you're looking at, as you adjust — no more soft preview that only sharpens after you let go, and no more freeze when zooming into a mask-heavy edit.
• Local adjustments now bite exactly as hard as the main sliders do. Clarity, Dehaze, Shadows, Blacks and the rest, when applied through a mask, ran on an older version of the processing — local Clarity in particular was far too gentle. Every local tool now uses the same engine as its full-image panel. Existing edits with local Clarity, Dehaze, or tonal values will render with the corrected, stronger processing.
• Local adjustments can be renamed. Double-click the name, or right-click for Rename — "red bird lower right" beats "Radial 3."
• Every export remembers the recipe that made it. Each export tucks the exact settings behind that file into the photo's XMP sidecar as a per-export snapshot — so months later you can still return to precisely the edit a given JPEG came from.
• You can see the export landed — a brief badge shows the filename when it finishes, and a failed write (full disk, read-only folder) says so instead of failing silently.
• Curves, per channel — right-click the tone-curve editor to reset a single channel's point curve or paste another channel's curve onto it.
• Small things: the empty workspace has a proper Open Photo button; Photo Developer's own controls (Shadow Cleanup, Sculpt, Luster, Bloom and friends) get proper hover explanations; masks whose AI segmentation found nothing now say so instead of silently doing nothing.

Elliptical radial masks

• Radial masks can now be squeezed into ellipses and rotated — drag the four edge handles to reshape, the stem handle to spin (hold Shift to re-lock the circle or snap rotation to 15°). This was the most-requested masking gap.
• Masks now look the same in fit view as at 100% and in the export — feather and expand no longer change strength with zoom, so a dodge or burn you set while zoomed out survives the export intact.
• Fixed: exported JPEGs no longer pick up faint white stripes along the edges, and the export dialog's filename extension now follows the format you choose.
• Fixed: inverting a brush mask no longer leaves a soft border around the frame, and Sculpt masks now sit exactly where you painted them — a small alignment fix that improves every Sculpt edit a touch.
• Diagnostic overlays in the View menu — Tonal Inversion and Frequency Separation join Focus Peaking as menu items instead of keyboard-only shortcuts, with a Feature Guide entry explaining what each one is for.

Healing spot removal

• Spot removal now heals by default: it takes only the texture from a clean nearby patch and keeps your photo's own color and brightness, so repairs blend into skin, sky, and gradients without the outline the old copy-only mode could leave. Clone is still there — press H to switch.
• It finds a clean source for you — place a spot and Photo Developer looks around and picks the most even nearby patch to heal from, so the first click lands well far more often. Drag the source anywhere if you'd rather choose yourself.
• A quiet reminder by the Detail and Effects panels: judge sharpening, noise, and grain at 100% — fit view is a fast preview that overstates fine detail; what you see at 100% is what exports.
• Shooting data under the histogram: your camera, lens, focal length, aperture, shutter, and ISO now sit in a compact block right beneath the histogram — always visible, no clutter on the image. Hide it from Settings → Display if you'd rather have the panel space back.

Clean shadows

• Dark areas no longer turn invisible sensor noise into visible colored speckle. The "muddy shadows" you could see under Auto B&W and strong HSL Luminance are gone — a night-and-day difference on older Micro Four Thirds files.
• New Shadow Cleanup slider in the Detail panel — a finishing tool for stubborn grain in compressed shadow regions.
• Smoother lifted shadows: pushing Parametric Shadows hard no longer posterizes the lower midtones.
• Fixed: exported JPEGs and TIFFs no longer pick up a thin white border along the edge.

Brushes that feel right

• Hardness and Flow on the adjustment brush now do what they say — softer edges and smoother buildup within a stroke.
• Clearer brush cursor and a cleaner mask preview while painting.

Geometry, presets, and faster straighten

• Rotate, flip, crop, and straighten now move your masks and spot removals with the image — no more drift when you reframe.
• Straighten is live and responsive as you drag, instead of coarse and laggy.
• Bind your favorite presets to keyboard shortcuts (⇧⌘1–9), and capture the current edit straight into a preset.
• Auto Enhance, Smart Develop, and Auto B&W now preserve all your manual work — crop, masks, curves, retouching, and hand edits all survive when you apply an auto tool.
• Preset Manager: "Update from Current Image" now opens a sheet so you can widen or narrow which panels a preset covers, plus a new Smart Views section (Favorites, Shortcuts, Selective, your own presets).
• The Targeted Adjustment Tool now edits the panel you actually clicked open; Show Before (Y) honors rotation, flip, and straighten.

Masks follow your crop and straighten

• Masks, spot removals, and on-image overlays now track the image when you straighten or crop — rotate the horizon and your local edits rotate with it. Person, subject, gradient, radial, and brush masks all follow.
• Live straighten preview while you're framing a crop, with a choice of composition guides: Rule of Thirds, Grid, Golden Ratio, Diagonals, or None.
• Portrait crops behave correctly: picking an aspect ratio on a portrait photo keeps it portrait instead of snapping to a landscape strip.
• Auto tools no longer discard your spot-removal retouching.

Deeper tone, rebuilt presence

• Clarity, Texture, and Dehaze rebuilt from scratch on newer processing. Cleaner, more natural results with fewer halos.
• Blacks, Shadows, and the parametric curve recalibrated so heavy shadow work actually lands; Highlights and Whites made less aggressive at the extremes.
• New Detail-panel refinement sliders (NR Contrast, Color NR Smoothness) and a tonal histogram drawn behind the point-curve editor so you're not placing points blind.

Launch refinements

• Noise reduction rewritten from the ground up. It catches both fine grain and medium blotches, cleans color noise without smearing edges, and stops over-blurring dark images — a clear step up on high-ISO Micro Four Thirds files.
• Crop, Straighten, and Flip are now independent operations — straighten and flip work outside crop mode with a live alignment grid.
• Fixed: applying a preset no longer wipes your crop, rotation, or flip.

The first public release

• A native macOS RAW developer built on a single deterministic pipeline of custom GPU shaders.
• Smart masks for subject and people; 26 film presets.
• A file-based workflow with XMP sidecars, so your edits travel with your photos — and outlive any one editor.