The short version. This is the photographer-facing changelog — what you'd actually notice, not the engineering detail. Every adjustment you make is saved as a plain-text .xmp sidecar, so updates only ever change how the app works, never your existing edits. Photo Developer is a one-time $34.99 purchase on the Mac App Store; every release below was a free update.
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, sky, 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 — guided-filter detail for Clarity and Texture, a physically-based dark-channel model for Dehaze. 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: a two-scale guided filter with luminance-aware chroma cleanup. 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.
From RAW to remarkable
- The first public release. A native macOS RAW developer built on a single honest pipeline of 22 GPU shaders.
- Smart masks for subject, sky, and people; 26 film-honest presets.
- A file-based workflow with XMP sidecars, so your edits travel with your photos — and outlive any one editor.
Before 1.0 — the road to the App Store
Photo Developer was built in the open between January and March 2026 — roughly 150 internal builds before the first public release on March 18. The arc, for anyone who wants the origin story: a Core Image RAW proof-of-concept in early January grew, week by week, into the full pipeline that shipped in 1.0 — the Metal shader stack, the film presets, Vision-based masking, the adjustment brush and spot removal, white-balance and Tone EQ architecture, crop and straighten, and the XMP sidecar contract that ties the whole DigTek photo suite together. None of that pre-launch history gets its own "What's New" row above; it's all summarized by the 1.0 entry.