The Develop tab

Working with the panel

Camera preview first

When you open a frame, you first see the camera's own JPEG, marked "camera preview". greycard's develop replaces it a second or two later. Droppers and drawing tools wait for the develop, but you can pan and zoom straight away.

Moving around the picture

• A click on the picture zooms to 1:1 there, and another goes back to fit. Space does the same, and Z zooms to 3:1.
• A middle click on the picture zooms to 200% there, and another goes back to where you were.
• The Fit button at the panel's foot fits the picture; its chevron, or a right-click on it, offers Fit, 25%, 33%, 50%, 100%, 200%, and 400%; under them, Full screen (F11).
• Drag to move the picture when you are zoomed in. With a tool in hand that draws on the picture (a repair, or a mask's shape waiting for its drag), hold Space and drag (Shift too, except with a Linear or Radial waiting, where Shift holds the shape): the pointer is a hand, the picture moves, and nothing is drawn. A tap of Space still zooms. A middle drag moves the picture whatever is in hand, the tool left as it was, and a middle click during any other drag ends that drag where the pointer is.
• A mouse wheel zooms a step in or out about the pointer with each click. A tilted wheel moves the picture sideways.
• A two-finger scroll on a touchpad moves the picture, in the direction your system scrolls.
• Ctrl with any scroll (⌘ on a Mac) zooms smoothly about the pointer, with a brush or a repair tool in hand too.
• + and − zoom a step in or out about the middle of the view.
• A pinch on a Mac trackpad, or on a Windows precision touchpad, zooms about the pointer. On Linux a touchpad pinch does nothing yet; use Ctrl and a scroll.
• F puts a mat around the fitted picture, a band of the canvas color on every side, to judge exposure and color against. F again takes it away. Zoomed in, the picture fills the view as before. The mat is remembered.

A scroll over an open sheet stays with the sheet and never zooms the picture behind it.

Icon buttons

A button that shows only an icon, such as undo and redo at the top of the panel, a bin, or the arrows that put a panel away, says its name in a word when you rest the pointer on it: "Undo", "Remove", "Hide panel". The word goes when you click, press a key or scroll.

Sliders

• Drag the handle, or click the track to jump there.
• Double-click a slider to put it back to its default.
• Type a value: click the number at the right, type it in the unit shown and press Enter. Escape leaves it as it was.
• Fine steps: click a slider, then use the left and right arrow keys or the mouse wheel. Each click of the wheel is one step. Shift with the wheel moves any slider without clicking it first. Hold Ctrl with the arrows or the wheel for finer steps, a tenth of one where the number shows it (Ctrl+Shift with the wheel on a slider not clicked). Hold Shift while dragging a slider and it moves a tenth as far as the mouse does.

Sections

• Click a section's title to fold it away or open it again.
• Most sections have a switch at the right of the title. Off, the picture is as if the section were not there. Its settings stay, dimmed, for when you turn it back on. Use it to compare before and after.
• Some sections have a Reset button that puts the whole section back to its defaults.
• A section marked "raw only" does nothing on a JPEG, PNG, or TIFF.

Look

LOOK is the first section, since a look is usually the first thing you choose. A look is a color table laid over the finished picture. It can be a film preset, a LUT you bought or made, or a look fitted to your camera's JPEGs.

• Click a look in the list to use it. None, at the top, uses no look.
• Rest the pointer on a look in the list to see it on the picture, at the Strength set. Move off and the look you chose comes back; click to keep the one under the pointer. Nothing is saved until you click.
• Strength blends the look in, from 0 to 100% (the default).
• Fit this camera's look… opens the camera match. See Fitting your camera's look.
• Rename… renames the chosen look. Every picture in the open folder, every preset and every snapshot that uses it takes the new name. Edits in other folders aren't reached: they show the old name as missing, and the old name's files stay until nothing in reach still needs them.
• Remove this look… moves the chosen look's files to the trash, after you confirm.
• Reset goes back to no look at full strength.

Looks fitted by the camera match are grouped by camera, with the open frame's camera first and marked "this camera". Each fitted look is made for one display curve. If it has no version for this picture's curve, the section says so and offers a button such as Refit under AgX….

To add your own, put .cube files or HaldCLUT .png files in the greycard/looks folder in your data directory. If you have no looks yet, the section names the folder.

White balance

Sets the color of the light, so that whites and greys come out neutral.

On a JPEG, PNG, or TIFF there is no camera white to name, so the two sliders move the picture from its own white instead: Temperature in mired, plus warmer, and Tint as the same Duv difference, both 0 under As shot. Auto and Neutral work the same way, and a mask's white balance adds to it.

Under As shot, Temperature and Tint show the camera's own white. Move either and As shot turns off by itself, with the slider where you left it; it is one step in the history, as any slider's move is. Turn As shot back on to go back to the camera's white. After a move, a double-click puts one slider back to the camera's value and leaves the other where you set it; As shot stays off. Under As shot a double-click changes nothing.

Auto reads the light from the edges in the picture, so a large sky or sea does not throw it off. It takes most of the warmth out of tungsten and candle light; to keep that warmth, set the white by hand.

Press Escape to put the Neutral dropper down.

Camera profile

You do not need one. The default, Embedded, uses the color matrix the camera maker put in every raw file. That is what most people develop with.

A DNG can carry more, and greycard applies some of it: the forward matrix made for the camera, and a phone's correction for its lens's dark corners. Not yet applied: a DNG's correction for lens distortion, and a phone's local tone mapping and exposure baseline, so a phone's DNG opens a little darker than the phone's own picture.

A DCP profile gives Adobe's rendering of your camera, or a profile made for your own copy of it. Put .dcp files in the folder the section names (greycard/profiles in your data directory). The list shows the profiles made for the open frame's camera, by the name inside each file. The same profile copied under two file names is listed once; two different profiles listed with one name show their file names in parentheses.

Where to get profiles:

• Adobe's own, free with the DNG Converter or Lightroom. Their license does not allow anyone else to pass them on, so copy yours by hand: on Windows from C:\ProgramData\Adobe\CameraRaw\CameraProfiles, on a Mac from /Library/Application Support/Adobe/CameraRaw/CameraProfiles. On Linux, run the DNG Converter once under Wine to unpack them.
• RawTherapee's, published by that project for the cameras it covers.
• Your own, from a ColorChecker shot run through dcamprof or the chart maker's tool.

If you choose a profile made for another camera, a warning says so.

Light

Auto sets Exposure, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, and Blacks from the picture's own histogram, as one step in the history. It never clips more than the default develop does, and it keeps a night frame's lights under white. Press it again and nothing changes.

Highlights and Shadows work on areas, not single pixels, so the texture inside a sky or a shadow keeps its contrast.

Highlights and Whites read how bright the frame itself is. Highlights reaches down into the upper mid-tones, as Lightroom's does, and Whites works from the frame's middle tones upward rather than from a fixed mid grey, so a face under bright light answers both. A frame edited with either before 0.7 opens a little differently.

At Exposure 0, each camera body opens at a brightness of its own, measured against that camera's JPEGs, so a frame opens about as bright as the camera's own picture of it. A frame edited before 0.8 keeps the brightness it had; Reset takes it to its body's.

Display curve

At the foot of LIGHT, on a raw, the Display curve switch chooses how the picture's tones and colors are fitted to the screen:

• Per channel is the default. Very bright, saturated colors shift on the way to white: blue toward magenta, red toward yellow.
• AgX takes bright, saturated colors to white more gradually and keeps their hue. Neon, stage lights and deep blue skies often look more natural.

Sync and paste carry it as a section of its own, Display curve, checked by default beside Light; a preset carries it when saved from an AgX picture. Uncheck it to leave each picture's own. A JPEG or TIFF, which has no switch, neither takes a curve nor gives one. A fitted look is made for one display curve; see LOOK.

Color

Curves

Choose Parametric or Point at the top. Reset puts back the curve you are looking at.

Parametric

Four sliders, each −100 to +100: Highlights, Lights, Darks and Shadows. Each raises or lowers its part of the tonal range. You can drag the three dividers between the parts on the graph. Double-click a divider to put it back.

Point

Pick a channel: RGB, Red, Green, Blue, R/G or B/Y.

• Click the curve to add a point, and drag it to move it.
• Double-click a point to remove it.
• Drag the black point right along the bottom, or the white point left along the top, and every tone beyond it takes that point's Out. You can also type an end point's In. A click past a slid end point adds no point there.
• Pick gives you a dropper: click a tone in the picture to add a point there, then drag up or down to move it.
• The point you last pressed stays selected. Type its position into In and Out below the curve (0 to 255) and press Enter.

R/G and B/Y tint by brightness without changing it. Raise R/G for red, lower it for green. Raise B/Y for yellow, lower it for blue. For example, lower B/Y at the left end to cool the shadows.

Color mixer

Changes one range of colors at a time. Click one of the eight color swatches, then set:

Pick gives you a dropper. Click a color in the picture to choose its swatch. Drag up or down to change its saturation, or sideways to change its hue. The dropper is put down when you let go, as the white balance one is; press Pick again for another. Esc or Pick puts it down without picking. Reset clears every color.

While BLACK & WHITE is on, the mixer has no effect. It is dimmed, and your settings come back when you turn black and white off.

Black and white

Turns the picture monochrome. Choosing a filter turns the section on.

• Filter: None, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green or Blue. These work like colored filters on black-and-white film. Red darkens a blue sky, and Green lightens foliage.
• Swatches and Weight: pick a color, then use Weight to make it lighter or darker in grey. The reading is in EV.
• Strength: 0 to 3.00x. It scales the whole set of weights, so the filter keeps its character and changes only how strong it is.
• Reset puts the section back to its defaults.

Color grading

Three wheels: Shadows, Mid-tones and Highlights.

• Drag in a wheel to set its color. The angle is the hue, and the distance from the center is the strength. Hold Shift as you press to keep the hue and move only the strength, or Ctrl (⌘ on a Mac) to keep the strength and move only the hue.
• The wheel last pressed is in hand, its ring drawn heavier. Ctrl-click (⌘-click on a Mac) the picture to set its hue to the color there, or Ctrl+Shift-click for the opposite hue; its strength stays, and a wheel at zero takes one from the color's saturation. The color is read without the wheels and the tint, so a second pick on the same spot finds the same hue. Esc, or a control in another section, puts it down.
• Double-click a wheel to clear it.
• Click a wheel, or its name, to choose it. The chosen wheel has a ring around it and its name in the accent color.
• Click a wheel's name to show it larger for finer control. Click it again to shrink it. Either click chooses the wheel without moving its point.
• Hue (0 to 360°) and Strength (0 to 100%) set the chosen wheel by number. Choose a wheel by its name to fine-tune it from where it stands.
• Balance (−100 to +100) moves the split between shadows and highlights.
• Reset clears all three wheels.

Each change is a step in the history that names the wheel, such as "Color grading shadows 40°".

Tint

Tints the whole picture toward one color, as a colored filter would. A blue tint over a warm scene cools it: colors far from the tint get duller on the way to it rather than turning into other colors, and greys take the tint's hue.

• Drag in the ring. The angle sets the hue, and the distance from the center sets the amount. Double-click the ring to clear it. Shift, Ctrl, and a Ctrl-click on the picture work as on the grading wheels.
• Hue (0 to 360°) is for fine adjustment. Amount goes from 0 to 100%.
• The small swatch shows what a mid grey turns into.
• The switch at the title turns the tint off and on, keeping its hue and amount, like any other section.
• Reset clears the hue and the amount and leaves the switch as it is. The history calls it "Color tint reset".

Noise

Raw only. Choose one of two kinds of noise reduction.

On a Fujifilm X-Trans raw the section says "learned: not on X-Trans yet" and the learned tiers rest: the learned denoiser does not work on that sensor yet. Denoise, the profiled one, works as on any raw. A tier already set on an X-Trans frame (by a sync from another camera, say) can still be turned off. See Demosaic.

The learned denoiser

The buttons along the top choose it: off (the default), fast, balanced or best. The slower tiers clean noise better. fast is quickest. best can take a while on a large frame. On an Apple silicon Mac the model runs through Core ML, which is quicker than the graphics path it used before; the first run of each tier on a machine takes longer while Core ML prepares it.

Luma and Chroma mix the denoised picture with the original, the brightness and the color on their own. Luma below 100% leaves a little grain; when you first open a raw it is set from its ISO, 35% at ISO 200 and below, up to 100% at ISO 3200 and above. Chroma starts at 100%, since color noise is rarely worth keeping. Presets leave both alone.

The learned denoiser also does the demosaic (see DEMOSAIC), so while it is on, the DEMOSAIC choice and Denoise below have no effect.

The profiled denoiser

Denoise turns it on. It is off by default. Strength goes from 0.5 to 3, with 1.5 as the default. It is quicker than the learned denoiser.

Lens

Corrects what the lens does to the picture. On a raw the three corrections start on; on a JPEG, TIFF, or PNG they start off, since the file was corrected once already by the camera or the editor that made it, and each is a switch. Settings > Editing > Lens corrections on new edits decides whether a raw's new edit starts with the section on; a raw that already has a sidecar keeps its own. Lens, near the top, picks whose profile corrects it. From the file, the default, is the lens the file names. Maker, above it, narrows the list to one maker's lenses, or All. The field beside Maker, Find a lens, narrows it further to the lenses whose name or maker holds every word typed, such as "24-70" or "sigma art". The line under Lens names the profile found, or says why none was:

• "no lens profiles on this machine": click Get lens profiles.
• "the file names no lens": for example a manual or adapted lens. Pick it under Lens, or use the manual sliders below.
• "no profile for" a lens: the database does not know it. Pick it, or one like it, under Lens.

A compact's file often names no lens, or names it only as a focal range, but its lens is part of the body: greycard finds it from the camera. When the database has several entries for that body, it takes the one that covers the focal length. A raw gets the entry made from CHDK's DNGs where there is one, and a JPEG never does, since the camera has corrected it already. Past that it takes the plain body over a converter, and none rather than a guess.

Picking a lens

Lens lists the database's lenses that fit the body's mount, then the Adobe lens profiles (.lcp) in the profile folder, by the lens name inside each. The profile folder is the one that holds your DCP camera profiles (see Camera profile). greycard reads an LCP's distortion, vignetting, and chromatic aberration, matched to the shot's focal length, aperture, and focus distance. A lens on another mount, on an adapter, appears when you type part of its name in Find a lens, with its mounts after the name.

Where to get LCPs:

• Adobe's own, free with the DNG Converter or Lightroom, under the same license as their camera profiles, so copy yours by hand: on Windows from C:\ProgramData\Adobe\CameraRaw\LensProfiles\1.0, on a Mac from /Library/Application Support/Adobe/CameraRaw/LensProfiles/1.0. They sit in one folder per maker; copy the .lcp files themselves, as greycard reads only the profile folder's own files.
• Your own, made with Adobe Lens Profile Creator for a lens no database has.

An LCP made on another body is used when the lens database knows yours, which gives your sensor's size; otherwise only one made on your body is used.

The lens picked is kept in the edit, and goes with copy and paste and with presets, as the Profile switch does. A lens that is not there for this body (one the database lacks, or a profile not on this machine) is still shown by its name, greyed, and corrects nothing. An export without it says so.

From the profile

These are all on by default when a profile is found:

• Profile turns all the profile's corrections on or off.
• Distortion straightens lines that bow in or out.
• Chromatic aberration removes the colored edges toward the corners. On a raw it is greyed: the aberration is measured on the frame itself and corrected before the profile, and the measurement has the last word. It is live on a JPEG, a TIFF, or a linear DNG.
• Vignetting brightens the darkened corners.

By hand

• Manual corrects distortion on top of the profile.
• Red / cyan and Blue / yellow remove colored edges by hand, in per mille.
• Auto scale, on by default, enlarges the picture just enough to hide the empty edges a correction leaves. Turn it off to set Scale yourself, from 50% to 200%.

Defringe

Defringe, off by default, removes purple and green fringes along high-contrast edges, such as branches against a bright sky. This is a different lens fault from the colored edges above.

• Radius (0.5 to 5 px) and Threshold (0 to 100) set how wide a fringe can be and how strong it must be before it is removed.
• Purple and Green each have Center (the hue), Width (how many hues count) and Amount.
• Pick hue gives you a dropper. Zoom to 1:1 and click a fringe to center the nearer of the two on its hue.

Detail

Structure works at a wider scale than Clarity, about a twelfth of the picture's long edge: the lit side of a face against its shadow side, a field against the hill behind it. It is soft by design. A horizon or a hairline gets no halo, and its effect levels off on strong contrasts instead of growing with them, so even at +100 it reads as a quiet separation of tones, never as an HDR look. Like Clarity, it leaves the brightest highlights and the deepest shadows alone.

Sharpen

Capture sharpening restores the crispness lost in the camera. It is on by default for raws and off for JPEG, PNG and TIFF files, which have already been sharpened once.

• Auto radius measures the right radius from the picture. Turn it off to set Radius (0.4 to 2) yourself. With it on, the reading shows the measured value.
• Iterations (5 to 50, default 20): more passes sharpen harder.
• Auto threshold keeps flat areas, like sky and skin, from being sharpened. Turn it off to set Threshold (0 to 200%) yourself: higher leaves more alone, and past about 100% only strong edges sharpen.
• Show mask paints in red where the sharpening acts.

Vignette

Darkens or lightens the edges of the picture as cropped.

Grain

Adds film grain. It follows the crop and looks the same at any export size. At the fit zoom you may hardly see it, so check it at 1:1.

• Amount (0 to 100%).
• Size (0.1 to 2‰ of the frame's width).
• Cubic or Tabular: classic film grain, or the finer and more even grain of modern film.

Soft proof and monitor

These two sections change what you see on screen, not the edit. See Scopes and color.

Demosaic

Raw only. This chooses how the sensor's data becomes a full color picture. The default, amaze-vng4, suits almost every frame. Try another only if you see a problem in fine detail:

• rcd-vng4 and rcd are quicker, and smoother on noisy or strongly colored edges.
• amaze keeps the most detail.
• vng4 is soft, but free of the maze-like pattern noise can give the sharper choices.
• bilinear is the softest.

When a learned denoiser is on, it does the demosaic itself and this choice has no effect.

Fujifilm X-Trans

Fujifilm's X-series cameras (other than the GFX) use an X-Trans sensor, whose colors are laid out differently. On an X-Trans raw the menu lists only the methods made for it:

• markesteijn-3, the default, makes three passes and keeps the most detail.
• markesteijn-1 makes one pass and takes about half the time.
• bilinear is the softest.

A method made for the other kind of sensor, carried by a preset, a sync or a paste, is left off an X-Trans frame and the status line says so; the same goes the other way round.

Two parts of the develop don't work on X-Trans yet: the learned denoiser, and the measured radius of Auto radius in SHARPEN, which uses its default radius instead. The profiled denoise and the hot pixel repair work as on any raw. The chromatic aberration correction runs too, but takes out less of a fringe than on other raws for now, and little of a blue one.

What happens without a control

Two repairs run on every raw. Neither has a setting:

• Hot pixels. A sensor site stuck bright or dark is replaced from its neighbors. Only a site lit in one color counts, so stars, glints and catchlights stay. A stuck pixel on busy texture may be missed.
• Clipped highlights. Where one or two color channels clipped, greycard rebuilds them from the channels that did not. A blown highlight then keeps a natural color instead of taking a cast.

Downloads on first use

Two Develop features download what they need the first time you use them. Each shows you its license before it downloads:

• the lens correction database, which is under a megabyte
• the learned denoiser, 5 to 20 MB depending on the tier

Each one is downloaded once. Download all in Settings, Models downloads the denoiser's tiers with every other model this computer runs.

The first time a picture opens, greycard also asks once whether to fetch every model now or as needed; that question comes first, and the lens offer at the next picture.

greycard offers the lens database without being asked. The first time a picture opens and there are no lens profiles on the machine, it asks whether to download them, since without them no lens is corrected. If you answer Not now, it will not ask again. The Get lens profiles button in LENS is there whenever you want them.