What's new
in the darkroom.

Layouts, mockups and posts you can save and open again, one Send to menu on every page that makes something, an Export page that exports them with your photos, mockups that keep the whole scene, and colour pickers that sample the photo.

New

• Saved layouts, mockups and posts. Layout, Mockups and Instagram now save what you make: Save gives it a name and a card under Saved layouts, Saved mockups or Saved posts, your changes save into it, and you can open, rename, duplicate or delete it later, with Undo. Delete all clears the list in one go, also with Undo. Anything you export is saved too, so it can be opened again. A saved mockup remembers its photo, and clicking another photo still previews it at once without changing the saved one.
• Send to, on every page. Every page that makes something now has the same Send to menu beside its Export button: add it to your Library, put it on a book page, open it in Mockups or Instagram, or hand it to another editor. Export on every page follows your Export settings, and the Export button at the top exports what the page you are on makes.
• Everything in one export. The Export page lists the layout, mockup, post or story and moodboard you have ready, and the ones you saved, beside your photos, so one export writes them all to one folder with one naming rule and one watermark. A row of chips and a search box above that list find a photo or a piece in a long library.
• Mockups in your Library. Add to Library, in the Send to menu, saves the finished mockup straight into your Library, ready to use anywhere in the app, with Export PNG still there for a file.
• Keep the whole scene. A photo scene in a 16:9, 1:1 or 4:5 format can now keep the whole scene instead of cropping it: choose Fit the whole scene under the format and the scene sits complete inside the shape, with the space around it filled by the scene's own soft tones or by a colour you pick.
• Pick a colour from the photo. The text colour swatch's picker now samples the photo. While the picker is open, point at the photo to see a magnified view of the colour under the pointer and click to give the text that colour; keep clicking to change it, press Esc or close the picker to stop. The same works for the other colours you set on the photo: outline, shadow and plate colours, borders, the Draw tool's ink and more.
• Send a crash report. After most crashes, the next launch offers Send report: your email opens with the crash details filled in for you to check, and nothing is sent until you press Send. Settings ▸ General ▸ Support ▸ Send crash report… does the same at any time.

Improved

• Putting photos in a layout. Click a photo to add it to the next empty frame and click it again to take it out; click a frame first to choose where a photo goes; Esc, Delete and undo work on the layout, and the selected frame is now clearly outlined. Dragging a photo moves it inside its frame without swapping it by accident; to swap, drag it onto another frame and hold for a moment. A label at the pointer says whether you are adjusting or about to swap, and the frame you hold over outlines itself before the swap. Photo calendar days drag the same way.
• Grain at Fit. The Fit view now shows film grain the way your export will look at that size, for the size set on the Export page: a large photo exported at Full looks smoother at Fit than before, just as the exported file does when it is shrunk to fit a screen. The Library's preview, its focus check and Side by side show grain the same way. 100% zoom and exports are unchanged.
• The Cleanup card. In Retouch, the Cleanup card is now two groups, Auto (Dust, Reflections) and By hand (the Heal tool, New layer and your hand layers). Spot outlines and Show spots moved behind an eye on the bar above the photo, on the Heal tool's bar while the tool is open and at the right end of the toolbar otherwise, so they are always in one place. The heal bar shows a selected spot's controls only while a spot is selected, and Stop and Again sit beside a slider's name instead of under it.
• A steadier Retouch panel. The Face and Makeup cards now hold their place while the faces are being found, so the panel no longer jumps when they appear; on a photo with no face they stay in place, folded, until one is found.
• Subject Glow stays visible while you crop. The glowing subject and the night tone show in the crop view, so you can line the crop up against the glow. After Apply the subject is found again for the new framing.
• Align text layers from the bar. Select two or more text layers and an Align layers button appears on the bar above the photo. Its menu lines the layers up with each other (left, centre and right edges; top, middle and bottom) and, with three or more, evens out the space between them. The same moves stay in Arrange ▸ Position & grid.
• A shorter text bar. Bold and Italic stay as buttons on the bar above the photo; Underline, Strikethrough, All caps, Small caps and Title Case now sit in one Aa menu that lights up when any of them is on.
• Clearer assistant answers. The assistant's longer answers now read as short paragraphs with space between them, and a very long answer scrolls inside the assistant panel so the text box stays in view. Answers now link each Chromogen panel or control once, by name, instead of underlining ordinary words, and steps in your computer's own Settings are no longer links. In an answer about an effect, its own controls (such as Super 8's Exposure and Halation) open that effect's controls.

Fixed

• On a wide-colour monitor that Windows has no colour profile for, photos in Chromogen now look the way Windows Photos and other apps show them, so the canvas matches your exported files. Exported files are exactly as before. The assistant also explains why an export can look different from the canvas, and how grain compares at Fit and at 100%.

AI Denoise for high-ISO RAW photos, HDR export for JPEGs that glow on HDR screens, a Colour card match with camera profiles, a redesigned Retouch with a Hair card for stray hairs, and a search box in Settings.

New

• AI Denoise. Effects ▸ Sharpness & Detail ▸ AI Denoise removes high-ISO noise from RAW photos with Chromogen's own AI model, before the film look and its grain, so the grain lands on a clean picture. It runs on your computer and can use a compatible graphics card.
• HDR export. Turn on Export ▸ Format ▸ HDR (Subtle, Natural or Vivid) and your JPEGs glow on HDR screens such as recent phones, Macs and HDR monitors, while every other screen shows the photo exactly as you edited it. HDR photos your phone saved as JPEG keep their own glowing highlights. Press Shift+H to see where a photo will glow.
• Your photo in HDR while you edit. With HDR turned on for your screen, the HDR glow view (Shift+H) shows the photo itself in HDR, the way your HDR export will look there, right in the editor or in its own window that you can move to another screen.
• Colour card. Develop has a Colour card, off by default: turn on Colour card in Develop in Settings ▸ Editing ▸ Tools. Photograph a 24-patch colour card (a ColorChecker Classic, Passport, Mini or Nano), press Match, and the photo's white balance and colours are corrected to the card's known values before the film look, so every camera starts from the same baseline. On a camera JPEG the match also reads the card's grey patches and straightens the camera's own tone curve. Drag the corners if they sit off the patches; Amount blends the match, and it travels with presets, Sync Edits and Copy edit.
• Camera profiles. After a match, Save as profile for your camera: every photo from that camera you open for the first time then starts with the correction already applied, before the film look, with nothing to undo. Settings ▸ Editing ▸ Tools turns it off.
• Retouch, redesigned. Retouch finds the faces in a photo on its own and shows them at the top: pick one, and the Face and Makeup cards work on that face. Every one-click fix is now a slider: move it up to run the fix, then it sets the strength, and 0 turns it off to compare. Dust, Reflections and the Heal tool sit together in a Cleanup card, where only your own hand repairs are listed as layers.
• The Hair card. Remove stray hairs: Around the hair takes flyaways and smooths the frizz along the hair's outline, and on plain backgrounds clears the fine fringe right beside the hair; Over face and body takes loose hairs lying on the face, neck, shoulders and clothes; Across the hair takes loose strands lying across the hair itself; and Pick by hand removes any hair you click. Locks still attached to the hair are left in place when a clean removal is uncertain. The Library can remove stray hairs from a whole shoot at once.
• Hide a card's changes. In Retouch, the Face, Makeup, Hair and Reshape cards have an eye that hides their changes while you compare; your edits stay as they are.
• Search in Settings. Type a word in the search box at the top of Settings to see the matching settings from every page in one list, and change them right there. Ctrl+F jumps to it.
• More Sony lenses corrected. Auto lens correction now corrects Sony lenses the built-in database does not know, such as the FE 28-70mm F2 GM, using the correction the camera itself wrote into the RAW file. Lenses the database already knows are unchanged.

Improved

• RAW Blacks. Blacks in RAW Develop deepens the darkest tones smoothly from the first step to the left, and true black stays black at every setting, on screen and in exports. Auto develop on RAW photos uses the same curve when it deepens the shadows.
• Very large RAW exports. When the computer is short of memory for a very large RAW photo, Export asks whether to stop, so you can close other apps and export again, or to export it at half size, still made from the RAW in full colour.
• Zooming into a large RAW keeps it in full colour at every zoom level, with the RAW Develop controls working throughout.
• Choose lens closes the moment you pick a lens, and Enter takes a search's first match.
• Clearer help. Tooltips and messages for the Color tools, Super 8, Library previews, offline photos and Photo info now explain what each action changes and how to continue.

Fixed

• Entering your license key again on the same computer, after an update, a reinstall or a long break, activates it again instead of saying it is already active on another computer.
• Use the default folder in Settings ▸ Library ▸ Storage also works while the drive holding your chosen cache folder is disconnected, so Chromogen stops looking for that drive.
• Esc or ? closes the keyboard shortcuts list again, even after you clicked a film stock or a button first.

Photos on a drive that isn't connected stay in the Library as Offline, a Photo info card for titles, captions and keywords that exports now carry, folders you have visited before open at once, the Colour map opens large in the Scopes window, and the Straighten ruler follows a slow drag.

New

• Offline photos. Photos on a drive or card that isn't connected now stay in the Library as Offline, dimmed, and come back by themselves when the drive is. A Remove N offline… button beside Organize forgets them without touching any file; the sidebar's Offline row shows them alone, and Find missing photos… points Chromogen at a folder that moved or was renamed and relinks every photo whose name matches, with its edits. A new setting under Settings ▸ Library ▸ Photos whose files can't be found can forget them instead.
• Photo info. Type a photo's title, caption, keywords, creator, copyright and place inside Chromogen: open the Library preview's info panel and fill in the Photo info card, or select several photos and choose Photo info… to add the same words to all of them. The words are saved in an .xmp file beside the photo, never in the photo itself, and anything another program saved there is kept.
• Exports keep photo info. Exports now carry the information saved with a photo, from the file or from a Bridge or Lightroom sidecar: title, caption, keywords, creator and contact details, copyright and rating, so it shows in Photoshop, Bridge, Lightroom and Finder. Turn it on or off with Keep photo info under Export ▸ Watermark & metadata; location (GPS) is never written.
• The Colour map, large. The button at the top of the Colour map's card opens the Scopes window on a new Colour map tab, drawn sharp at whatever size you make the window and following the map on the panel live. The map on the panel is drawn sharper too, on every screen scale, and its colours are now a fine scatter of points, like a vectorscope's trace, instead of a soft cloud.
• Which range a colour belongs to. On Mix, pointing at the photo also shows which Color Mixer range that colour falls in: the range lights up faintly on the Colour map and the name in the corner adds it, so you can see at a glance which colour's sliders would move it.
• A cache folder of your choosing. Settings ▸ Library ▸ Storage can now move the caches, the previews, decoded RAW files and converted DNGs, to a folder you choose, such as a bigger or faster drive, and bring them back to the default with one click. The app keeps working while they move.

Improved

• A folder you have opened before opens at once. Previews already on disk are used as they are, and "Preparing previews" counts only photos that are new or edited since. Edited photos no longer re-prepare their previews after an update; when an update does change how edits look, each edited photo shows its previous preview while the new one is prepared behind it.
• Previews after a big import. Previews now come in the order you look at them: the photo tray fills from the cards in view outward, the Library's own previews are no longer held up by the tray's, and every RAW whose preview is still being prepared shows a quick black-and-white stand-in instead of an empty card.
• The caches follow your photos. Deleting a photo clears its cached previews, decoded RAW file and converted DNG at once. Removing a photo or folder from the Library clears its decoded RAW file and converted DNG but keeps its thumbnails, so adding it back still opens at once.
• The Straighten ruler. In Develop ▸ Geometry and on the crop bar, the ruler now follows a slow drag, and the photo keeps up with it. It used to stay at level until the mouse moved quickly, then jump several degrees at once, and the photo lagged behind.
• Show affected area. While it is on, a small tag just above the photo names the view and the colour it follows, says when nothing in the photo is in range, and offers Switch off; leaving Color ends the view. The grey preview is never mistaken for a frozen photo.
• The Colour map's hover dot now moves smoothly: it reads a small area around the pointer and settles gently, so grain no longer makes it jump.
• Calmer motion in the panel. Switching between Color's Grade, Mix, Curves, Skin and Primaries tabs is now a single clean fade, and unfolding a card in the panel no longer flashes.

Fixed

• Opening a photo from the Library no longer flashes a slightly larger first frame: the editor comes back at its resting size in one step.
• In the compare room, when the window is too narrow to show the reference beside your photo, your photo now uses the whole stage instead of leaving an empty column, and the room's opening message matches what you see.
• The big-folder sheet's time estimate is now measured from each preview build, so it no longer says "a while" on a computer that prepared the first screen of previews in under two seconds.

Color rebuilt around a live Colour map with Grade, Mix, Curves, Skin and Primaries, a Library that takes folders of thousands of photos, the Super 8 effect, JPEG exports that keep their full colour detail, and smoother slider drags.

New

• The Colour map. Color now opens with a live map of your photo's colours. Drag a colour round the map to shift its hue, or outward and inward to saturate or mute it; the change lands in the tool that is open, so on Mix it moves that colour's own Hue and Saturation sliders and elsewhere it bends the Hue vs Hue and Hue vs Sat curves and opens them with the moved point selected. On Mix, the selected colour's range shows on the map with handles to widen or narrow it.
• One tool at a time. Below the map, Vibrance and Saturation stay in place and one tool opens on the Grade, Mix, Curves, Skin and Primaries tabs. The tabs show every name whole even at the narrowest side panel.
• Grade. Four small wheels show Master, Shadows, Mids and Highs at a glance; click one to open it in the large wheel below, where strength and brightness sit on the ring. Blending and Balance set how far the shadow, midtone and highlight tints overlap and where they split, and Reset clears all four ranges. Every mask's Color card gets the same Grade tool, plus Hue, so a mask can tint the whole area or only its shadows, midtones or highlights.
• Mix. Every colour on one row, with the colours you pick from the photo on their own Picked tab and the eyedropper always at the top of the card. Apply to adds a precise brightness range and keeps its labels whole, and a colour's Smoothness and Apply to now stay with the photo.
• Curves. Five curves on tabs: Hue vs Hue, Hue vs Sat, Hue vs Luma, and the new Luma vs Sat and Sat vs Sat, which calm the saturation of deep shadows and bright highlights or tame only the most saturated colours. The line is drawn in the colours it makes, a hue grid and a readout show where you are, a click adds a point on the curve, Shift moves it finely and the arrow keys nudge it. Point at the photo and a thin marker shows where that colour sits on the curve and what moving up or down would give; the eyedropper in the card's header puts a point there. The curves also open in a window of their own.
• Skin. Pick the skin with an eyedropper, shift its colour, even it out, and protect it from Grade and Mix so a strong look leaves faces natural. Skin now applies to the subject by default: it works on the person it finds in the photo, so a wall, sand or wood of a similar colour is left alone, and the card says when no subject was found. Choose Apply to ▸ Whole photo to edit by colour everywhere, as before.
• Primaries. A fifth tool moves the red, green and blue every colour is built from: drag the corners of its triangle, and add a shadow tint.
• Big folders in the Library. A folder of many thousands of photos no longer fills the computer's memory or freezes the import. The Library keeps in memory only the thumbnails near the photos you are looking at, builds a big grid a screen at a time, and prepares previews below your own clicks and scrolls. After an import of more than 1,000 photos it asks whether to prepare every preview now or only as you browse (Settings ▸ Library ▸ Large folders keeps a standing choice), and big RAW files show a quick black-and-white stand-in while their full preview is on its way. On a PC with many processor cores and memory to spare, the previews of a big folder are prepared faster.
• Super 8. A new effect gives a photo the look of a scanned small-gauge film frame: five film looks, natural grain, soft detail and warm halation, with a default Overscan view that fits the photo into a generated film frame with its sprocket hole and neighbouring image strips. Full photo keeps your composition with an Amount blend, and New frame advances a simulated roll with fresh grain and edge detail.
• More cameras. Sigma Foveon (X3F) files open as camera RAW, and Pentax, Phase One, Leaf, Samsung NX, Konica Minolta and Kodak bodies that were treated as unknown cameras are recognised. A Pentax 645Z photo opens at the camera's own 4:3 frame, without the dark and light strips that ran down its sides, and a Samsung NX200 or NX210 photo no longer shows a coloured line along one edge.

Improved

• Full-colour JPEG exports. JPEG exports now keep the photo's full colour detail at every quality setting, so colour grain and fine colour edges in the file match the canvas; JPEG files are around a fifth larger. TIFF and PNG are unchanged. Ask the assistant about screen colours and it also tells you what Chromogen is doing for the screen you are on.
• Smoother slider drags. Dragging a slider redraws the photo about as often as your screen can show it, including photos with no film stock chosen yet, photos wearing a film border, Instant Film prints and VHS, and the app does less work in the background while you drag. What you see when you let go is unchanged.
• Subject Glow. The light follows the subject's outline, and a small or narrow subject glows as a large one does at every Glow size, instead of fading to a plain white cutout as the glow widens.
• The crop bar. It keeps its full row of ratios in smaller windows again, its drop-down arrows match, and a double-click on the straighten dial sets the photo level.
• Text behind the subject. When a photo is reopened the words wait until the subject has been found, then appear behind it, instead of showing in front for a few seconds.
• Mockups. Opening another mockup no longer shows the previous one's picture, dimmed, while the new one renders.

Fixed

• A photo opened while its edit file was briefly unavailable (a sync service or a virus scan reading it, a network drive waking up) could lose that edit when you zoomed, saved or synced edits. The edit is now left alone and is there the next time you open the photo. Your photo files were never affected.
• A change made while a zoomed-in photo was still sharpening could be lost if you zoomed back out, moved to another photo or closed the app right away. It is now saved like any other change, and zooming, or turning a section off and on, no longer saves an unchanged edit again, so it can no longer replace a newer edit of the same photo made on another computer.
• Reset Edits in the Library now also resets the photo open in the editor. Before, the editor kept showing the old edit, and your next change there brought all of it back.
• With a Color Mixer colour edited, the All colours sliders could have no effect when the graphics processor developed the photo, on screen and in exports.

A compare room that matches your photo to a reference, a reorganised Text mode with text behind the subject, straightening with guides, Colour separation, and better Panasonic, Hasselblad and compact-camera RAW support.

New

• Compare room. Reference, now a mode in the toolbar, opens a compare room with your photo beside up to four reference photos. Under the two photos, switch between their histograms, Numbers, Scopes, a Tone map and a Colour cube, with a Difference score out of 100 and a few words on how your photo differs.
• Match. Match moves your photo toward the reference's contrast, black and white points, colour, saturation and as much of its brightness as you choose, by adjusting your Develop curves; your film stock, sliders, effects and masks stay as they are. Its panel sets what to match and the strength, matching again replaces the earlier match, and one undo takes it back.
• Faces, skies and several references. Match finds faces and a clear sky in both photos: the faces keep their own skin tone, white balance comes from neutral greys or from the faces, never from the scene's own colours, and a sky is matched only when both photos show one. With two or more references on the board, Match uses the look they share, or only the current reference if you choose.
• Colour cube. See each photo's colours in a cube you can turn and zoom, one dot per colour, larger the more of the photo shares it, side by side or together in one cube. Right-click it to show only the neutral greys, follow each photo's grey spine from dark to light, change the colour space or stretch muted colours ×2 or ×4.
• Match selected photos. Select two or more photos in the tray (Ctrl-click or Shift-click) and choose Match selected photos to see how each one differs from the reference, then press Match all to match them together. One undo takes them all back.
• The compare room in its own window. Open in a window moves the compare room into its own window, with its own Match and Undo, that you can drag to a second display. The icon in its title bar docks it back, and Reference reopens it the way you used it last.
• Text behind the subject. Choose Behind on the type bar, or turn on Behind the subject at the top of Style, and the photo's person or object is laid over your words. The arrow beside Behind opens Subject edge and Softness to fine-tune the outline, and Refine subject mask lets you paint where the subject covers the text.
• Text effects. In Style, Finish adds a glow or chrome look to the letters, the drop shadow gains Softness, Angle and a colour, and outlines and plates take any colour; Letter fill runs a gradient through the letters or shows the photo inside them. Arrange ▸ Shape bends a line of text into an arc, a wave or a full circle.
• More type styles. Bold, Strikethrough, Small caps and Title Case join Italic, Underline and All caps in Type ▸ Character and on the type bar. Filter the font list by Sans, Serif, Script, Mono or Display, and rest the pointer on a font to see it on your photo before you choose it.
• Styled watermarks. In Export ▸ Watermark & metadata, Style sets your watermark in one of six text looks, such as Film title or Signature, and Logo adds your own image. Place, Size, Opacity, Inset and Rotation then set where it sits, how large and strong it is, and whether it runs up or down the side.
• Text layer groups. Select two or more text layers and press Ctrl+G, or the folder button above the layer list, to group them; a group moves, hides and deletes together, and Ctrl+Shift+G ungroups.
• Move several texts at once. Ctrl-click or Shift-click text layers on the photo or in the layer list, then drag any of them to move them together; the arrow keys, Delete and Ctrl+D act on all of them.
• Smart guides. While you drag text, magenta lines show when it lines up with other text or with the photo's centre and edges, pink bands show equal spacing, and the text snaps into place. Hold Ctrl to move it freely.
• Equal spacing. Arrange ▸ Position & grid spaces three or more selected text layers evenly, left to right or top to bottom.
• Copied text onto many photos. The arrow beside Add text pastes copied text onto every selected photo at once, as one undo step. Copied text is now kept after you close Chromogen.
• Straighten with guides. In the Crop tool, press G and drag a line along an edge that should be level or upright: one line levels the photo, and two along the sides of a building also fix its perspective. The lines stay with the photo, so you can adjust them later.
• Auto straighten. Horizon levels a tilted horizon, Uprights stands leaning walls up and Both does both, from Develop ▸ Geometry or the wand on the crop bar. When a photo has no clear edges, Auto says so and opens the guides for you.
• Colour separation. A new control on the Develop tab of Film Stock's Fine-tune makes a colour stock's colours separate further from each other, the way the layers of a colour negative do, without clipping. It starts at 0, so photos you have already edited look exactly as before.
• A short tour for new installs. On a new install, the first photo you open starts a four-card tour of Film Stock, Shuffle, Develop and Export, with a Try Shuffle button. Settings ▸ General ▸ Take the tour shows it again.
• Edited dots. A small dot on a section in the sidebar shows that it holds edits on the open photo, so you can see where your changes are at a glance, even with the sidebar folded.
• Arrow keys and Select all. Press ← or → while you edit to open the previous or next photo in the photo tray. Copy an edit with Ctrl+C, press Ctrl+A to select every photo in the Library or the photo tray, then press Ctrl+V to paste it onto all of them at once.
• Studio device mockups. Mockups ▸ Devices adds iPhone 18 Pro Max in studio, iPhone Duo in studio and iPad Pro in studio, each placing your photo on the device's screen in a white studio, with adjustable screen brightness and glass reflections. The iPhone Duo is unfolded and shows one photo across its display.

Improved

• Four toolbar modes. The toolbar now starts with four modes, Photo, Text, Shuffle and Reference, shown as icons: the open one is highlighted and each shows its name when you point at it. The rest of the toolbar holds the open mode's controls, such as Shuffle's groups and Shuffle again, or Match and Open in a window.
• Zoom, rotate and full screen in one place. They moved into the Fit chip at the end of the Photo toolbar, which shows Fit or the zoom percentage: click it to switch between Fit and 100%, or open its arrow for Zoom in, Zoom out, Rotate left, Rotate right and Full screen.
• Text, reorganised. With no text selected, the panel on the right is Layouts, which arranges your Headline, Subhead and Body for you: rest the pointer on a look to see it on your photo, and Try another layout gives a new arrangement in the same look. Select a text to edit it in Type, Style and Arrange; Add text is on the type bar, and with no text selected a click on the photo starts a new text there.
• The type bar. The font menu lists your favourite and recently used fonts first, with a search and the font filters, and alignment is one button with a menu that includes Justify for a paragraph. The weight and the style buttons stay on the bar whenever there is room, More appears only when the bar is too narrow, and a trash button beside Done deletes the selected text.
• Text at the photo's edge. Text you move to the edge of the photo now keeps its size and line breaks and can run past the edge, which cuts it off. To have text shrink and re-wrap to stay on the photo instead, choose Fit inside in Settings ▸ Editing ▸ Text ▸ At the photo's edge.
• Edits reach every selected text. Font, style, size, colour, finish, blending and alignment changes now apply to every selected text layer at once.
• Placing text. New text takes dark or light ink to stay readable on the photo under it, and a round handle above a selected line of text turns it.
• Text settings in one place. Animate text changes, Drag text on the photo, Double-click text to edit and Snap text to the grid when dragging are now in Settings ▸ Editing ▸ Text (the gear on the Text panel opens it), where Chromogen remembers them.
• Develop ▸ Geometry. New Vertical, Horizontal and Aspect controls under Perspective correct converging lines by hand and show what the guides or Auto straighten set. Straighten is now a ruler: drag it to turn the photo, use the mouse wheel or the arrow keys for a tenth of a degree, and double-click it to return to level. The flip buttons now read Flip horizontal and Flip vertical.
• Film Stock Fine-tune tabs. Fine-tune now sits on four tabs: Texture (Film Grain, Film Halation), Develop (Shot Exposure, Development, Scan balance, Colour separation), Print (Silver stage, Silver Retention, Print Compensation) and Scan (Film border, Anchor black point). A small dot marks a tab with a value off its default, the card opens on the tab you used last, and Film border shows each choice as a small picture.
• Panasonic Lumix RAW files. Lumix RAW files shot with the camera set to 1:1, 4:3, 16:9, 2:1 or 65:24 now open in that shape, as the camera showed them; Reset crop in Develop ▸ Geometry brings back the whole frame. The S1 II, S1 IIE, G97, G95D and TZ95D now open with their own colour, the TZ95D straight from the RAW, and the S1R II's 177 MP High Resolution mode files now open from the RAW. Auto lens correction now recognises the lens on more Lumix photos.
• Compact cameras open as the camera showed them. RAW files from Nikon Coolpix, Canon PowerShot and Panasonic Lumix compacts (TZ, ZS, LX and FZ) and the Leica C-Lux, D-Lux and V-Lux now open with the camera's own lens correction, so lines look as straight as they did on the camera. Photos you have already edited keep their lens setting; turn off Auto lens correction to see the whole sensor.
• Hasselblad RAW files. Hasselblad 3FR and FFF files can now be chosen in Open and in Library ▸ Add ▸ Add photos…, and so can every other RAW file type Chromogen reads. The photo tray's RAW filter now shows them all too.
• True colours on wide-colour screens. On wide-colour screens, such as Display P3 and OLED laptops, photos on the canvas, in the export preview and in thumbnails now show the same colours as your exported file in Windows Photos and other colour-managed apps. There is nothing to set, and exported files are exactly as before.
• .NET 10. Chromogen now runs on .NET 10, Microsoft's current long-term-support release, supported until November 2028. It is built into the app, so there is nothing extra to install.
• Pick this look in Shuffle. Point at a look and choose Pick this look to switch your photo to it and leave Shuffle. Done, on the centre image, leaves Shuffle with your photo as it is.
• Colour separation in Shuffle. Shuffle can now vary Colour separation on colour stocks, and each look's label says how much it uses. Set its range, or switch it off to keep your own setting, in Shuffle's Develop group.
• Undo a paste onto many photos. Ctrl+Z now takes a pasted edit back off every photo it landed on, and each photo gets its earlier edit back; Ctrl+Shift+Z pastes it again. A photo you changed after the paste keeps that change.
• Remove or delete several photos at once. Select photos in the photo tray or the Library, then right-click one of them: Remove N from Library and Delete N from Computer… now act on all of them, after a confirmation.
• Deleting the photo you are editing. The editor now moves on to the next photo in the photo tray and stays on the same page, and the deleted photo's saved edits go to the Recycle Bin with it. Delete the last photo and the editor is left empty.
• Your watermark in the Export preview. The Export preview now shows your watermark where and how each file will carry it, and updates as you change it.
• New installs. On a new install, the toolbar starts docked at the top of the photo and the sidebar lists Color right after Develop. Existing setups keep their toolbar and sidebar as they are.
• Clearer wording. Labels, tooltips and the assistant's help answers are plainer and clearer, and the photos you pick for batch actions are now called selected photos (Ctrl-click or Shift-click to select).
• The Reset Edits message now says what happens: the photo goes back to how it looked when you first opened it, and Ctrl+Z brings your edits back until you close Chromogen.

Fixed

• Resizing text from a corner. Dragging a corner of a text box now scales the text smoothly while the opposite corner stays in place, and Type ▸ Character shows the new size.
• Words and layers stay in step. Clearing a field in Layouts ▸ Words now takes that text off the photo and out of the layer list, and deleting a text clears its field.
• Type controls. The type bar's size field now shows long sizes such as 269.7 in full, and the font and weight boxes in Type ▸ Character stand out clearly from the panel.
• Dark edges stay in the picture. RAW files from several Lumix and Leica cameras, and from the Hasselblad X1D, X2D 100C, X2D II 100C and H6D-400c MS (single shots), no longer lose a dark right or bottom edge, such as a night sky or a black backdrop, when they open. Your RAW files were never changed.
• Menus. In the Light theme, menus, submenus and right-click menus are now light with dark text that reads clearly. In the dark theme, submenus and right-click menus now match every other menu, so their dividing lines and the highlighted row are easy to see.
• Watermarks on prints. On a print with bleed or printer's marks, your watermark now sits on the photo inside the trim instead of on the edge the cut removes.
• The Before / After divider can now be dragged while Subject Glow's Pick, the Print effect's Pick object or the Object mask is waiting for a click.

Subject Glow and Star Filter, crop grids, an Effects group in Variations, smoother slider drags, Undo that keeps each photo's steps, and better Nikon, Canon, Fujifilm and Olympus RAW support.

New

• Subject Glow. New in Effects: the subject turns into glowing white light and the scene takes a cool night tone. The subject is found for you; click any object or paint on the photo to choose exactly what glows.
• Star Filter. New in Effects: the lights in your photo grow rays the way they do through a star filter on the lens. A brighter light reaches further, a coloured light makes coloured rays, and a plain bright wall only glows. Choose 2, 4, 6 or 8 points or the sunstar of a lens iris, turn the rays, set their length, and fine-tune the threshold, the colour along the rays, their softness and the glow around each light.
• Crop grids. Crop has nine grid overlays: Thirds, Grid, Golden ratio, Golden spiral, Golden triangle, Diagonal, Centre and Dynamic symmetry, or none. Pick one from the new Grid button on the crop bar (point at a tile to preview it on your photo), or press O to step through them and Shift+O to turn the spiral (eight ways, including upright) or the triangle. A fine grid appears while you straighten.
• An Effects group in Variations. Switch on Thermal, VHS, Digicam, Film damage, Date stamp, Pre-exposed, Invert or Print to let it appear on the looks Variations deals, each in a fresh setting of its own. All eight start switched off, so your photo's own effects stay as they are until you choose.

Improved

• Smoother slider drags. Dragging a slider now updates the photo much more smoothly, most of all with a film stock and a film border on. What you see when you let go is unchanged.
• Undo keeps each photo's steps. Undo now keeps each photo's steps until you close Chromogen, so you can return to a photo and undo, even after Reset Edits.
• Motion Blur's layer brush now erases or restores the blur fully in one stroke.
• Nikon RAW files. Exports of Nikon High Efficiency RAW files are always made from the full RAW when Adobe's free DNG Converter is installed, and an export made from the camera's preview now says so. Coolpix superzoom RAW files, such as the A1000 and B700, open with the camera's own lens correction: no dark corners or bent lines. NEF scans saved by Nikon Scan from a Coolscan film scanner now open. Library thumbnails and batch exports now apply Auto lens correction too.
• Canon RAW files. Canon RAW files shot with the camera set to 1:1, 4:3 or 16:9 now open in that shape, like the camera shows them; Reset crop brings back the whole frame. Canon PowerShot RAW files (G7 X, G5 X, G9 X, G1 X, S and SX series) open with the camera's own lens correction: no dark corners or bent lines at the wide end, and Auto lens correction applies the camera's correction on the others. Canon CRW files (the EOS D30, D60, 10D, 300D and the PowerShot G1 to G6) now show their camera, date taken and exposure in the photo info, keep that information in exported photos, and sort and organize by the date taken. Canon EOS R8 and R5 Mark II photos now take part in Auto develop and the roll pass like every other camera; the Library draws their picture from the RAW itself, since those files carry no JPEG preview.
• Fujifilm RAW files. Fujifilm RAW files taken at DR200 or DR400, or at a high ISO, now open as bright as the camera showed them, with RAW Exposure raised by the stops the camera held back. Fujifilm GFX100 II, GFX100S, GFX100S II and GFX50S II RAW files are now recognised as supported cameras. Fujifilm X-E5 and GFX100RF RAW files now open from the RAW at full resolution, with accurate colour, and Fujifilm X-T30 III colour is more accurate.
• Olympus and OM System RAW files. OM System OM-3 RAW files now open straight from the RAW at full quality instead of as the camera's preview, OM System OM-5 Mark II photos open with more accurate colour, and the Olympus E-M10 Mark IIIs is recognised as a supported camera. Olympus and OM System RAW files from the E-M1 Mark II and III, E-M5 Mark II and III, E-M10 Mark II and IV, OM-1 Mark II, TG-7 and several older compacts are now recognised as supported cameras.
• Photo info for more RAW files. Olympus, OM System, Panasonic and Leica RAW files now show their camera, date taken and exposure in the photo info, keep that information in exported photos, and sort, group and organize by the date they were taken. RAW files from older cameras (Minolta, older Canon, Sigma, Leaf, Kodak and Phase One) now show their camera, date and exposure. Organize now sorts RAW files by camera, ISO and aperture correctly.

Fixed

• Your latest edit always wins. A Library export, a thumbnail or a photo you came back to could show an earlier version of your edits. Now your latest edit is always the one used, even when a photo's folder can't be written (the edits are kept in a backup on your computer until it can), and Save (Ctrl+S) always saves a RAW's edits and tells you if it couldn't. Your photo files were never affected.
• A change made just before you close Chromogen is now saved.
• Before / After keeps the photo's shape. Holding Space to view the original and the Compare divider now show your photo at its true shape on framed photos: inside a border or a film strip, on a poster page, and with Instant Film on, inside the same print, so only the look changes.
• Zoomed in on an Instant Film print, edits now update the photo right away.
• Nikon RAW S (small NEF) files, from cameras such as the D4S and D810, no longer open with a pink cast.
• Fujifilm edges. X-M5 and X-T30 III photos no longer show a thin black band along the right edge, X-H2S and X-S20 photos no longer show a thin coloured line along the bottom edge, and X-Trans previews no longer show green dots along the left edge.
• Shutter speeds between a third of a second and one second now show correctly in the photo info, for example 0.4s and 0.8s instead of 1/2 and 1/1.
• Bug reports name your Windows version. A bug report now names your Windows version and shows the Windows screenshot shortcut, and messages say “this PC” instead of “this Mac”.

Photo calendars, Editorial layouts with words, Add to Library and Book Studio from Layout, a more natural Instant Film, Reshape you can watch while you drag, and better Sony RAW support.

New

• Photo calendar. New in Layout: Calendar turns a month into one picture with a photo on each day, filled from the photos you shot or edited that day, over a colour or a photo of your choice. Shuffle shows other photos from the same days. Open it from Layout or from Photo calendar in the Calendar's Month view.
• Editorial layouts. Layout ▸ Collage now has an Editorial style: thirty magazine and photo-book pages, at least four for every number of photos, with room around the photos and words you can edit. Give each title, caption or note its own font, weight, size and colour, and drag the words where you want them while guides line them up with the photos and the page.
• Edit a photo from its layout. Edit any photo in a layout straight from its frame, then use Back to Layout to return to it. The Layout panel is simpler: your layout saves itself, New starts over, and exported files are named for you.
• Add to Library and Add to Book Studio. In Layout, Add to Library saves your collage, carousel, contact sheet or calendar as a photo in your Library, and Add to Book Studio places it on the next empty page of your book, so you no longer export it and bring it back in.

Improved

• Instant Film Reagent Spread. Reagent Spread creates more natural uneven development, with subtle roller streaks and stronger chemical variation at higher settings. The pattern stays consistent between preview and export.
• Instant Film backdrop and shadow. The print stays centred when you adjust Print Size or change the backdrop. Its shadow follows the paper edges more closely, with a new Shadow Strength slider to lighten, deepen or remove it. Choosing Backdrop None now removes the extra background from Mini and Wide, leaving only the paper print.
• Reshape. Reshape now moves the photo under the brush while you drag, so you see each push, grow or shrink before you let go.
• Sony RAW files. Sony RAW files shot with the camera set to 1:1, 4:3 or 16:9 now open in that shape, like the camera shows them; Reset crop brings back the whole frame. Sony a7CR RAW files, and a7R VI photos shot in its lossless RAW format, now open straight from the RAW at full quality, with no DNG Converter needed. Sony RX1R III photos open with more accurate colour.

Fixed

• Heal, Clone, Remove and Reshape on an edited photo now work exactly where you click or drag on a cropped, rotated, straightened, flipped or bordered photo, and with lens correction applied; the Adjust eyes by hand outlines sit on the eyes in every case.
• Masks on a flipped photo now land where you work. A brush stroke no longer jumps to the mirrored side when you let go, and gradients, radials, Subject and Object selections and Print's Protect Subject follow the photo as you see it.
• The pickers read the spot under the pointer on an edited photo: the White Balance picker, the colour pickers and Pull from photo, on a cropped, turned, straightened, flipped or bordered photo.
• Sony Medium and Small RAW sizes no longer open with a magenta cast.
• Sony RX10 V and RX1R III photos taken in portrait or upside down no longer open with a black band along one edge.

Reduce reflections, Copy from card and faster culling, Draw, VHS, Thermal and Stamp Cutout, text blending, new mockups and Calendar holidays, and a free trial that lets you use every film stock.

New

• Reduce reflections. Retouch ▸ Reduce reflections reduces reflections in photos taken through windows or glass, as a layer you can adjust, compare or remove. Reduce reflections further adds another pass, up to three. Processing stays on your computer and can use a compatible graphics card; results vary with the photo.
• Fix dust and Show spots. Fix dust finds sensor dust on skies and other smooth areas and leaves textured areas alone. Show spots displays the photo as a grey relief so you can find specks and remove them with the Heal tool.
• Copy from card. Import the new photos from a camera card with Card in the top bar or Library ▸ Add ▸ Copy from card…, choosing Photos, Photos + videos or Whole card, filed by day, by month or in one folder. Each file is checked against the card after copying, and photos you have already copied are skipped.
• Faster culling. Marking a photo in the Library preview moves on to the next one, RAW previews are prepared ahead, and Z zooms in to check focus. Compare up to four photos side by side, undo a mark with Ctrl+Z, and move the rejects to the Recycle Bin in one step after confirming.
• Try every film stock. The free trial now lets you use every film stock. Premium stocks and their looks carry a Chromogen trial mark until you buy a license; the free stocks export clean, as before.
• Draw. Press D to draw on a photo with Freehand, Line, Circle or Arrow, using a Crayon, Felt pen, Paint or Pen brush in any colour. Marks stay on what they circle when you crop or rotate, and they are included in exports.
• Text blending. Select a text layer and open Blending to choose one of 17 blend modes and set Opacity. For headlines, Fill fades only the letters, and Knockout cuts them through a plate, outline or shadow to show the photo.
• VHS. In Effects, VHS gives a still photo a camcorder-and-tape look: choose Tape, Amount and System (NTSC or PAL), and use Stamp to add the photo's date, time or both. Fine-tune adjusts Colour bleed, Noise, Sharpness, Tracking, Wobble and Dropouts.
• Thermal. Thermal maps brightness to one of seven false-colour palettes, chosen from gradient chips. Fine-tune adjusts Shift, Repeat, tone and Edges, and Shuffle in the card header tries another combination.
• Stamp Cutout. Choose a Shape and Size, then click the photo to cut a stamp and set it on paper beside the photo it came from. Stamps ▸ Several adds a stamp with each click; Edge & texture, Layout and Paper finish the sheet.
• Silver Retention. In Film Stock ▸ Fine-tune, Silver Retention adds contrast and muted colour to every colour stock, with Print Compensation to control brightness. On colour negatives, Silver stage offers Negative for brighter highlights and more contrast, or Print for deeper, less saturated shadows.
• Instant Film: New frame and Paper colour. New frame picks another paper texture, edge and corner variation for the selected format, and Paper colour sets the print's border, white by default.
• New mockups. Books adds Book on steel, Book in studio, Warm open book and Centered book flat lay. Devices adds Phone in shadow, three laptops, Watch on steel, iPhone Duo on steel, iPad Air on steel and iPod on steel. A new CDs category offers CD on gray, CD case in shadow and CD in clear sleeve, and Your room adds Museum audience: your framed print on a gallery wall in front of visitors.
• Adjust for mockups. Fine-tune (Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Saturation and Warmth) and Grain for the whole scene and artwork.
• Calendar holidays. Calendar shows public holidays for 55 countries and regions, each in its own colour; choose them with the gear in Calendar. Every to-do has its own colour, and right-clicking a day, shoot or to-do shows its actions.

Improved

• Shot Exposure and Development. A new film response, with Shot Exposure as the capture exposure and Development as push or pull processing, on every stock including Azura 100, the Prisma looks and Instant. Scan balance in Film Stock ▸ Fine-tune sets how much of the brightness change is compensated. Photos edited before this update keep their look, in Develop, in the Library and in batch exports.
• Auto develop and white balance. More consistent starting points, including on RAW photos and scenes with a strong blue cast. Auto in White Balance gives the same balance as Auto develop, the pipette samples a small area around your click, and on JPEG and other non-RAW photos the Kelvin slider runs from 800 to 15000 K.
• Text on a shape. Wrap flows a paragraph around a drawn shape or line, Subject uses the outline of the photo's subject as the shape, and pausing before you release snaps a stroke to a clean line, arc, circle or ellipse.
• Text layers. Drag a row in the Layers list to change the stacking order, Ctrl+D duplicates a layer, Add text also adds a scrim, caption bar or rule line, and the Finish card adds a drop shadow, outline or plate.
• Light Leak. Five new leaks based on real film scans (Door Band, Streak, Flame, Open Back and Torn Seal) and a Shuffle in the card header; black-and-white stocks use neutral leaks. Existing leaks take the revised colour, and Edge Fog, Corner Glow and Double take revised shapes.
• Shuffle. Double-click a look to keep it and finish. The Develop group can vary Silver retention, and the Film border options are simpler.
• Mockups. Drag a photo to move it, scroll to resize it, double-click to reset it, or drag any corner or edge of its box; the photo stays within its screen or print. Book covers carry your photo across the whole front, Reflected light sets the highlights in book scenes, and Screen brightness sets the display in device scenes. The gallery lists photo scenes first.
• Export, reorganized. Export settings are grouped into cards in the order you decide them, with a Digital | Print switch at the top. Trial exports go up to 2048 px; full-size and print exports need a license.
• The assistant. Ask about any tool, effect, workspace or setting and follow up without repeating the name. Suggested questions appear under each answer, a control named in an answer takes you to it, and more ways of asking are understood.
• Instant Film uses its own print frame, with no film border added around it.
• Clearer wording in tooltips, messages and settings across the app.
• A tool rail docked at the side moves extra tools into the … menu while the photo tray is open.
• At the smallest window sizes, the tool rail settles on its buttons straight away.
• Better colour from some newer cameras' RAW files, including the Canon EOS R6 Mark III. Your original files are unchanged. The first time you open each RAW photo after updating, it takes a moment longer.

Fixed

• Zoomed to 100%, the whole view stays sharp while you drag around the photo, right up to the edge of a photo with a Scan edge or Lab scan border.
• Grain and fine detail stay consistent when you zoom back out, including in Before / After.
• The top bar stays still while previews are being prepared.

Improved responsiveness when generating variations and returning to the editor.

Fixed

• Variations. Pressing Done after a shuffle returns to the editor reliably.
• Faster transitions. Generating another set of variations or returning to the editor is more responsive, including with large RAW photos.

Variations deals nine takes of your photo, text follows a drawn shape or line, five more lab-scan frames, and the Colour Mixer's All colours work beside a band.

New

• Variations. Your photo as a grid of nine takes. Click the one you like and eight more are dealt around it. Lock the film, the develop, the finish or the tone, and set the range from subtle to wild. On the Film Stock card.
• Text on a shape or a line. Draw a shape or a line on the photo and type along it, inside or outside, above or below. The Shape tool on the type bar.
• Five more lab-scan frames, seventeen in all, cut so the black wraps the photo the way real scans do. A photo saved with a frame keeps it.
• The Moodboard's Screenshot button works on Windows, through the Windows snipping overlay.

Improved

• Azura 100 shows its grain. The slide now carries the fine grain a scanner reads from real slide film. Existing Azura edits pick it up the next time they open.
• Colour Mixer. The eyedropper shows when it is armed, All colours (hue, saturation, lightness) work alongside a colour band, and Reset puts the picker away.
• Zoomed in, a lab-scan frame stays the frame. The band and the rounded corners are never painted over.
• Plainer words throughout. Labels, tooltips and empty states say what they do, and every label fits its button.
• The license screen says exactly what happens when a trial ends.
• Book Studio's header fits on one line, with the page tools and the tabs on one centre.
• The graphics-card preview and the export agree exactly in Colour Unify, down to the last pixel.

Fixed

• Menus no longer flicker at 175 % display scaling.
• Deleted photos go to the Recycle Bin, where you can get them back.
• RAW photos from some Panasonic cameras develop identically every time.

Remove in the Heal tool, Lens Sharpen, scan grain on the colour stocks, automatic lens correction, and support for the newest cameras.

New

• Remove, in the Heal tool. Brush over a thing, or click an object, and the gap fills from the photo itself. Each removal is a row in the Retouch passes, the film look and grain go on over it like any other repair, and nothing leaves your computer.
• Lens Sharpen. The detail the lens and the sensor softened, put back before the film goes on. In Effects, under Sharpness & Detail.
• Six grain types. Each has its own character, and the choice is kept with the photo. Grain on a photo without a film stock is now a lab scan's grain.
• Automatic lens correction. The lens named in the photo's EXIF has its distortion, colour fringing and vignetting corrected from a library of over 1,500 profiles, or pick the lens by hand. Off by default; turn it on in the Lens section.
• New frame with every stock. A switch in Settings gives the film border a fresh frame each time you pick a stock, and the New frame buttons never repeat one.
• New cameras. Nikon Z 5 II, Z 50 II and ZR, Panasonic S1R II, Canon EOS R50 V and Sony a7 V open with their own colour. Nikon High Efficiency files are labelled as such, and .nrw files appear in the pick lists.

Improved

• Scan grain on the colour film stocks. Every colour-negative stock now carries the grain a lab scanner reads from real film, and it renders on the graphics card.
• Lab scan is the default film border. New photos start with it; your existing setting moves to it once, and Settings keeps your choice from there.
• One switch for Heal, Clone and Remove in the Heal bar.
• Under the hood. Sturdier reading of unusual RAW files, and the latest decoder for the cameras above.

Fixed

• RAW photos open with the same look every time, zoomed in or not. After this update each RAW is read once more the first time it opens, then cached again.
• Old Fujifilm SuperCCD RAW files now open.
• 16-bit TIFF and PNG files open at their full depth.
• A RAW that needs the free Adobe DNG Converter now always starts the conversion, and the converted photo opens in full quality.
• A camera the app does not know yet opens as the camera's own preview.

Motion Blur on its own layer, a Film border picker on the Film Stock card, and presets you can preview by pointing at them.

New

• Motion Blur on a layer. Turn on Blur on a layer and the blur sits on its own layer over your photo. Keep the subject sharp, set the blur's opacity, and erase or restore it with a brush. With a mask, choose to blur inside or outside it. The guide on the photo steps aside while you work.
• Film border on the Film Stock card. Pick Off, Scan edge, Lab scan, 35mm strip or Medium format right where you choose your film, and set the one new photos start with in Settings.

Improved

• Cleaner dropdowns. Every dropdown in the side panel is a clear pill, with its value always in the same place.
• A tidier Lip Makeup panel. The finish choice appears only when there is a finish to choose.
• Under the hood. The app now runs on the latest platform security updates.

Fixed

• Pointing at an imported preset previews it on your photo before you click, zoomed in or not.

Lip Makeup and Eyebrow Styles, Motion Blur, Lab Scan film frames, a Calendar for your shoots, Send to your other editors, and a faster, steadier Library.

New

• Lip Makeup. A Velvet finish with one strength slider and its own colour, and a soft fade across the lip outline so the colour never ends in a hard line. Adjust outline lets you correct the mouth by hand: Detect again, or Mouth closed for a mouth read as open.
• Eyebrow Styles. Natural, Soft Sweep and Lifted Arch reshape the photographed brow hairs before the brow makeup goes on.
• Face card by part. Skin, Outline, Eyes, Nose and Mouth each have their own page, Makeup is its own card, and Skin has Skin Cleanup and Eye bags. Skin Cleanup now keeps textured and freckled skin as skin, and everything it needs is inside the app.
• The heal bar. Healing moves into the tool rail with Spot outlines (Auto, On, Off), Fix dust and New pass at hand; a dragged stroke draws as one outline.
• Motion Blur. Linear, Zoom and Spin blur with its own apply area: the background, the subject, or a mask you paint.
• Lab Scan film frames. Film Border › Scan edge gains a Lab scan style: real lab-scanned 35 mm frames laid over your photo, with the paper, the black band and its soft edges, the gold light at the frame gap and the film-base fringe. Light bleed, Bleed colour and Base fringe controls, and New frame rolls another of the twelve.
• Calendar. A Calendar in the Library: an edit meter for every day, Month, Logbook, Shoots and Year views, labels and highlights on dates, to-dos, shoots with call sheets, and a goal you set for a selection of photos.
• Send to. Right-click a photo and hand it to Capture One, Lightroom or Photoshop.

Improved

• Library and the photo tray. The tray shows what is on screen at once, card menus open on the first right-click, the grid stands ready behind the page, and the Library stays responsive while thumbnails render, retouched photos included.
• Steadier when the computer is busy. The app keeps its memory in check when little is free, and stays responsive through it.
• Added photos land where you work. An opened or dropped photo lands in your last Edit section, several photos land together, Import date groups by day, and the Library chip row wraps instead of overflowing.
• Each photo is metered on its own the moment it opens.

Fixed

• The window always opens on a screen that is connected, even if it was last closed on a monitor that is now unplugged or while minimized.
• Every shortcut hint shows Windows keys.
• A RAW file the app cannot open shows an empty stage with a clear message instead of the previous picture.

A quick follow-up to 1.8.0: the film stock hover preview, and an Editing row for the Instagram grid.

Improved

• Instagram grid. The photo you are editing is pinned in an Editing row at the top of the photo list, one click from the grid, and the grid follows the photo you are editing: its tile is selected when it is on the grid, and nothing else stays selected when it is not.

Fixed

• Film stock hover preview. Moving the pointer across the film stocks previews each one on your photo; the preview no longer stays on the first stock you pointed at.

Mockups of your photo on devices, frames, posters, books and billboards; a Face card in the new Retouch workspace; Auto Develop.

New

• Mockups. Put your photo on 45 scenes: a laptop, a display, a tablet and a phone rendered in 3D; framed prints in three rooms; and photographed frames, posters, books, albums, billboards and street displays that keep the paper, glass and print surface of the real scene. The cards fill with your photo the moment the page opens, grouped by subject with a 3D / Photo / Your room filter and a card-size slider. Pick a card, turn the camera, choose the finish, crop the print, and export at 2000, 3000 or 4000 px in 16:9, 1:1, 4:5 or the scene’s own framing, or all three formats at once. Your own wall and an exhibition gallery round out the set. The 3D scenes render through a portable copy of Blender that the app fetches once, or an existing Blender 5.2.
• Book Studio, redesigned. A full-window studio with rulers on the edge, drag and drop from your own photos and the edited-photo tray, editable pages, and a print-ready PDF.
• Retouch: Heal, Reshape and a new Face card. Chromogen finds the faces in a photo and gives you shape sliders, skin smoothing that keeps texture, and makeup: eyeliner in three styles with a wing length, mascara on the photo’s own lashes, kohl, brows and lips. Drag the eye outlines by hand when you want them elsewhere. Faces turned on their side are found too. The precision models come with the app.
• Auto Develop. One click meters brightness, balance and tone for a photo, on RAW and JPEG alike, and the Roll pass gives every photo from the same roll a consistent read. Built for wedding and event work.
• Customize. Right-click the sidebar or the Effects panel to drag sections into your own order, hide what you never use, and rename what you keep.
• Copy and paste edits. Copy an edit from one photo in the tray and paste it onto another, or onto every selected photo at once; shift-click selects a run of photos.

Improved

• Instagram. The grid finds the photo you are editing, every tile has a right-click menu, the story shows at a true 9:16 with zoom and placement, the grid run starts from the phone with a crop card beside it, a double-click opens a post, and the Share card previews the export.
• Text. Letters space exactly as they render while you type, a change lands in one step with the words standing in until it does, and text joins a design as a role: text-only develops, multi-select alignment, and copy and paste of text layers.
• The photo tray is ready before it opens, keeps a still preview pill, and rises with the photo.

Fixed

• Show original works while zoomed in. Holding the eye past fit now shows the original at full sharpness.

Develop on your graphics card, print-ready export, and real highlight recovery for RAW.

New

• Develop on your graphics card. Every adjustment now renders on the graphics chip, so edits land in a few milliseconds instead of a noticeable pause, on RAW and large files too. It is on by default; turn it off any time in Settings › Editing › GPU Develop.
• Print-ready export. A new Print size in the Export window: paper sizes at your chosen resolution, borders, bleed, crop marks, colour bars and a file-info strip for the lab, sharpening tuned to the paper surface, PDF output, and a choice of colour space (sRGB, Adobe RGB, Display P3 or ProPhoto) with the profile embedded. The print resolution is written into every file.
• Test strips and soft proofing. Export a test strip of the print’s middle band at the print’s own scale before committing to a full sheet, and preview the export through your lab’s or paper’s ICC profile, with paper white simulated and colours the paper cannot print marked. Drag to pan the 1:1 preview.
• Star ratings from the right-click menu. Rate photos on the Library grid and in the bottom tray with a right-click, and switching to the Library now lands on the photo you are editing.

Improved

• RAW highlight recovery recovers real detail. Blown highlights in RAW files are rebuilt from the data the sensor still holds instead of being flattened to white, so skies and bright edges keep their tone and colour. RAW files with blown highlights render differently by default as a result.
• Zooming a RAW is smooth. Zoom in and out without the whole frame re-developing, large JPEGs open ready to zoom, and the picture no longer stays soft after zooming out and back in.
• Masks at full resolution. Masks are drawn at up to 2048 px with smooth edges instead of steps, AI mattes are cleaner, the Object mask is tighter, a radial feather is available, and Auto mask finds edges more reliably. The brush lives permanently in the tool rail, with a pixel size you can type, Alt + right-drag to size it on the photo, and Shift+[ ] for hardness. The Colour Mixer opens on All colours with colour-tinted tracks.
• Colour Grading, relaid. Master, Shadows, Midtones and Highlights each get one large wheel with Saturation and Tone rails beside it, and the tabs always fit the panel.
• Finer grain. The finest grain is now 1.2 px across every stock, Argent 400’s granules are scan-sized with calmer highlights, and colour negatives carry evenly balanced, neutral grain. Existing edits export with the new grain.
• RAW white balance stays put. The as-shot white balance of a RAW file no longer drifts between opens.

Fixed

• Argent 400 hover and undo. Hovering colour stocks after Argent 400 no longer pins the amount at 100%, each slider drag is one undo step, and the arrow keys work in the value box.

Design for Instagram, medium-format film frames, and a live masking brush.

New

• The Instagram page. See a photo the way Instagram will show it before you post: as a feed post, on your profile grid, as a story or reel with the safe area marked, or as a carousel, on a phone preview that carries your own username and profile photo. Pick the post’s frame (original, square, 4:5, 3:4 or landscape) and drag the crop into place; Export for Instagram writes exactly that frame at Instagram’s upload size, and your photo’s own edits stay untouched. Plan your grid by dragging photos into position and adjusting each tile, export a story at 1080 × 1920, and build a carousel of up to 20 slides. A caption and frame are remembered for every photo.
• Medium-format film frames. A new frame look drawn from real 120 film scans, with edge printing you can edit in your own words, the maker’s own printing style per stock, and black-and-white frames printed in white. One Film Border card now gathers all three film looks, and Reset all effects covers the whole Effects page.
• A live masking brush. Strokes land the instant you paint, the effect shows live as you work, and the brush now offers finer size control, pen pressure, keyboard sizing, and an Auto mask that finds edges for you. Each mask row shows a picture of the mask and a plain description, with one Show mask switch set to Auto, On or Off.
• The Moodboard, redesigned. The board now shares the rest of the app’s look, with undo and redo in the bar, renaming in place, a snap grid, and the photo tray right on the board.

Improved

• Grain matched to real film scans. Negative stocks keep a touch of grain in the brightest areas, the black-and-white stock carries stronger grain, and shadow grain takes on colour the way a real scan does.
• Push development and shot exposure. The + development strength is re-fitted to real film data, an over-exposed shot now reads visibly dense the way a scanned negative does, and under-exposure keeps its colour shift to the shadows. Fluorescent Cast (formerly Mixed Light) and Tungsten Balance now appear only for the film stock that uses them.
• The export preview matches the file. The preview in the Export window now renders through the same path as the export itself, so what you see is what you get, glow and all.
• Edit files, tidied. Each photo keeps one hidden edit file beside it, and the app keeps a safety copy of its own. A new setting lets you show the edit files if you prefer to see them. Your photos and existing edits are never affected.
• Faster and lighter. A quicker launch, lower memory while idle, and a welcome card that stays out of the way while a photo opens.

Fixed

• Fujifilm RAW consistency. X-Trans RAW files now develop identically on every open, with full multi-core speed kept.

AI Denoise for RAW photos, HDR export that glows on HDR screens, Retouch redesigned around the faces it finds with a Hair card that removes stray hairs, a Colour card match in Develop, Settings search, and Sony lenses corrected from the camera's own data.

New

• AI Denoise. Effects ▸ Sharpness & Detail ▸ AI Denoise removes high-ISO noise from RAW photos with Chromogen's own model, before the film look and its grain, so the grain lands on a clean picture. It runs on your Mac's processor: the first move runs the model on the whole photo, and the status bar shows its progress.
• HDR export. Turn on Export ▸ Format ▸ HDR (Subtle, Natural or Vivid) and your JPEGs glow on HDR screens, such as recent iPhones, Macs with HDR screens and HDR monitors, while every other screen shows the photo exactly as you edited it. HDR photos your phone saved as JPEG keep their own glowing highlights. Press Shift+H, or click the sun in the photo toolbar, to see where a photo will glow.
• Retouch, redesigned. Retouch finds the faces in a photo on its own and shows them at the top: pick one, and the Face and Makeup cards work on that face. Every one-click fix is now a slider: move it up to run the fix, then it sets the strength, and 0 turns it off to compare. Dust, Reflections and the Heal tool sit together in a Cleanup card, where only your own hand repairs are listed as layers.
• The Hair card removes stray hairs. Around the hair takes the flyaways and smooths the frizz along the hair's outline, clears the fine fringe right beside the hair on plain backgrounds, and keeps connected locks when a repair is uncertain; Over face and body takes loose hairs lying on the face, neck, shoulders and clothes; Across the hair takes loose strands lying across the hair itself, rebuilding the hair under them; Pick by hand removes any hair you click. The Library can remove stray hairs from a whole shoot at once.
• Colour card. Develop has a Colour card, off by default: turn on Colour card in Develop in Settings ▸ Editing ▸ Tools. Photograph a 24-patch colour card (a ColorChecker Classic, Passport, Mini or Nano), press Match, and the photo's white balance and colours are corrected to the card's known values before the film look, so every camera starts from the same baseline. On a camera JPEG the match also reads the card's grey patches and straightens the camera's own tone curve. Drag the corners if they sit off the patches; Amount blends the match; it travels with presets, Sync and Copy settings. Save a match as a profile for your camera, and every photo from that camera you open for the first time starts with the correction already applied, before the film look, with nothing to undo.
• Settings search. Settings has a search box: type a word to see the matching settings from every page in one list, and change them right there. ⌘F jumps to it.
• Hide a Retouch card's changes. The Face, Makeup, Hair and Reshape cards have an eye that hides their changes while you compare; your edits stay as they are.

Improved

• Sony lenses the database does not know. Auto lens correction now corrects them, such as the FE 28-70mm F2 GM, using the correction the camera itself wrote into the RAW file. Lenses the database already knows are unchanged.
• Choose lens closes as soon as you pick a lens (or press Return on a search), and can no longer be left open over a blocked window.
• Blacks in RAW Develop now deepens the darkest tones smoothly from the first step to the left, and true black stays black at every setting, on screen and in exports. Auto develop on RAW photos uses the same curve when it deepens the shadows.
• Clearer tooltips and help for Color tools, Super 8, Library previews, offline photos and Photo info. Messages explain what each action changes and how to continue.

Fixed

• Zooming into a large RAW photo now keeps it in full colour at every zoom level, with the RAW Develop controls working throughout.
• Exporting a very large RAW photo when the Mac is short of memory now asks whether to stop, so you can close other apps and export again, or to export it at half size, still made from the RAW in full colour. It no longer exports the camera's own preview instead.
• Use the default folder in Settings ▸ Library ▸ Storage now also works while the drive holding your chosen cache folder is disconnected, so Chromogen stops looking for that drive.
• Entering your license key again on the same Mac, after an update, a reinstall or a long break, now activates it again instead of telling you it is already active on another computer.
• The keyboard shortcuts list: Esc or ? closes it again, even after clicking a film stock or a button first, and pressing Esc on it no longer quits the app.

The Colour map opens large and draws every colour as a point, photo info typed in the Library and carried into exports, offline photos that wait for their drive, folders that open at once the second time, and a cache folder you choose.

New

• The Colour map opens large. The button at the top of its card opens the Scopes window on a new Colour map tab, drawn sharp at whatever size you make the window and following the map on the panel live. The map on the panel is drawn sharper too, on every screen scale, and its colours are now a fine scatter of points, like a vectorscope's trace, instead of a soft cloud.
• Photo info. Type a photo's title, caption, keywords, creator, copyright and place inside Chromogen: open the Library preview's info panel and fill in Photo info, or select several photos and choose Photo info… to add the same words to all of them. The words are saved beside the photo, never in it, and exports carry them with Keep photo info.
• Keep photo info in exports. Exports now keep the information saved with a photo — title, caption, keywords, creator and contact details, copyright and rating, from the file or from a Bridge or Lightroom sidecar — so it shows in Photoshop, Bridge, Lightroom and Finder. Turn it on or off with Keep photo info under Export ▸ Watermark & metadata; location (GPS) is never written.
• Offline photos. Photos on a drive or card that isn't connected now stay in the Library as Offline, dimmed, and come back by themselves when the drive is; right-click Offline in the sidebar to find a folder that moved. A new setting under Settings ▸ Library can forget them instead.
• Choose where the caches live. Settings ▸ Library ▸ Storage can now move the caches — previews, decoded RAW files and converted DNGs — to a folder you choose, such as a bigger or faster drive, and bring them back to the default with one click. The app keeps working while they move.

Improved

• Folders open at once the second time. A folder you have opened before now opens at once: previews already on disk are used as they are, and "Preparing previews" counts only photos that are new or edited since. Edited photos no longer re-prepare their previews after an update; when an update does change how edits look, each edited photo shows its previous preview while the new one is prepared behind it.
• Previews in the order you look. After a big import, previews now come in the order you look at them: the photo tray fills from the cards in view outward and the Library's own previews are no longer held up by the tray's. Every RAW whose preview is still being prepared shows a quick black-and-white stand-in instead of an empty card, and the big-folder sheet's time estimate is measured from each preview build.
• The caches follow your photos. Deleting a photo now clears its cached previews, decoded RAW file and converted DNG at once. Removing a photo or folder from the Library clears its decoded RAW file and converted DNG but keeps its thumbnails, so adding it back still opens at once.
• The Colour map's dot. Pointing at the photo now moves the Colour map's dot smoothly: it reads a small area around the pointer and settles gently, so grain no longer makes it jump. On Mix, pointing at the photo also shows which Color Mixer range that colour belongs to: its range lights up faintly on the map and the name in the corner adds it, so you can see at a glance which colour's sliders would move it.
• Show affected area. While it is on, a small tag just above the photo names the view and the colour it follows, says when nothing in the photo is in range, and offers Switch off; leaving Color ends the view. The grey preview is never mistaken for a frozen photo.
• Calmer switches. Switching between Color's Grade, Mix, Curves, Skin and Primaries tabs is now a single clean fade, unfolding a card in the panel no longer flashes, and opening a photo from the Library no longer flashes a slightly larger first frame: the editor comes back at its resting size in one step.

Fixed

• The Straighten ruler, in Develop ▸ Geometry and on the crop bar, now follows a slow drag, and the photo keeps up with it.
• The compare room in a narrow window. When the window is too narrow to show the reference beside your photo, your photo now uses the whole stage instead of leaving an empty column, and the room's opening message matches what you see.
• Drops on the References board. Photos dropped from Finder or a browser onto the compare room's References board now land as references.

Color rebuilt as the Colour Studio, big folders in the Library, Super 8, a Skin tool that works on the person in the photo, JPEG exports with full colour detail, smoother slider drags, and more cameras.

New

• Colour Studio. Color is rebuilt around your photo: a live Colour map at the top shows where its colours sit, Vibrance and Saturation stay right under it, and one tool at a time opens below on the Grade, Mix, Curves, Skin and Primaries tabs.
• Edit on the Colour map. Drag a colour round the map to shift its hue, or outward and inward to saturate or mute it; the change lands in the Hue and Sat curves. The map edits whichever tool is open: on Mix, dragging a colour moves that colour's own Hue and Saturation sliders, and the selected colour's range shows on the map with handles to widen or narrow it; on the other tools it bends the Hue vs Hue and Hue vs Sat curves and opens them with the moved point selected, so you see the change as you make it.
• Grade. The four ranges show as small wheels over one large wheel, strength and brightness sit on the ring around the wheel, and the card's Reset clears all four. Blending and Balance set how far the shadow, midtone and highlight tints overlap and where they split.
• Mix. The Color Mixer shows every colour on one row, with the colours you pick from the photo on their own Picked tab and the eyedropper always at the top of the card. Apply to adds a precise brightness range and keeps its labels whole in a narrow panel, and a colour's Smoothness and Apply to now stay with the photo.
• Curves. Five curves on tabs: Hue vs Hue, Hue vs Sat, Hue vs Luma, and the new Luma vs Sat and Sat vs Sat, which calm the saturation of deep shadows and bright highlights or tame only the most saturated colours. A hue grid and a readout of the hue and amount under the pointer, points added on the curve, Shift for fine moves and the arrow keys to nudge, the line drawn in the colours it makes, an eyedropper in the card's header that puts a point where a photo colour sits, and a window of their own.
• Skin. Pick the skin with an eyedropper, shift its colour, even it out and protect it, so a strong grade or colour change leaves faces natural. Skin now applies to the subject by default: it works on the person it finds in the photo, so a wall, sand or wood of a similar colour is left alone, and the card says when no subject was found. Choose Apply to ▸ Whole photo to edit by colour everywhere.
• Primaries. A fifth Color tool moves the red, green and blue every colour is built from: drag the corners of its triangle, with a shadow tint.
• Colour on masks. Every mask's Color card adds Hue and Color Grading wheels, and a mask's Color Grading works like Color's Grade tool: four small wheels show Master, Shadows, Mids and Highs at a glance, and a click on one opens it in the large wheel below.
• Super 8. Small-gauge film character for a photo, with five film looks (50D, 200T, 500T, 100D reversal and 200 B&W reversal), natural clustered grain, soft detail, warm halation around bright details and across the frame edge, and a default Overscan view with generated film frames: black film, the whole sprocket hole with its lit rim, and neighbouring image strips to the edges. Switch to Full photo for an Amount blend; New frame advances a simulated film roll with fresh grain, registration and edge detail.
• Big folders in the Library. A folder of many thousands of photos no longer fills the computer's memory or freezes the import: the Library keeps in memory only the thumbnails near the photos you are looking at, builds a big grid a screen at a time, and prepares previews below your own clicks and scrolls. After an import of more than 1,000 photos it asks whether to prepare every preview now or only as you browse (Settings ▸ Library ▸ Large folders keeps a standing choice), and big RAW files show a quick black-and-white stand-in while their full preview is on its way.

Improved

• JPEG exports keep full colour detail. JPEG exports now keep the photo's full colour detail at every quality setting, so colour grain and fine colour edges in the file match the canvas; JPEG files are around a fifth larger. TIFF and PNG are unchanged. Ask the assistant about screen colours and it also tells you what Chromogen is doing for the screen you are on.
• Subject Glow follows the outline. The light now follows the subject's outline, and a small or narrow subject glows as a large one does at every Glow size, instead of fading to a plain white cutout as the glow widens.
• Smoother slider drags. Dragging a slider redraws the photo more often: photos with no film stock chosen yet and film stocks with softness now develop on your Mac's graphics chip, photos wearing a film border redraw more often, an Instant Film print keeps its paper, frame and backdrop between redraws, and VHS keeps its tape work space between frames. What you see when you let go is unchanged.
• More cameras. Sigma Foveon (X3F) files open as camera RAW, and Pentax, Phase One, Leaf, Samsung NX, Konica Minolta and Kodak bodies that were treated as unknown cameras are recognised. A Pentax 645Z photo opens at the camera's own 4:3 frame, without the dark and light strips that ran down its sides, and a Samsung NX200 / NX210 photo no longer shows a coloured line along one edge.

Fixed

• Edits are kept. A photo opened while its edit file was briefly unavailable (a sync service or a virus scan reading it, a network drive waking up) keeps that edit, and it is there the next time you open the photo. A change made while a zoomed-in photo was still sharpening is now saved like any other change, and zooming, or turning a section off and on, no longer saves an unchanged edit again, so it can no longer replace a newer edit of the same photo made on another computer. Your photo files were never affected.
• All colours on the graphics chip. With a Color Mixer colour edited, the All colours sliders now take effect when the photo develops on your Mac's graphics chip, on screen and in exports.
• Reset Edits in the Library now also resets the photo open in the editor, so your next change there no longer brings the old edit back.
• Text behind the subject no longer appears in front for a few seconds when a photo is reopened: the words wait until the subject has been found, then appear behind it.
• Mockups. Opening another mockup no longer shows the previous one's picture, dimmed, while the new one renders.

A compare room that matches your photo to a reference, a reorganised Text mode with text behind the subject, straightening with guides, Colour separation, and better Panasonic, Hasselblad and compact-camera RAW support.

New

• Compare room. Reference, now a mode in the toolbar, opens a compare room with your photo beside up to four reference photos. Under the two photos, switch between their histograms, Numbers, Scopes, a Tone map and a Colour cube, with a Difference score out of 100 and a few words on how your photo differs.
• Match. Match moves your photo toward the reference's contrast, black and white points, colour, saturation and as much of its brightness as you choose, by adjusting your Develop curves; your film stock, sliders, effects and masks stay as they are. Its panel sets what to match and the strength, matching again replaces the earlier match, and one undo takes it back.
• Faces, skies and several references. Match finds faces and a clear sky in both photos: the faces keep their own skin tone, white balance comes from neutral greys or from the faces, never from the scene's own colours, and a sky is matched only when both photos show one. With two or more references on the board, Match uses the look they share, or only the current reference if you choose.
• Colour cube. See each photo's colours in a cube you can turn and zoom, one dot per colour, larger the more of the photo shares it, side by side or together in one cube. Right-click it to show only the neutral greys, follow each photo's grey spine from dark to light, change the colour space or stretch muted colours ×2 or ×4.
• Match selected photos. Select two or more photos in the tray (⌘-click or Shift-click) and choose Match selected photos to see how each one differs from the reference, then press Match all to match them together. One undo takes them all back.
• The compare room in its own window. Open in a window moves the compare room into its own window, with its own Match and Undo, that you can drag to a second display. The icon in its title bar docks it back, and Reference reopens it the way you used it last.
• Text behind the subject. Choose Behind on the type bar, or turn on Behind the subject at the top of Style, and the photo's person or object is laid over your words. The arrow beside Behind opens Subject edge and Softness to fine-tune the outline, and Refine subject mask lets you paint where the subject covers the text.
• Text effects. In Style, Finish adds a glow or chrome look to the letters, the drop shadow gains Softness, Angle and a colour, and outlines and plates take any colour; Letter fill runs a gradient through the letters or shows the photo inside them. Arrange ▸ Shape bends a line of text into an arc, a wave or a full circle.
• More type styles. Bold, Strikethrough, Small caps and Title Case join Italic, Underline and All caps in Type ▸ Character and on the type bar. Filter the font list by Sans, Serif, Script, Mono or Display, and rest the pointer on a font to see it on your photo before you choose it.
• Styled watermarks. In Export ▸ Watermark & metadata, Style sets your watermark in one of six text looks, such as Film title or Signature, and Logo adds your own image. Place, Size, Opacity, Inset and Rotation then set where it sits, how large and strong it is, and whether it runs up or down the side.
• Text layer groups. Select two or more text layers and press ⌘G, or the folder button above the layer list, to group them; a group moves, hides and deletes together, and ⇧⌘G ungroups.
• Move several texts at once. ⌘-click or Shift-click text layers on the photo or in the layer list, then drag any of them to move them together; the arrow keys, Delete and ⌘D act on all of them.
• Smart guides. While you drag text, magenta lines show when it lines up with other text or with the photo's centre and edges, pink bands show equal spacing, and the text snaps into place. Hold ⌘ to move it freely.
• Equal spacing. Arrange ▸ Position & grid spaces three or more selected text layers evenly, left to right or top to bottom.
• Copied text onto many photos. The arrow beside Add text pastes copied text onto every selected photo at once, as one undo step. Copied text is now kept after you close Chromogen.
• Straighten with guides. In the Crop tool, press G and drag a line along an edge that should be level or upright: one line levels the photo, and two along the sides of a building also fix its perspective. The lines stay with the photo, so you can adjust them later.
• Auto straighten. Horizon levels a tilted horizon, Uprights stands leaning walls up and Both does both, from Develop ▸ Geometry or the wand on the crop bar. When a photo has no clear edges, Auto says so and opens the guides for you.
• Colour separation. A new control on the Develop tab of Film Stock's Fine-tune makes a colour stock's colours separate further from each other, the way the layers of a colour negative do, without clipping. It starts at 0, so photos you have already edited look exactly as before.
• A short tour for new installs. On a new install, the first photo you open starts a four-card tour of Film Stock, Shuffle, Develop and Export, with a Try Shuffle button. Settings ▸ General ▸ Take the tour shows it again.
• Edited dots. A small dot on a section in the sidebar shows that it holds edits on the open photo, so you can see where your changes are at a glance, even with the sidebar folded.
• Arrow keys and Select all. Press ← or → while you edit to open the previous or next photo in the photo tray. Copy an edit with ⌘C, press ⌘A to select every photo in the Library or the photo tray, then press ⌘V to paste it onto all of them at once.
• Studio device mockups. Mockups ▸ Devices adds iPhone 18 Pro Max in studio, iPhone Duo in studio and iPad Pro in studio, each placing your photo on the device's screen in a white studio, with adjustable screen brightness and glass reflections. The iPhone Duo is unfolded and shows one photo across its display.

Improved

• Four toolbar modes. The toolbar now starts with four modes, Photo, Text, Shuffle and Reference, shown as icons: the open one is highlighted and each shows its name when you point at it. The rest of the toolbar holds the open mode's controls, such as Shuffle's groups and Shuffle again, or Match and Open in a window.
• Zoom, rotate and full screen in one place. They moved into the Fit chip at the end of the Photo toolbar, which shows Fit or the zoom percentage: click it to switch between Fit and 100%, or open its arrow for Zoom in, Zoom out, Rotate left, Rotate right and Full screen.
• Text, reorganised. With no text selected, the panel on the right is Layouts, which arranges your Headline, Subhead and Body for you: rest the pointer on a look to see it on your photo, and Try another layout gives a new arrangement in the same look. Select a text to edit it in Type, Style and Arrange; Add text is on the type bar, and with no text selected a click on the photo starts a new text there.
• The type bar. The font menu lists your favourite and recently used fonts first, with a search and the font filters, and alignment is one button with a menu that includes Justify for a paragraph. The weight and the style buttons stay on the bar whenever there is room, More appears only when the bar is too narrow, and a trash button beside Done deletes the selected text.
• Text at the photo's edge. Text you move to the edge of the photo now keeps its size and line breaks and can run past the edge, which cuts it off. To have text shrink and re-wrap to stay on the photo instead, choose Fit inside in Settings ▸ Editing ▸ Text ▸ At the photo's edge.
• Edits reach every selected text. Font, style, size, colour, finish, blending and alignment changes now apply to every selected text layer at once.
• Placing text. New text takes dark or light ink to stay readable on the photo under it, and a round handle above a selected line of text turns it.
• Text settings in one place. Animate text changes, Drag text on the photo, Double-click text to edit and Snap text to the grid when dragging are now in Settings ▸ Editing ▸ Text (the gear on the Text panel opens it), where Chromogen remembers them.
• Develop ▸ Geometry. New Vertical, Horizontal and Aspect controls under Perspective correct converging lines by hand and show what the guides or Auto straighten set. Straighten is now a ruler: drag it to turn the photo, use the mouse wheel or the arrow keys for a tenth of a degree, and double-click it to return to level. The flip buttons now read Flip horizontal and Flip vertical.
• Film Stock Fine-tune tabs. Fine-tune now sits on four tabs: Texture (Film Grain, Film Halation), Develop (Shot Exposure, Development, Scan balance, Colour separation), Print (Silver stage, Silver Retention, Print Compensation) and Scan (Film border, Anchor black point). A small dot marks a tab with a value off its default, the card opens on the tab you used last, and Film border shows each choice as a small picture.
• Panasonic Lumix RAW files. Lumix RAW files shot with the camera set to 1:1, 4:3, 16:9, 2:1 or 65:24 now open in that shape, as the camera showed them; Reset crop in Develop ▸ Geometry brings back the whole frame. The S1 II, S1 IIE, G97, G95D and TZ95D now open with their own colour, the TZ95D straight from the RAW, and the S1R II's 177 MP High Resolution mode files now open from the RAW. Auto lens correction now recognises the lens on more Lumix photos.
• Compact cameras open as the camera showed them. RAW files from Nikon Coolpix, Canon PowerShot and Panasonic Lumix compacts (TZ, ZS, LX and FZ) and the Leica C-Lux, D-Lux and V-Lux now open with the camera's own lens correction, so lines look as straight as they did on the camera. Photos you have already edited keep their lens setting; turn off Auto lens correction to see the whole sensor.
• Hasselblad RAW files. Hasselblad 3FR and FFF files can now be chosen in Open and in Library ▸ Add ▸ Add photos…, and so can every other RAW file type Chromogen reads. The photo tray's RAW filter now shows them all too.
• .NET 10. Chromogen now runs on .NET 10, Microsoft's current long-term-support release, supported until November 2028. It is built into the app, so there is nothing extra to install.
• Pick this look in Shuffle. Point at a look and choose Pick this look to switch your photo to it and leave Shuffle. Done, on the centre image, leaves Shuffle with your photo as it is.
• Colour separation in Shuffle. Shuffle can now vary Colour separation on colour stocks, and each look's label says how much it uses. Set its range, or switch it off to keep your own setting, in Shuffle's Develop group.
• Undo a paste onto many photos. ⌘Z now takes a pasted edit back off every photo it landed on, and each photo gets its earlier edit back; ⇧⌘Z pastes it again. A photo you changed after the paste keeps that change.
• Remove or delete several photos at once. Select photos in the photo tray or the Library, then right-click one of them: Remove N from Library and Delete N from Computer… now act on all of them, after a confirmation.
• Deleting the photo you are editing. The editor now moves on to the next photo in the photo tray and stays on the same page, and the deleted photo's saved edits go to the Trash with it. Delete the last photo and the editor is left empty.
• Your watermark in the Export preview. The Export preview now shows your watermark where and how each file will carry it, and updates as you change it.
• New installs. On a new install, the toolbar starts docked at the top of the photo and the sidebar lists Color right after Develop. Existing setups keep their toolbar and sidebar as they are.
• Clearer wording. Labels, tooltips and the assistant's help answers are plainer and clearer, and the photos you pick for batch actions are now called selected photos (⌘-click or Shift-click to select).
• The Reset Edits message now says what happens: the photo goes back to how it looked when you first opened it, and ⌘Z brings your edits back until you close Chromogen.
• The crop bar. Its drop-down arrows now match, and it keeps its full row of ratios in smaller windows again. To level a photo while cropping, double-click the straighten dial.

Fixed

• Resizing text from a corner. Dragging a corner of a text box now scales the text smoothly while the opposite corner stays in place, and Type ▸ Character shows the new size.
• Words and layers stay in step. Clearing a field in Layouts ▸ Words now takes that text off the photo and out of the layer list, and deleting a text clears its field.
• Type controls. The type bar's size field now shows long sizes such as 269.7 in full, and the font and weight boxes in Type ▸ Character stand out clearly from the panel.
• Dark edges stay in the picture. RAW files from several Lumix and Leica cameras, and from the Hasselblad X1D, X2D 100C, X2D II 100C and H6D-400c MS (single shots), no longer lose a dark right or bottom edge, such as a night sky or a black backdrop, when they open. Your RAW files were never changed.
• Menus. In the Light theme, menus, submenus and right-click menus are now light with dark text that reads clearly. In the dark theme, submenus and right-click menus now match every other menu, so their dividing lines and the highlighted row are easy to see.
• Watermarks on prints. On a print with bleed or printer's marks, your watermark now sits on the photo inside the trim instead of on the edge the cut removes.
• The Before / After divider can now be dragged while Subject Glow's Pick, the Print effect's Pick object or the Object mask is waiting for a click.
• The Archivo font. Text set in Archivo on Windows now shows in Archivo on the Mac too, instead of a different font.

Subject Glow, smoother slider drags, Undo that keeps each photo’s steps, and your latest edit always kept.

New

• Subject Glow. New in Effects ▸ Light & Atmosphere: the subject turns into glowing white light and the scene takes a cool night tone. The subject is found for you; click any object or paint on the photo to choose exactly what glows. Glow sets the halo, Night darkens the scene, and Tone chooses Moonlight, Sea or Natural.

Improved

• Smoother slider drags. Dragging a slider now updates the photo much more smoothly, most of all with a film stock and a film border on. What you see when you let go is unchanged.
• Undo keeps each photo’s steps. Undo now keeps each photo’s steps until you close Chromogen, so you can return to a photo and undo, even after Reset Edits. A change made just before you close the app is now saved.
• Motion Blur’s layer brush now erases or restores the blur fully in one stroke.

Fixed

• Your latest edit always wins. A Library export, a thumbnail or a photo you came back to could show an earlier version of your edits. Your latest edit now always wins, even when a photo’s folder can’t be written (the edits are kept in a backup on your computer until it can), and Save (⌘S) always saves a RAW’s edits and tells you if it couldn’t. Your photo files were never affected.

Star Filter, crop grids, photo calendars, Editorial layouts with words, Add to Library and Book Studio from Layout, an Effects group in Variations, a more natural Instant Film, Reshape you can watch while you drag, and better Sony, Nikon, Canon, Fujifilm and Olympus RAW support.

New

• Star Filter. New in Effects: the lights in your photo grow rays the way they do through a star filter on the lens. A brighter light reaches further, a coloured light makes coloured rays, and a plain bright wall only glows. Choose 2, 4, 6 or 8 points or the sunstar of a lens iris, turn the rays, set their length, and fine-tune the threshold, the colour along the rays, their softness and the glow around each light.
• Crop grids. Crop has nine grid overlays: Thirds, Grid, Golden ratio, Golden spiral, Golden triangle, Diagonal, Centre and Dynamic symmetry, or none. Pick one from the new Grid button on the crop bar (point at a tile to preview it on your photo), or press O to step through them and Shift+O to turn the spiral (eight ways, including upright) or the triangle. A fine grid appears while you straighten.
• Photo calendar. New in Layout: Calendar turns a month into one picture with a photo on each day, filled from the photos you shot or edited that day, over a colour or a photo of your choice. Shuffle shows other photos from the same days. Open it from Layout or from Photo calendar in the Calendar's Month view.
• Editorial layouts. Layout ▸ Collage now has an Editorial style: thirty magazine and photo-book pages, at least four for every number of photos, with room around the photos and words you can edit. Give each title, caption or note its own font, weight, size and colour, and drag the words where you want them while guides line them up with the photos and the page.
• Edit a photo from its layout. Edit any photo in a layout straight from its frame, then use Back to Layout to return to it. The Layout panel is simpler: your layout saves itself, New starts over, and exported files are named for you.
• Add to Library and Add to Book Studio. In Layout, Add to Library saves your collage, carousel, contact sheet or calendar as a photo in your Library, and Add to Book Studio places it on the next empty page of your book, so you no longer export it and bring it back in.
• An Effects group in Variations. Switch on Thermal, VHS, Digicam, Film damage, Date stamp, Pre-exposed, Invert or Print to let it appear on the looks Variations deals, each in a fresh setting of its own. All eight start switched off, so your photo's own effects stay as they are until you choose.

Improved

• Instant Film Reagent Spread. Reagent Spread creates more natural uneven development, with subtle roller streaks and stronger chemical variation at higher settings. The pattern stays consistent between preview and export.
• Instant Film backdrop and shadow. The print stays centred when you adjust Print Size or change the backdrop. Its shadow follows the paper edges more closely, with a new Shadow Strength slider to lighten, deepen or remove it. Choosing Backdrop None now removes the extra background from Mini and Wide, leaving only the paper print.
• Reshape. Reshape now moves the photo under the brush while you drag, so you see each push, grow or shrink before you let go.
• Sony RAW files. Sony RAW files shot with the camera set to 1:1, 4:3 or 16:9 now open in that shape, like the camera shows them; Reset crop brings back the whole frame. Sony a7CR RAW files, and a7R VI photos shot in its lossless RAW format, now open straight from the RAW at full quality, with no DNG Converter needed. Sony RX1R III photos open with more accurate colour.
• Nikon RAW files. Exports of Nikon High Efficiency RAW files are always made from the full RAW when Adobe's free DNG Converter is installed, and an export made from the camera's preview now says so. Coolpix superzoom RAW files, such as the A1000 and B700, open with the camera's own lens correction: no dark corners or bent lines. NEF scans saved by Nikon Scan from a Coolscan film scanner now open. Library thumbnails and batch exports now apply Auto lens correction too.
• Canon RAW files. Canon RAW files shot with the camera set to 1:1, 4:3 or 16:9 now open in that shape, like the camera shows them; Reset crop brings back the whole frame. Canon PowerShot RAW files (G7 X, G5 X, G9 X, G1 X, S and SX series) open with the camera's own lens correction: no dark corners or bent lines at the wide end, and Auto lens correction applies the camera's correction on the others. Canon CRW files (the EOS D30, D60, 10D, 300D and the PowerShot G1 to G6) now show their camera, date taken and exposure in the photo info, keep that information in exported photos, and sort and organize by the date taken. Canon EOS R8 and R5 Mark II photos now take part in Auto develop and the roll pass like every other camera; the Library draws their picture from the RAW itself, since those files carry no JPEG preview.
• Fujifilm RAW files. Fujifilm RAW files taken at DR200 or DR400, or at a high ISO, now open as bright as the camera showed them, with RAW Exposure raised by the stops the camera held back. Fujifilm GFX100 II, GFX100S, GFX100S II and GFX50S II RAW files are now recognised as supported cameras. Fujifilm X-E5 and GFX100RF RAW files now open from the RAW at full resolution, with accurate colour, and Fujifilm X-T30 III colour is more accurate.
• Olympus and OM System RAW files. OM System OM-3 RAW files now open straight from the RAW at full quality instead of as the camera's preview, OM System OM-5 Mark II photos open with more accurate colour, and the Olympus E-M10 Mark IIIs is recognised as a supported camera. Olympus and OM System RAW files from the E-M1 Mark II and III, E-M5 Mark II and III, E-M10 Mark II and IV, OM-1 Mark II, TG-7 and several older compacts are now recognised as supported cameras.
• Photo info for more RAW files. Olympus, OM System, Panasonic and Leica RAW files now show their camera, date taken and exposure in the photo info, keep that information in exported photos, and sort, group and organize by the date they were taken. RAW files from older cameras (Minolta, older Canon, Sigma, Leaf, Kodak and Phase One) now show their camera, date and exposure. Organize files RAW photos by camera, ISO and aperture correctly.

Fixed

• Heal, Clone, Remove and Reshape on an edited photo now work exactly where you click or drag on a cropped, rotated, straightened, flipped or bordered photo, and with lens correction applied; the Adjust eyes by hand outlines sit on the eyes in every case.
• Masks on a flipped photo now land where you work. A brush stroke no longer jumps to the mirrored side when you let go, and gradients, radials, Subject and Object selections and Print's Protect Subject follow the photo as you see it.
• The pickers read the spot under the pointer on an edited photo: the White Balance picker, the colour pickers and Pull from photo, on a cropped, turned, straightened, flipped or bordered photo.
• Before / After keeps the photo's shape. Holding Space to view the original and the Compare divider now show your photo at its true shape on framed photos: inside a border or a film strip, on a poster page, and with Instant Film on, inside the same print, so only the look changes.
• Zoomed in on an Instant Film print, edits now update the photo right away.
• Sony Medium and Small RAW sizes no longer open with a magenta cast.
• Sony RX10 V and RX1R III photos taken in portrait or upside down no longer open with a black band along one edge.
• Nikon RAW S (small NEF) files, from cameras such as the D4S and D810, no longer open with a pink cast.
• Fujifilm edges. X-M5 and X-T30 III photos no longer show a thin black band along the right edge, X-H2S and X-S20 photos no longer show a thin coloured line along the bottom edge, and X-Trans previews no longer show green dots along the left edge.
• Shutter speeds between a third of a second and one second now show correctly in the photo info, for example 0.4s and 0.8s instead of 1/2 and 1/1.

Reduce reflections, Copy from card and faster culling, Draw, VHS, Thermal and Stamp Cutout, text blending, new mockups and Calendar holidays, and a free trial that lets you use every film stock.

New

• Reduce reflections. Retouch ▸ Reduce reflections reduces reflections in photos taken through windows or glass, as a layer you can adjust, compare or remove. Reduce reflections further adds another pass, up to three. Processing stays on your Mac; results vary with the photo.
• Fix dust and Show spots. Fix dust finds sensor dust on skies and other smooth areas and leaves textured areas alone. Show spots displays the photo as a grey relief so you can find specks and remove them with the Heal tool.
• Copy from card. Import the new photos from a camera card with Card in the top bar or Library ▸ Add ▸ Copy from card…, choosing Photos, Photos + videos or Whole card, filed by day, by month or in one folder. Each file is checked against the card after copying, and photos you have already copied are skipped.
• Faster culling. Marking a photo in the Library preview moves on to the next one, RAW previews are prepared ahead, and Z zooms in to check focus. Compare up to four photos side by side, undo a mark with ⌘Z, and move the rejects to the Trash in one step after confirming.
• Try every film stock. The free trial now lets you use every film stock. Premium stocks and their looks carry a Chromogen trial mark until you buy a license; the free stocks export clean, as before.
• Draw. Press D to draw on a photo with Freehand, Line, Circle or Arrow, using a Crayon, Felt pen, Paint or Pen brush in any colour. Marks stay on what they circle when you crop or rotate, and they are included in exports.
• Text blending. Select a text layer and open Blending to choose one of 17 blend modes and set Opacity. For headlines, Fill fades only the letters, and Knockout cuts them through a plate, outline or shadow to show the photo.
• VHS. In Effects, VHS gives a still photo a camcorder-and-tape look: choose Tape, Amount and System (NTSC or PAL), and use Stamp to add the photo's date, time or both. Fine-tune adjusts Colour bleed, Noise, Sharpness, Tracking, Wobble and Dropouts.
• Thermal. Thermal maps brightness to one of seven false-colour palettes, chosen from gradient chips. Fine-tune adjusts Shift, Repeat, tone and Edges, and Shuffle in the card header tries another combination.
• Stamp Cutout. Choose a Shape and Size, then click the photo to cut a stamp and set it on paper beside the photo it came from. Stamps ▸ Several adds a stamp with each click; Edge & texture, Layout and Paper finish the sheet.
• Silver Retention. In Film Stock ▸ Fine-tune, Silver Retention adds contrast and muted colour to every colour stock, with Print Compensation to control brightness. On colour negatives, Silver stage offers Negative for brighter highlights and more contrast, or Print for deeper, less saturated shadows.
• Instant Film: New frame and Paper colour. New frame picks another paper texture, edge and corner variation for the selected format, and Paper colour sets the print's border, white by default.
• New mockups. Books adds Book on steel, Book in studio, Warm open book and Centered book flat lay. Devices adds Phone in shadow, three laptops, Watch on steel, iPhone Duo on steel, iPad Air on steel and iPod on steel. A new CDs category offers CD on gray, CD case in shadow and CD in clear sleeve, and Your room adds Museum audience: your framed print on a gallery wall in front of visitors.
• Adjust for mockups. Fine-tune (Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Saturation and Warmth) and Grain for the whole scene and artwork.
• Calendar holidays. Calendar shows public holidays for 55 countries and regions, each in its own colour; choose them with the gear in Calendar. Every to-do has its own colour, and right-clicking a day, shoot or to-do shows its actions.

Improved

• Shot Exposure and Development. A new film response, with Shot Exposure as the capture exposure and Development as push or pull processing, on every stock including Azura 100, the Prisma looks and Instant. Scan balance in Film Stock ▸ Fine-tune sets how much of the brightness change is compensated. Photos edited before this update keep their look, in Develop, in the Library and in batch exports.
• Auto develop and white balance. More consistent starting points, including on RAW photos and scenes with a strong blue cast. Auto in White Balance gives the same balance as Auto develop, the pipette samples a small area around your click, and on JPEG and other non-RAW photos the Kelvin slider runs from 800 to 15000 K.
• Text on a shape. Wrap flows a paragraph around a drawn shape or line, Subject uses the outline of the photo's subject as the shape, and pausing before you release snaps a stroke to a clean line, arc, circle or ellipse.
• Text layers. Drag a row in the Layers list to change the stacking order, ⌘D duplicates a layer, Add text also adds a scrim, caption bar or rule line, and the Finish card adds a drop shadow, outline or plate.
• Light Leak. Five new leaks based on real film scans (Door Band, Streak, Flame, Open Back and Torn Seal) and a Shuffle in the card header; black-and-white stocks use neutral leaks. Existing leaks take the revised colour, and Edge Fog, Corner Glow and Double take revised shapes.
• Shuffle. Double-click a look to keep it and finish. The Develop group can vary Silver retention, and the Film border options are simpler.
• Mockups. Drag a photo to move it, scroll to resize it, double-click to reset it, or drag any corner or edge of its box; the photo stays within its screen or print. Book covers carry your photo across the whole front, Reflected light sets the highlights in book scenes, and Screen brightness sets the display in device scenes. The gallery lists photo scenes first.
• Export, reorganized. Export settings are grouped into cards in the order you decide them, with a Digital | Print switch at the top. Trial exports go up to 2048 px; full-size and print exports need a license.
• The assistant. Ask about any tool, effect, workspace or setting and follow up without repeating the name. Suggested questions appear under each answer, a control named in an answer takes you to it, and more ways of asking are understood.
• Instant Film uses its own print frame, with no film border added around it.
• Clearer wording in tooltips, messages and settings across the app.
• A tool rail docked at the side moves extra tools into the … menu while the photo tray is open.
• Better colour from some newer cameras' RAW files, including the Canon EOS R6 Mark III. Your original files are unchanged. The first time you open each RAW photo after updating, it takes a moment longer.

Fixed

• Zoomed to 100%, the whole view stays sharp while you drag around the photo, right up to the edge of a photo with a Scan edge or Lab scan border.
• Grain and fine detail stay consistent when you zoom back out, including in Before / After.
• The top bar stays still while previews are being prepared.
• At the smallest window sizes, the tool rail settles on its buttons straight away.

Variations deals nine takes of your photo, text follows a drawn shape or line, five more lab-scan frames, and the Colour Mixer’s All colours work beside a band — now on the Mac.

New

• Variations. Your photo as a grid of nine takes. Click the one you like and eight more are dealt around it. Lock the film, the develop, the finish or the tone, and set the range from subtle to wild. On the Film Stock card.
• Text on a shape or a line. Draw a shape or a line on the photo and type along it, inside or outside, above or below. The Shape tool on the type bar.
• Five more lab-scan frames, seventeen in all, cut so the black wraps the photo the way real scans do. A photo saved with a frame keeps it.

Improved

• Azura 100 shows its grain. The slide now carries the fine grain a scanner reads from real slide film, rendered on your Mac’s graphics chip. Existing Azura edits pick it up the next time they open.
• Colour Mixer. The eyedropper shows when it is armed, All colours (hue, saturation, lightness) work alongside a colour band, and Reset puts the picker away.
• Zoomed in, a lab-scan frame stays the frame. The band and the rounded corners are never painted over.
• Plainer words throughout. Labels, tooltips and empty states say what they do, and every label fits its button.
• The license screen says exactly what happens when a trial ends.
• Book Studio’s header fits on one line, with the page tools and the tabs on one centre.
• The graphics-chip preview and the export agree in Colour Unify.

Remove in the Heal tool, Lens Sharpen, scan grain on the colour stocks, automatic lens correction, and support for the newest cameras — now on the Mac.

New

• Remove, in the Heal tool. Brush over a thing, or click an object, and the gap fills from the photo itself. Each removal is a row in the Retouch passes, the film look and grain go on over it like any other repair, and nothing leaves your Mac.
• Lens Sharpen. The detail the lens and the sensor softened, put back before the film goes on. In Effects, under Sharpness & Detail.
• Six grain types. Each has its own character, and the choice is kept with the photo. Grain on a photo without a film stock is now a lab scan’s grain.
• Automatic lens correction. The lens named in the photo’s EXIF has its distortion, colour fringing and vignetting corrected from a library of over 1,500 profiles, or pick the lens by hand. Off by default; turn it on in the Lens section.
• New frame with every stock. A switch in Settings gives the film border a fresh frame each time you pick a stock, and the New frame buttons never repeat one.
• New cameras. Nikon Z 5 II, Z 50 II and ZR, Panasonic S1R II, Canon EOS R50 V and Sony a7 V open with their own colour. Nikon High Efficiency files are labelled as such, and .nrw files appear in the pick lists.

Improved

• Scan grain on the colour film stocks. Every colour-negative stock now carries the grain a lab scanner reads from real film, and it renders on your Mac’s graphics chip.
• Lab scan is the default film border. New photos start with it; your existing setting moves to it once, and Settings keeps your choice from there.
• One switch for Heal, Clone and Remove in the Heal bar.
• Under the hood. Sturdier reading of unusual RAW files, and the latest decoder for the cameras above.

Fixed

• RAW photos open with the same look every time, zoomed in or not. After this update each RAW is read once more the first time it opens, then cached again.
• Old Fujifilm SuperCCD RAW files now open.
• A RAW that needs the free Adobe DNG Converter now always starts the conversion, and the converted photo opens in full quality.
• A camera the app does not know yet opens as the camera’s own preview.

Motion Blur on its own layer, a Film border picker on the Film Stock card, and presets you can preview by pointing at them — now on the Mac.

New

• Motion Blur on a layer. Turn on Blur on a layer and the blur sits on its own layer over your photo. Keep the subject sharp, set the blur’s opacity, and erase or restore it with a brush. With a mask, choose to blur inside or outside it. The on-photo dial tucks itself away while you work and comes back when you point at it.
• Film border on the Film Stock card. Pick Off, Scan edge, Lab scan, 35mm strip or Medium format right where you choose your film, and set the one new photos start with in Settings.

Improved

• Cleaner dropdowns. Every dropdown in the side panel is a clear pill, with its value always in the same place.
• A tidier Lip Makeup panel. The finish choice appears only when there is a finish to choose.
• Under the hood. The app now runs on the latest platform security updates.

Fixed

• Pointing at an imported preset previews it on your photo before you click, zoomed in or not.

Lip Makeup and Eyebrow Styles, Motion Blur, Lab Scan film frames, a Calendar for your shoots, Send to your other editors, and a faster, steadier Library — now on the Mac.

New

• Lip Makeup. A Velvet finish with one strength slider and its own colour, and a soft fade across the lip outline so the colour never ends in a hard line. Adjust outline lets you correct the mouth by hand: Detect again, or Mouth closed for a mouth read as open.
• Eyebrow Styles. Natural, Soft Sweep and Lifted Arch reshape the photographed brow hairs before the brow makeup goes on.
• Face card by part. Skin, Outline, Eyes, Nose and Mouth each have their own page, Makeup is its own card, and Skin has Skin Cleanup and Eye bags. Skin Cleanup now keeps textured and freckled skin as skin, and everything it needs is inside the app.
• The heal bar. Healing moves into the tool rail with Spot outlines (Auto, On, Off), Fix dust and New pass at hand; a dragged stroke draws as one outline.
• Motion Blur. Linear, Zoom and Spin blur with its own apply area: the background, the subject, or a mask you paint.
• Lab Scan film frames. Film Border › Scan edge gains a Lab scan style: real lab-scanned 35 mm frames laid over your photo, with the paper, the black band and its soft edges, the gold light at the frame gap and the film-base fringe. Light bleed, Bleed colour and Base fringe controls, and New frame rolls another of the twelve.
• Calendar. A Calendar in the Library: an edit meter for every day, Month, Logbook, Shoots and Year views, labels and highlights on dates, to-dos, shoots with call sheets, and a goal you set for a selection of photos.
• Send to. Right-click a photo and hand it to Capture One, Lightroom or Photoshop.

Improved

• Library and the photo tray. The tray shows what is on screen at once, card menus open on the first right-click, the grid stands ready behind the page, and the Library stays responsive while thumbnails render, retouched photos included.
• Steadier when the computer is busy. The app keeps its memory in check when little is free, and stays responsive through it.
• Added photos land where you work. An opened or dropped photo lands in your last Edit section, several photos land together, Import date groups by day, and the Library chip row wraps instead of overflowing.
• Each photo is metered on its own the moment it opens.
• Compare. The before / after divider is the same thin bar with the chevron capsule as on Windows.

Fixed

• A RAW file the app cannot open shows an empty stage with a clear message instead of the previous picture.
• Retouch pass names fit their row in the pass register.

Mockups of your photo on devices, frames, posters, books and billboards; a Face card in the new Retouch workspace; Auto Develop — now on the Mac.

New

• Mockups. Put your photo on 45 scenes: a laptop, a display, a tablet and a phone rendered in 3D; framed prints in three rooms; and photographed frames, posters, books, albums, billboards and street displays that keep the paper, glass and print surface of the real scene. The cards fill with your photo the moment the page opens, grouped by subject with a 3D / Photo / Your room filter and a card-size slider. Pick a card, turn the camera, choose the finish, crop the print, and export at 2000, 3000 or 4000 px in 16:9, 1:1, 4:5 or the scene’s own framing, or all three formats at once. Your own wall and an exhibition gallery round out the set. The 3D scenes render through a portable copy of Blender that the app fetches once, or an existing Blender 5.2, on Apple silicon Macs; Intel Macs keep every photographed scene.
• Book Studio, redesigned. A full-window studio with rulers on the edge, drag and drop from your own photos and the edited-photo tray, editable pages, and a print-ready PDF.
• Retouch: Heal, Reshape and a new Face card. Chromogen finds the faces in a photo and gives you shape sliders, skin smoothing that keeps texture, and makeup: eyeliner in three styles with a wing length, mascara on the photo’s own lashes, kohl, brows and lips. Drag the eye outlines by hand when you want them elsewhere. Faces turned on their side are found too. The precision models come with the app.
• Auto Develop. One click meters brightness, balance and tone for a photo, on RAW and JPEG alike, and the Roll pass gives every photo from the same roll a consistent read. Built for wedding and event work.
• Customize. Right-click the sidebar or the Effects panel to drag sections into your own order, hide what you never use, and rename what you keep.
• Copy and paste edits. Copy an edit from one photo in the tray and paste it onto another, or onto every selected photo at once; shift-click selects a run of photos.

Improved

• Instagram. The grid finds the photo you are editing and pins it in an Editing row at the top of the photo list, every tile has a right-click menu, the story shows at a true 9:16 with zoom and placement, the grid run starts from the phone with a crop card beside it, a double-click opens a post, and the Share card previews the export.
• Text. Letters space exactly as they render while you type, a change lands in one step with the words standing in until it does, and text joins a design as a role: text-only develops, multi-select alignment, and copy and paste of text layers.
• The photo tray is ready before it opens, keeps a still preview pill, and rises with the photo.

Fixed

• Show original works while zoomed in. Holding the eye past fit now shows the original at full sharpness.

Develop on the graphics chip, print-ready export, and real highlight recovery for RAW — now on the Mac.

New

• Develop on your Mac’s graphics chip. Every adjustment now renders on the graphics chip, so edits land in a few milliseconds instead of a noticeable pause, on RAW and large files too. It is on by default; turn it off any time in Settings › Editing › GPU Develop.
• Print-ready export. A new Print size in the Export window: paper sizes at your chosen resolution, borders, bleed, crop marks, colour bars and a file-info strip for the lab, sharpening tuned to the paper surface, PDF output, and a choice of colour space (sRGB, Adobe RGB, Display P3 or ProPhoto) with the profile embedded. The print resolution is written into every file.
• Test strips and soft proofing. Export a test strip of the print’s middle band at the print’s own scale before committing to a full sheet, and preview the export through your lab’s or paper’s ICC profile, with paper white simulated and colours the paper cannot print marked. Drag to pan the 1:1 preview.
• Star ratings from the right-click menu. Rate photos on the Library grid and in the bottom tray with a right-click, and switching to the Library now lands on the photo you are editing.

Improved

• RAW highlight recovery recovers real detail. Blown highlights in RAW files are rebuilt from the data the sensor still holds instead of being flattened to white, so skies and bright edges keep their tone and colour. RAW files with blown highlights render differently by default as a result.
• Zooming a RAW is smooth. Zoom in and out without the whole frame re-developing, large JPEGs open ready to zoom, and the picture no longer stays soft after zooming out and back in.
• Masks at full resolution. Masks are drawn at up to 2048 px with smooth edges instead of steps, AI mattes are cleaner, the Object mask is tighter, a radial feather is available, and Auto mask finds edges more reliably. The brush lives permanently in the tool rail, with a pixel size you can type, Option + right-drag to size it on the photo, and Shift+[ ] for hardness. The Colour Mixer opens on All colours with colour-tinted tracks.
• Colour Grading, relaid. Master, Shadows, Midtones and Highlights each get one large wheel with Saturation and Tone rails beside it, and the tabs always fit the panel.
• Finer grain. The finest grain is now 1.2 px across every stock, Argent 400’s granules are scan-sized with calmer highlights, and colour negatives carry evenly balanced, neutral grain. Existing edits export with the new grain.
• RAW white balance stays put. The as-shot white balance of a RAW file no longer drifts between opens.

Fixed

• Argent 400 hover and undo. Hovering colour stocks after Argent 400 no longer pins the amount at 100%, each slider drag is one undo step, and the arrow keys work in the value box.

Design for Instagram, medium-format film frames, and a live masking brush — now on the Mac.

New

• The Instagram page. See a photo the way Instagram will show it before you post: as a feed post, on your profile grid, as a story or reel with the safe area marked, or as a carousel, on a phone preview that carries your own username and profile photo. Pick the post’s frame (original, square, 4:5, 3:4 or landscape) and drag the crop into place; Export for Instagram writes exactly that frame at Instagram’s upload size, and your photo’s own edits stay untouched. Plan your grid by dragging photos into position and adjusting each tile, export a story at 1080 × 1920, and build a carousel of up to 20 slides. A caption and frame are remembered for every photo.
• Medium-format film frames. A new frame look drawn from real 120 film scans, with edge printing you can edit in your own words, the maker’s own printing style per stock, and black-and-white frames printed in white. One Film Border card now gathers all three film looks, and Reset all effects covers the whole Effects page.
• A live masking brush. Strokes land the instant you paint, the effect shows live as you work, and the brush now offers finer size control, pen pressure, keyboard sizing, and an Auto mask that finds edges for you. Each mask row shows a picture of the mask and a plain description, with one Show mask switch set to Auto, On or Off.
• The Moodboard, redesigned. The board now shares the rest of the app’s look, with undo and redo in the bar, renaming in place, a snap grid, and the photo tray right on the board.

Improved

• Grain matched to real film scans. Negative stocks keep a touch of grain in the brightest areas, the black-and-white stock carries stronger grain, and shadow grain takes on colour the way a real scan does.
• Push development and shot exposure. The + development strength is re-fitted to real film data, an over-exposed shot now reads visibly dense the way a scanned negative does, and under-exposure keeps its colour shift to the shadows. Fluorescent Cast (formerly Mixed Light) and Tungsten Balance now appear only for the film stock that uses them.
• The export preview matches the file. The preview in the Export window now renders through the same path as the export itself, so what you see is what you get, glow and all.
• Edit files, tidied. Each photo keeps one hidden edit file beside it, and the app keeps a safety copy of its own. A new setting lets you show the edit files in the Finder if you prefer to see them. Your photos and existing edits are never affected.
• Faster and lighter. A quicker launch, lower memory while idle, and a welcome card that stays out of the way while a photo opens.

The Layout page, richer film texture, and a truer zoom — now on the Mac.

New

• The Layout page. Design with your photos in one place: collages, swipeable carousels and contact sheets, built on a live canvas from one auto-saved draft. Drag photos between frames and watch them trade places with a smooth dissolve, preview a carousel with real swipe physics, pick carousel ratios (1:1, 4:5, 3:4) and export each slide as its own file, or lay a whole shoot out as proof-sheet pages that export one file per page. A photo rail alongside searches your library, filters by stars or collection, and fills a layout with one click.
• Mixed Light. A new control for night scenes shot under mixed street lighting: it brings the different light sources together the way film does, with a response tuned for city glow.

Improved

• Richer grain in the shadows. Shadow grain now renders as the fine, sharp, clustered speckle of a real film scan, and the grain amount behaves consistently from subtle to heavy.
• Halation in high definition. The glow around bright light sources renders with a finer texture that holds up at close zoom.
• A truer film strip. The Film Strip frame’s edge print now looks light-printed the way it appears on a scanned strip, with the film’s own grain running through the lettering, a fuller top edge, and refined sprocket holes.
• A truer zoom. Double-click zooms straight to an exact 100% view and stays there — on RAW files too — zooming in and out is smoother, and very large photos (100-megapixel cameras included) now take the fast preview path.
• Library sorting sticks. Your sort choice is remembered across launches, and new installs sort by import date with the newest photos first.
• The scan edge follows the film. With the automatic scan edge enabled in Settings, picking a film stock adds the edge and returning to Neutral removes it again; an edge you switch on yourself always stays your choice.

Fixed

• Fujifilm RAW consistency. X-Trans RAW files now develop identically on every open, with full multi-core speed kept.
• Export window polish. The scrollbar no longer overlaps the settings, and the photo tray stays out of the Export screen.
• The developing indicator. It now lives in the bottom status bar instead of appearing over the photo.

The Layout page, richer film texture, and a truer zoom.

New

• The Layout page. Design with your photos in one place: collages, swipeable carousels and contact sheets, built on a live canvas from one auto-saved draft. Drag photos between frames and watch them trade places with a smooth dissolve, preview a carousel with real swipe physics, pick carousel ratios (1:1, 4:5, 3:4) and export each slide as its own file, or lay a whole shoot out as proof-sheet pages that export one file per page. A photo rail alongside searches your library, filters by stars or collection, and fills a layout with one click.
• Mixed Light. A new control for night scenes shot under mixed street lighting: it brings the different light sources together the way film does, with a response tuned for city glow.

Improved

• Richer grain in the shadows. Shadow grain now renders as the fine, sharp, clustered speckle of a real film scan, and the grain amount behaves consistently from subtle to heavy.
• Halation in high definition. The glow around bright light sources renders with a finer texture that holds up at close zoom.
• A truer film strip. The Film Strip frame’s edge print now looks light-printed the way it appears on a scanned strip, with the film’s own grain running through the lettering, a fuller top edge, and refined sprocket holes.
• A truer zoom. Double-click zooms straight to an exact 100% view and stays there, zooming in and out is smoother, and very large photos (100-megapixel cameras included) now take the fast preview path.
• Library sorting sticks. Your sort choice is remembered across launches, and new installs sort by import date with the newest photos first.
• The scan edge follows the film. With the automatic scan edge enabled in Settings, picking a film stock adds the edge and returning to Neutral removes it again; an edge you switch on yourself always stays your choice.

Fixed

• Export window polish. The scrollbar no longer overlaps the settings, and the photo tray stays out of the Export screen.
• The developing indicator. It now lives in the bottom status bar instead of appearing over the photo.

TIFF files open properly again.

Fixed

• TIFF opening. Compressed and 16-bit TIFF files now open on Windows, including files saved by Photoshop, Capture One, Lightroom and film scanners. Colours follow the file’s embedded profile, and 16-bit files develop at their full precision, so heavy edits stay smooth without banding.

The effects wave, and export redesigned.

New

• Export, redesigned. A proper Export window: every photo the Library shows, each with a tick. Tick it and it exports. A live preview shows the highlighted photo at the output size with its file name, pixel size and estimated file size before you commit. One-click presets (Web & social, Print lab, Master), a picker for exporting a whole collection at once, Shift-click to tick a range, and a progress pill with Stop while it runs. Ctrl+E opens the window; Ctrl+Shift+E exports with your previous settings, no window.
• Date Stamp. The little orange date from film cameras, printed the way a real data-back exposes it: it glows in the shadows and fades over bright light. Three styles, the photo’s own date or any text, with size, glow and colour controls.
• Film Damage. Dust, hairs and scratches with the geometry and behaviour of the real thing: specks lighten on a scanned negative and darken on a print, scratches run with the film and fade in and out along their length. Sliders per class, and a re-roll for a fresh scatter.
• Film Strip frame. The photo sits on a strip of 35 mm film, with sprocket holes at true dimensions, frame numbers, and an edge print you can customise. Two looks: a bright scan or the raw orange-mask negative.
• Black-and-white filters and toners. Mono film stocks gain the classic coloured contrast filters (yellow, orange, red, green) computed as real glass in front of the lens, plus darkroom toners (sepia, selenium, gold, blue, or a split) with strength control.
• Digicam look. The early-2000s compact-camera rendering: the era’s resolution, its colour cast, sensor smear that streaks from true points of light, fringing and period JPEG texture, with three camera generations to pick from.
• Custom watermark text. Stamp exports with your own text, falling back to your copyright line when the box is empty.

Improved

• Full size means full size. Full-resolution exports keep the original pixel dimensions of any camera, however large the sensor.
• Zoomed editing with frames on is faster. Working at 1:1 with a film frame applied now redraws only what you can see.
• The whole library warms up. RAW photos across your library are prepared quietly in the background, so clicking any photo opens it fast, not just the neighbours of the current one.
• The crop bar, redesigned. It now speaks the app’s own visual language, and every ratio pick or flip re-fits the photo to the full edge instead of shrinking it step by step.
• Grain reaches further. The grain amount above 100% now has twice the range for a heavier texture when you want it.
• Highlights reach further. The plus side of the Highlights slider has a stronger range, with a gentle extra lift in the mid-highlights.
• Lighter on memory. The app frees a photo’s working buffers when you switch away, so long editing sessions stay lean.
• A quiet previews pill. While the Library prepares previews, a small ring in the top bar shows the count from any workspace, and never interrupts you.

Fixed

• Switching from the Library opens the photo you clicked without briefly flashing the previously edited one.
• On a neutral black-and-white photo the histogram reads as one clean line instead of picking up a coloured rim.

The film wave: grain and halation, rebuilt.

New

• Film grain, rebuilt. Every film stock now carries its own grain character. Grain lives in the shadows the way scanned film really looks, black-and-white stocks get a true silver-crystal texture, and exported grain matches what you saw while editing. One Amount slider drives it: pick a stock and the grain card shows exactly what that stock adds.
• Halation, rebuilt. Bright lights bloom the way film actually behaves: a small clipped highlight glows hot and compact instead of washing out the frame. Each stock keeps its own glow signature, and the Halation slider now gives its full effect on every stock, through its entire range. Source Size has a visibly stronger reach.
• Film scan edge. A new Frame option wraps the photo in a scanned-negative border, with subtly torn edges and texture in the black, never the same twice. Scan also gains a Night look tuned for after-dark shots.
• Custom crop ratios. The crop bar matches the app’s current look, adds more of the most-used ratios, and accepts any ratio you type: 16:10, 1.85, whatever the job needs. On smaller windows it compacts itself so every control stays reachable.

Improved

• iPhone ProRAW opens in full quality, fast. DNGs from the newest iPhones open in full 16-bit quality out of the box, prepare in the background so switching photos is quick, reopen in a blink after a restart, and show their shot info (ISO, shutter speed, aperture).
• A sharper, more detailed histogram. Line-drawn colour channels over a finer grid in a taller plot, and the Scopes panel now renders at full screen resolution with a cleaner window.
• Your Library click carries over. Click a photo in the Library, switch to Develop, and that photo is the one that opens.
• The photo keeps its fit with the film frame on. Hovering or picking a film stock while the default film frame is on no longer crowds the photo against the tray.

The overnight repair round.

Fixed

• Your Library keeps what you import. Photos you add individually now stay in your Library across restarts, single photos dropped onto the app join the Library too, and removing a photo now sticks. If photos you imported recently seemed to disappear, they will return on their own after this update — your files and edits were never affected.
• Upgrading from 1.5 brings your license across smoothly. The upgrade now picks up your existing license on the same computer without asking for the key, and license messages are clearer if anything does need your attention.

Same-day polish, round two.

Fixed

• Text stays anchored through a crop. Text you placed on a photo now stays exactly over the same spot in the picture when you crop — the same way masks and healing already behave — and un-cropping puts it right back.
• Quick Export handles long file names. The name box stays inside the dialog, shows the end of the name when it opens, and scrolls as you type or arrow through it.
• The export confirmation stays out of your way. It no longer covers the photo tray’s buttons, and a click anywhere on it dismisses it immediately.

Same-day fixes for 1.6.

Fixed

• Choosing a font is back to effortless. Fixed a crash that could occur when opening the font menu in Text, and the floating text toolbar no longer moves with the mouse while you pick a font or size from it.

Improved

• Very large RAW files feel lighter. The Library indexes and previews big files much faster, and opening one shows a tone-matched placeholder instantly while the full preview develops.
• Under the hood: dependency and stability updates.

A whole new Chromogen.

New

• A redesigned app, top to bottom. Chromogen for Windows moves to a new, faster interface — cleaner panels, a calmer layout, and the same darkroom underneath. It’s the same app Chromogen ships on the Mac, so both platforms now look and work the same.
• A real photo library. Browse whole folders in a full-bleed grid, cull with picks and rejects, star-rate, group into albums, filter and search, and step through a fast full-screen preview — all before you ever open a photo to edit.
• New film-scan rendering. The Scan effect now reads each photo and adapts — lifted, warm blacks; creamy highlights; luminous mids — with Tone, Glow, Balance and Warmth controls. It’s the finishing move that makes a digital file feel like a developed frame.
• A simpler Film Grain card. Type, Amount, and a fine-tune fold with Size, Crispness, Colour and Shadow grain — and the Colour slider now stays visibly filmic all the way up.
• Everything carries over. Install 1.6 and it opens as your app: your license, your settings, your library — ratings, flags, albums — and every edit you’ve ever saved come across automatically. Nothing to export, nothing to re-enter.
• One-file install. The installer now carries everything the app needs — no separate downloads, no prerequisites.

Improved

• Clearer effect controls and shorter help text across the develop panels, and a reorganized Settings window that’s easier to scan.
• Photo counts always match between the bottom photo tray and its toggle pill.

Invert: the negative, four ways.

New

• Invert, with styles. Flip your photo into a negative in Effects, under Frame and Format. Pick from four styles: Negative, the pure flip; Film Negative, your photo as a developed strip with the classic orange base; X-ray, the monochrome plate; and Solarize, the darkroom partial invert.
• A dial that means it. Solarize brings a Threshold slider where every position is a different picture, plus a Highlights/Shadows switch for which side of the tones flips.
• Plays well with everything. Invert rides presets, sync between photos, and per-photo saves like any other effect, and you can find it by typing “negative”, “solarize” or “x-ray” into Find an effect.

Improved

• Smaller refinements and polish under the hood.

Bring your presets in bulk.

New

• Import a whole .zip preset pack. Pick a downloaded pack and it imports in one go: Lightroom presets and Capture One styles inside convert automatically, LUT .cube files become looks, and everything lands in one tidy group named after the pack.
• Duplicates skip themselves. Packs often carry the same look many times over. Chromogen imports each look once and tells you how many copies it skipped.

Improved

• Better names on import. When a pack leaves preset names blank, the imported presets take their file names instead of arriving as “Untitled”.
• Packs made on a Mac import cleanly. Hidden system files inside a zip are ignored instead of showing up as failed imports.

The Print Room comes to Windows.

New

• The Print Room. Render your photo as a true paper print. Five real scanned paper styles sit on the new Print card as one-tap chips, with Auto, Screen and Multiply paper blends, a paper tone from cool to warm, and light bleed that washes in from the frame’s edge like a re-photographed print.
• Click-to-protect. Keep the paper off your subject: one click finds them automatically, or pick exactly what to protect on the photo. Your picks are remembered with the photo.
• True at every zoom. The paper reads the same zoomed in, zoomed out, in the preview and in the export.

Improved

• Reset Edits clears everything. Every effect returns to its default in one step, and the edited marker clears with it.

A fix for Quick Export in the Library.

Fixed

• Quick Export follows your selection in the Library. Pick a photo in the Library, press Quick Export, and it exports that photo. Chromogen opens your selection first if it isn’t already the one you’re editing, so the export is always of the picture you chose — its image and its file name.

Good to know

• Everywhere else Quick Export is unchanged, and nothing about how a photograph develops or exports has changed. Your photos, edits and settings are untouched.

Text on your photographs, designed for you.

New

• The text composer. Write a headline, a subhead and a few lines of body, and Chromogen designs the layout over your photograph — where the words sit, how large, in what order of importance, in a colour that stays readable, with a matched pair of typefaces. Try another look gives you a genuinely different arrangement each time you press it.
• Choose the type, or let Chromogen choose. Set a font for each role — headline, subhead, body, label — or leave it on Automatic. The typefaces that come with Chromogen travel with your edit and render the same on Windows and Mac; your own installed fonts are there too, listed under “This PC”.
• A tool bar that becomes a text editor. Press T and the bar over your photo turns into type controls — font, weight, size, colour, effects, italic, caps, alignment and justified — and Photo tools turns it back. It follows the bar wherever you dock it, along the top or down a side.
• Find a font by typing. Open any font list and start typing; it narrows to what you mean as you go.
• Weights that are really there. Bold is one click, and the caret beside it opens the full range a typeface actually ships — Light through Black. A typeface with no bold of its own says so rather than faking one.
• Type on the picture. Double-click any text to edit it where it sits; click a selected piece again to deselect it.

Improved

• Designing is immediate. The first design, each new look, and switching fonts all happen without waiting — including deep into a long run of Try another look.
• The photo gets the room. Opening Text folds the navigation to a slim icon rail and gives the width to your picture and the tool bar; leaving restores it. Your own choice about the rail always wins.
• The Curves editor shows its grid again, in both the light and the dark interface.
• Before / after tags know when to step aside. Slide the divider all the way across and the tag for the half you can no longer see gets out of the way.
• Shorter, clearer hover tips across the app, plus a new Show tips under controls switch in Settings › Appearance for the small grey lines beneath controls.
• In Masking, the small labels under Subject, Object, Brush, Gradient, Radial and Luma read in full instead of cutting off.

Good to know

• Text you have already placed is untouched. Existing designs render exactly as they did before, pixel for pixel — and nothing about how a photograph develops or exports has changed.

The Digicam sensor streak, true to the sensor.

Improved

• Digicam’s sensor streak now behaves like the real thing. A bright point of light — a street lamp, a glint, the sun’s disk — casts a single clean vertical beam. A bright window softens into one gentle band instead of hard stripes at its edges, and blown skies, clouds and snow stay completely clean. Night scenes keep their signature; bright daytime photos stop growing stripes.

The effects wave — and export, redesigned.

New

• Export, redesigned. A proper Export window: every photo the Library shows, each with a tick — tick it and it exports. A live preview shows the highlighted photo at the output size with its file name, pixel size and estimated file size before you commit. One-click presets (Web & social, Print lab, Master), a picker for exporting a whole collection at once, ⇧-click to tick a range, and a progress pill with Stop while it runs. Exporting with your previous settings, no window, stays one shortcut away.
• Date Stamp. The little orange date from film cameras, printed the way a real data-back exposes it: it glows in the shadows and fades over bright light. Three styles, the photo’s own date or any text, with size, glow and colour controls.
• Film Damage. Dust, hairs and scratches with the geometry and behaviour of the real thing — specks lighten on a scanned negative and darken on a print, scratches run with the film and fade in and out along their length. Sliders per class, and a re-roll for a fresh scatter.
• Film Strip frame. The photo sits on a strip of 35 mm film — sprocket holes at true dimensions, frame numbers, and an edge print you can customise. Two looks: a bright scan or the raw orange-mask negative.
• Black-and-white filters and toners. Mono film stocks gain the classic coloured contrast filters (yellow, orange, red, green) computed as real glass in front of the lens, plus darkroom toners — sepia, selenium, gold, blue, or a split — with strength control.
• Digicam look. The early-2000s compact-camera rendering: the era’s resolution, its colour cast, sensor smear on bright lights, fringing and period JPEG texture, with three camera generations to pick from.
• Custom watermark text. Stamp exports with your own text, falling back to your copyright line when the box is empty.

Improved

• Full size means full size. Full-resolution exports keep the original pixel dimensions of any camera, however large the sensor.
• Zoomed editing with frames on is faster. Working at 1:1 with a film frame applied now redraws only what you can see.
• The whole library warms up. RAW photos across your library are prepared quietly in the background, so clicking any photo opens it fast — not just the neighbours of the current one.
• The crop bar, redesigned. It now speaks the app’s own visual language, and every ratio pick or flip re-fits the photo to the full edge instead of shrinking it step by step.
• Grain reaches further. The grain amount above 100% now has twice the range for a heavier texture when you want it.
• Lighter on memory. The app frees a photo’s working buffers when you switch away, so long editing sessions stay lean.
• A quiet previews pill. While the Library prepares previews, a small ring in the top bar shows the count from any workspace — and never interrupts you.

Fixed

• Switching from the Library opens the photo you clicked without briefly flashing the previously edited one.
• On a neutral black-and-white photo the histogram reads as one clean line instead of picking up a coloured rim.

The film wave: grain and halation, rebuilt.

New

• Film grain, rebuilt. Every film stock now carries its own grain character. Grain lives in the shadows the way scanned film really looks, black-and-white stocks get a true silver-crystal texture, and exported grain matches what you saw while editing. One Amount slider drives it: pick a stock and the grain card shows exactly what that stock adds.
• Halation, rebuilt. Bright lights bloom the way film actually behaves: a small clipped highlight glows hot and compact instead of washing out the frame. Each stock keeps its own glow signature, and the Halation slider now gives its full effect on every stock, through its entire range. Source Size has a visibly stronger reach.
• Film scan edge. A new Frame option wraps the photo in a scanned-negative border, with subtly torn edges and texture in the black, never the same twice. Scan also gains a Night look tuned for after-dark shots.
• Custom crop ratios. The crop bar matches the app’s current look, adds more of the most-used ratios, and accepts any ratio you type: 16:10, 1.85, whatever the job needs. On smaller windows it compacts itself so every control stays reachable.

Improved

• A sharper, more detailed histogram. Line-drawn colour channels over a finer grid in a taller plot, and the Scopes panel now renders at full screen resolution.
• Your Library click carries over. Click a photo in the Library, switch to Develop, and that photo is the one that opens.
• The photo keeps its fit with the film frame on. Hovering or picking a film stock while the default film frame is on no longer crowds the photo against the tray.

Fixed

• Your Library keeps what you import. Photos you add individually now stay in your Library across restarts, single photos dropped onto the app join the Library too, and removing a photo now sticks. If photos you imported recently seemed to disappear, they will return on their own after this update — your files and edits were never affected.
• Text stays anchored through a crop. Text you placed on a photo now stays exactly over the same spot in the picture when you crop — the same way masks and healing already behave — and un-cropping puts it right back.
• Quick Export handles long file names. The name box stays inside the dialog, shows the end of the name when it opens, and scrolls as you type or arrow through it.
• The export confirmation stays out of your way. It no longer covers the photo tray’s buttons, and a click anywhere on it dismisses it immediately.

A quick fix for the text bar.

Improved

• Choosing a font or size from the text bar is clean again. The bar moves only when you drag its grip or its empty chrome — never while you’re picking from one of its menus.
• Small fixes under the hood.

Missed 1.3.6? It brought the film-look update — Light Leak, Pre-Exposed film, Scan, shadow grain and grain colour, plus much faster indexing of very large RAW files. Details below.

The film-look update: Light Leak, Pre-Exposed film and Scan.

New

• Light Leak. Stray light that fogs and burns like the real thing. Ten characters as visual chips — Edge Fog, Corner Glow, Frame Burn, Full Veil, Crack, Gate Flare, Sprocket, Red Window, Bands and Double — with Amount, Position, Size and Warmth, a Lab Correction dial for the minilab’s rebalance, and a Variation roll so no two frames leak alike. Find it in Effects, under Light and Atmosphere.
• Pre-Exposed film. A second exposure of little shapes laid over the frame: Hearts, Dots, Stars, Petals, Garden, Mixed, a Pixel arcade roll, Cats, Dogs, Emoji, Cosmos — or your own words with the Text shape — in any colour, with Amount, Variety, Size and Density and a fresh Roll whenever you like. Drop your own PNG icons into Pictures › Chromogen › Pre-Exposed › the shape’s folder and they join that roll.
• Scan: new film-scan rendering. The Scan effect reads each photo and adapts — lifted, warm blacks; creamy highlights; luminous mids — with Tone, Glow, Balance and Warmth controls. It’s the finishing move that makes a digital file feel like a developed frame.
• Shadow grain and grain colour. The Film Grain card gains Shadow grain, the fine texture real scans carry through the shadows, and a Colour slider that stays visibly filmic all the way up. The card itself is simpler: Type, Amount, and a fine-tune fold with Size, Crispness, Colour and Shadow grain.
• Faster with very large RAW files. Folders of 100-megapixel RAWs now index smoothly: thumbnails fill in where you’re looking first, a quick grey preview shows while each photo’s full render develops, and big files the Library has already read come back instantly next time.

Improved

• Instant film: drag the photo inside the print. Position your photo within the instant frame with a grab hand, and the Instant Backdrop control now lives on the Instant Film card.
• The photo tray follows the Library. The bottom tray shows photos in your Library’s order, an Import date sort joins the list, and the tray’s photo count always matches.
• Smarter crop ratios. Re-click a ratio chip to flip it between landscape and portrait, pull a corner past square to flip the lock, and a locked ratio now holds exactly at the frame edges.
• A reorganized Settings window with grouped sections that are easier to scan; the Film Stock card’s gear jumps straight to your default film look. Clearer effect controls and shorter help text across the develop panels.
• Picking a Light Leak character or a Pre-Exposed shape updates its own card in place, and every picker has an Off pill.
• An adjustment made in the instant you change photos stays with the photo you made it on.
• Small fixes and smoother behavior across the app.

Invert: the negative, four ways.

New

• Invert, with styles. Flip your photo into a negative in Effects, under Frame and Format. Pick from four styles: Negative, the pure flip; Film Negative, your photo as a developed strip with the classic orange base; X-ray, the monochrome plate; and Solarize, the darkroom partial invert.
• A dial that means it. Solarize brings a Threshold slider where every position is a different picture, plus a Highlights/Shadows switch for which side of the tones flips.
• Plays well with everything. Invert rides presets, sync between photos, and per-photo saves like any other effect, and you can find it by typing “negative”, “solarize” or “x-ray” into Find an effect.
• The tool strip moves up top. The canvas tools now sit in a horizontal strip above the photo, with a Save button beside Open and Quick Export.

Improved

• Film Stock cards show the whole photo. A portrait now fits inside its card instead of being cropped to a slice.
• A clearer histogram. Where colour channels overlap, the histogram now shows it in the secondary colours — yellow, cyan, magenta — with a neutral core where all three meet.
• Truer white-balance sliders. The Kelvin and Tint tracks colour from the real neutral point, and the value band fades toward its full colour as you move.
• Every effect card shows a filled pill for the picked option; the Instant Film card gains a Reset.
• Small fixes and smoother behavior across the app.

Reshape: sculpt with a brush.

New

• The Reshape tool. A new hand tool on the Masking bench: Push moves what’s under the brush — hair, a jawline, the fall of a jacket — Grow and Shrink swell or slim while you hold, and Restore paints any of it back out. The preview follows your hand live, at full speed.
• Face sliders. Find Faces detects faces right on your Mac — nothing leaves your machine — and gives each face its own sliders: eye size, nose width, lip fullness, smile, jawline, face width, forehead and chin.
• A hand for panning. Zoom in and the cursor becomes the familiar grab hand — drag to move around the photo.

Improved

• Reshape strokes travel with the photo — masks follow reshaped content, and edits reopen exactly as you left them.
• The Effects panel’s “Expand all” becomes “Collapse all” once everything is open.
• Leaving a section puts away an armed brush, so a stray drag can’t edit from somewhere else.
• Cleaner toolbar and sidebar group lines, and Reshape’s controls share the app’s one segmented style.
• Small fixes and smoother behavior across the app.

The Library, redesigned.

New

• A redesigned Library. Rounded panels, a folder sidebar you can fold away, and a cleaner two-row header — when you tick photos, the filter row becomes the selection actions (Sync Edits, Rename, Reset, Delete) right in place.
• Three layouts. Grid (now the default), Justified, and Masonry — switch from the Layout chip or pick your default in Settings › Library.
• RAW + JPEG as one photo. A RAW and its same-name JPEG shot pair into a single tile with a “+ JPEG” badge; folder counts agree. Turn it off in Settings if you prefer both.
• Sort, filter, save. Sort by shot time, name or rating; a new Edited filter; and saved Views that survive relaunch.
• A bigger culling loupe. Hold to zoom to 100%, and an info panel where rating, flags and copyright are editable on the spot.
• The Gallery, refreshed. Same design language as the Library, with clearer controls.

Improved

• Photo rows fill the view edge to edge at every thumbnail size — the last row no longer renders larger than the rest.
• Collection counts stay accurate when files change outside Chromogen (photos on an unplugged drive still count — nothing is forgotten).
• Right-click menus share one consistent look everywhere.
• Small fixes and smoother behavior across the app.

Bring your presets in bulk.

New

• Import a whole .zip at once. Drop a downloaded preset pack on Chromogen — or pick it in Presets › Import… — and every preset, style and LUT inside lands in its own group, named after the pack. Exact duplicate copies inside the pack are skipped and counted for you.
• Drop to import. Preset files dropped anywhere on the window now import directly — photos keep opening exactly as before, even in the same drop.
• Select several presets at once. ⌘-click or Shift-click preset cards, then move or delete the whole selection together — from the selection bar or the right-click menu.

Improved

• Imported presets keep their proper names — no more mystery “Untitled” entries from downloaded packs.
• Small fixes and smoother behavior across the app.

Library polish and small fixes.

Improved

• Double-click to develop. In the Library’s large view, double-click a photo — on the image or the filmstrip — to open it straight in Develop.
• The filmstrip sits clear of the scrollbar. Thumbnails no longer hide under it.
• Small fixes and smoother behavior across the app.

Your photo, printed on real paper — the Print Room release.

New

• The Print effect. Effects › Print renders your photo as a true paper print: tones settle into the paper’s own range, the paper white leans warm or cool, and light bleeds softly in from the frame’s edge — from a whisper to a full editorial wash.
• Real scanned paper. Five sheets — fine tooth, woven canvas, scan streaks, aged mottle, airy bright — chosen as visual chips, with Auto, Screen and Multiply blends. Every photo wears its own region of the sheet, so no two prints are identical, and the paper looks right at every zoom and export size.
• Protect your subject. One slider keeps the paper off the person. If the automatic pick isn’t what you meant, click the object you want protected — clicks add together, Show mask previews the protected area in white, and your picks save with the photo.
• Tungsten Balance. On the Film Stock card: rebalance toward tungsten film so night skies cool down while tungsten and sodium lamps keep their warmth.
• Halation › Source Size. Large blown light sources can now bloom bigger than small speculars — the way a streetlamp glows wider than a glint.

Improved

• Fine-tune sections. Six busy cards — Film Stock, Grain, Halation, Dehaze, Vignetting, Print — keep their main control out front and fold the character controls into a Fine-tune section that remembers how you left it. A switch in Settings › Editing pins them all open.
• Reset all effects. The Effects panel’s reset now resets every effect’s values in one click.
• Film stock cards preview the stock. The stock strip shows each film’s own colour character, no longer dimmed by finishing effects applied on top.
• Opening a Fine-tune section scrolls its controls into view.

Write on your photos — the new Text workspace.

New

• The Text workspace. Write a headline, subhead and body and Chromogen designs the layout over your photo — automatic font pairing (or choose your own families), composition looks from quiet to hero, over the photo or as a poster, all on a measured grid. Try another look explores a genuinely different arrangement every time.
• Edit type right on the picture. Double-click any text to type into it where it sits, drag it into place with grid snapping, and style it from the toolbar — font, size, italics, underline, caps, alignment, colour.
• A text toolbar that lives where you work. It appears at your tool rail’s edge, snaps to any side of the canvas — a full row on top or bottom, a slim column on the sides — or floats wherever you drop it. Grab the grip or any empty part of the bar; the wand tries another look without opening a panel.
• Copy and paste edits between photos. ⌘C copies the developed look, ⌘V applies it to another photo — crops, healing and text stay with the photo they belong to.
• Save exactly the preset you mean. Tick what the preset carries — tone & white balance, colour, curves, grain, effects, detail & RAW, an imported LUT — and file it into a group as you save.
• Panels remember how you left them. Collapsed sections persist across photos and restarts (Settings › Editing).

Improved

• The photo gets the room in Text. Entering the Text workspace folds the navigation to a slim icon rail and gives the canvas the width back; leaving restores it. Your own collapse choice always wins.
• A tidier frame. The collapsed navigation rail is balanced around its icons, live “On” indicators on colour and effect cards stay current as you edit, and preset previews are steadier when browsing quickly.
• Finer control. Hue adjustments move gently near zero instead of jumping, and photos without previous edits always open clean.
• Clearer tips. Hints across the app say what things actually do — and one switch in Settings hides them all.

Batch editing that works, honest previews everywhere, and a library that does what you ask.

Fixed

• Copying edits between photos actually copies them. Sync Edits in the Library silently failed on photos you’d edited before — the old edits kept winning. Copies land every time now, previously-edited photos included, and thumbnails and the big preview update the moment it happens.
• Presets carry your whole look. Saved presets quietly dropped the Color Mixer’s “All colors” shift, Film Response and Color Grain — and applying any preset reset those three on the photo. They’re captured, applied and left alone now.
• Saving back to Lightroom or Capture One no longer changes the picture on screen. The saved file was always correct, but the canvas re-applied your film stock on top of the already-baked image the moment the save landed. What you see now is exactly what was saved.
• Every preview shows the real developed look. Thumbnails, the filmstrip, the photo strip and the full-screen preview show the developed appearance and refresh when edits change. RAW previews are retained for faster browsing.

New

• Choose what to copy. Sync Edits now shows exactly what’s moving — from which photo, onto which photos — with ten tick-boxes (film stock, preset, RAW develop, lens, tone, white balance, color, curves, effects, local adjustments). Crops, healing and text never copy — they belong to one photo. The highlighted photo is the source; copying a RAW’s look onto a JPEG translates it so it matches.
• The library does more from a right-click. Remove any folder — parents included — from the library (files stay on disk, and it stays removed). Send a photo to a moodboard without leaving the library, or jump straight into Develop.
• Scrolling can’t nudge your sliders. Two-finger scrolling over the panels only ever scrolls them now. If you liked adjusting sliders with the wheel, turn it back on in Settings › Editing.

Improved

• Selection you can read at a glance. Selection rings sit just outside the photo with a breathing gap — never covering your pixels — in the library, the filmstrip and the Film Stock browser, and the photo that’s open in the editor wears a small EDITING tag.

Masks stay where you put them, the crop tool behaves, and the assistant actually understands you.

Fixed

• Masks follow the crop on RAW files. Creating a Subject, brush or gradient mask after cropping a RAW aimed it at the original framing instead of your crop — and masks made before cropping drifted off when the crop landed. Both orders are correct now: every mask stays glued to the part of the photo it was drawn on, through crops, rotation and straightening. JPEGs were never affected.
• The crop tool no longer strands your photo. Opening the crop tool could leave the picture parked high with a large empty area below it, especially after a second crop. The crop view now always fits and centres, a stray two-finger scroll can’t shove it, and the photo strip steps aside so the frame gets the full canvas.
• The brush lets go. The paint brush had no way out except switching tools — Esc now ends it, and so does picking or adding any other kind of mask.
• Questions stop editing your photo. Asking the assistant “why is exposure 1?” used to set exposure to 1. Questions are answered now, never applied.
• “Don’t add grain” no longer adds grain. Negatives are understood: “no grain” clears it, “don’t make it warmer” returns to the as-shot white balance.

New

• Enter applies the crop, Esc cancels it — the shortcuts you already have in your fingers.
• The assistant understands far more. Typos just work (“wamer”, “grian 30”). Intensity registers — “super warm” leans twice as far as “warmer”, “slightly” goes gently. Complaints work the way you’d say them: “too warm” cools it, “not warm enough” warms it, “too much grain” dials grain back. And plain description works: “less warm”, “more grainy”, “softer”.
• Masking waits for the crop. Adding a mask while the crop tool is still open used to place it wrongly; it now asks you to finish the crop first, so you never get a silently mis-aimed mask.

Improved

• The ⌘K assistant bar is real frosted glass — it genuinely blurs the photo behind it instead of just being see-through, so the text stays readable over busy images. It also floats above the photo strip now instead of closing it.

The external-drive fix: photos on USB and Thunderbolt drives open properly again.

Fixed

• Photos on external drives open correctly now. Opening a photo from a USB or Thunderbolt drive could show a black screen, with Develop reporting “volume isn’t responding” even though the drive was healthy — most often during or right after a big import. The app was treating every external drive with the caution reserved for network shares; local drives are now read directly, like the internal disk.
• Faster opens off external drives. The same change removes a behind-the-scenes copy step for every photo on an external drive — opens read straight from the drive now.
• Honest messages. If macOS is blocking access to a drive (System Settings › Privacy & Security › Files and Folders), Chromogen now says so and points at the setting instead of blaming the drive. Network drives keep their protective behaviour, and “reconnect the drive” is reserved for drives that are genuinely unreachable.

Retouching grows up: heal spots become layers you can manage — and exports are now pixel-faithful to the canvas.

New

• The Retouch panel. Your heal repairs now live in the Masking workspace as proper layers: every pass shows its spots, and each row has an eye to mute it, a trash to delete it, a Strength dial to fade the whole layer, and double-click to rename. Fix dust and New pass moved in beside them, and clicking New pass now shows the waiting layer immediately.
• Fresh sessions. Coming back to a photo you retouched before starts a new cleanup layer automatically, so today’s work never mixes into last week’s.
• An eye for the overlay. Press O (or the eye on the heal bar) to hide the spot outlines while you judge the result — the repairs stay on.

Fixed

• Healing on RAW files is fast now. The tool was re-copying the full-resolution image on every frame while a repair existed; it reuses it now, so brushing and sliders stay smooth on big files.
• Exports match the canvas. Exactly. An export now binds to the frame you accepted — if you click Export while an edit is still rendering, it waits for that exact result instead of racing it, and changing output settings afterwards can’t affect a queued export. Every exported file also carries an explicit sRGB tag so Preview, Photos and browsers all agree on its colour.
• Preview grain matches export grain. The canvas used to render grain slightly weaker than the exported file at the default quality; what you see is now what you get.
• The “Exporting…” status can no longer get stuck if a photo reload is interrupted mid-export.

Improved

• The heal cursor and spot outlines are clean black & white — no more amber tint sitting over the very skin tones you’re trying to judge. Selection reads by weight: the active repair is the bright, thick ring.
• The heal bar matches the app — same chrome as the crop bar, and it now sits clear of the filmstrip instead of covering it.
• The ⌘K assistant bar is properly glassy and no longer lands on top of the Photos pill.

A fast fix for Film Stock previews — plus an assistant that now works without any setup.

Fixed

• Film Stock previews behave now. Stock cards refresh consistently when browsing, hovering or switching photos.
• The window buttons stopped sulking. The traffic lights kept their colour rules straight through Settings, minimize and full screen — and no more “double dots”.

New

• The assistant works offline now. Press ⌘K and just type: “warmer”, “grain 30”, “push 1”, “shot exposure -1” — every develop slider responds. Ask “where’s vignette?” and it takes you there; ask “what does push pull do?” and it knows. No account, no key, nothing leaves your Mac. (Connecting a provider is still there for open-ended edits.)

Improved

• Truer highlights on clipped suns. The RAW engine’s new neutral default keeps blown highlights and sun rims honest instead of tinting them.
• Faster photo opens carried over from the load-time work, and drag a filmstrip card onto the Reference pane to pin it.

A reference photo beside the editor, a tool bar that docks or floats wherever you work, richer gradient masks — and your masks now travel between Windows and Mac.

New

• Pin a reference photo beside the editor. The new Reference pane holds any photo next to the one you’re editing — drag one in from the filmstrip, from Finder, or straight off a web page (Pinterest, Google Images…). Comparing a photo with itself shows your finished look, not the flat original.
• A tool bar that docks or floats. Dock it flat to any edge on its own lane — never over your photo — or drag it out to float anywhere. It compacts under your hand while you drag, springs onto an edge with a real glide, tucks into a little puck on a double-click, and quiets down when idle (you choose how much, in Settings).
• Gradient masks grew up. A master Amount for any mask, both-ways gradients with independent per-side handles (fade tighter above than below, or the reverse), one-key Invert (X) and overlay preview (O), arrow-key nudging, and proper move / rotate cursors on the guides.
• Your masks now cross between Windows and Mac. Gradient, zone and radial masks — and AI-raster brushes — made on one platform now open on the other. Mac edits keep every Windows brush recipe intact for the trip back. (Hand-painted stroke brushes still render on Windows only — they’re next.)

Improved

• It feels faster everywhere. Photos open quicker, sliders stay sharp while you drag them on typical photos instead of dropping to a blur, film grain previews render several times faster, and the compare view opens and closes smoothly.
• Small polish: the Reference tool wears its own icon now, and dragging a photo out of the filmstrip just works — drop it on the reference pane.

Fixed

• Compare mode lag is gone — opening, closing, and docking the tool bar during compare are all on one smooth clock, and closing with two RAWs open no longer stalls.
• Comparing a photo with itself looked different from the editor — the reference now mirrors the editor’s exact rendering.
• The tool bar minded its manners: no more covering the photo when docked, colliding with the filmstrip tray, or oversized cursors on the gradient guides.

Chromogen is now native on Apple Silicon — plus a big round of stability and polish.

New

• Native on Apple Silicon. A dedicated M1–M4 build — no more Rosetta translation. RAW decodes and exports run on your Mac’s own architecture, verified pixel-identical to the Intel build. Intel Macs keep their own build; the download page now offers both.
• Cull with Picks and Rejects. In the Library, P picks, X rejects, U clears — each auto-advances to the next photo. Rejects fade back, a new Flag filter shows Any / Picks / Rejects, and flags follow photos through renames and moves. A reject never touches the file.
• Collections. Albums that reference your photos instead of moving them. Right-click any photo → Collections. Adding, removing, even deleting a whole collection never touches a file on disk.
• Press ? for the keyboard cheat-sheet, and I in the photo preview for an info card: camera, exposure, size, and your marks.
• Rotate from the crop corners. Grab just outside any corner of the crop box and turn to level the horizon — a proper rotate cursor shows the way, and the straighten dial follows along. The crop controls now appear where your tool bar is, instead of hiding at the bottom of the window.

Fixed

• The app no longer freezes while editing photos on an external drive. If your drive or network share fell asleep mid-session, saving could stall. A sleeping drive now costs one brief pause at worst, and your edits are always kept in memory.
• Cropping a RAW no longer washes out your edits. Applying a crop (or rotating, or straightening) silently switched off the RAW develop — the photo looked reset, and exports of cropped RAWs were washed out too. Every format we support was verified pixel-identical before and after cropping.
• Crop behaves like a proper tool now. The photo re-centres after you apply; dragging the box back out to the full frame actually removes the crop; Cancel rolls back everything the session changed — including corner rotation; and Reset Edits works in one press.
• Tools let go when you’re done with them. The colour and white-balance pickers can be put away (Esc, or just pick another tool), the curve’s Pull from photo stops following you across workspaces, and the masking brush’s Erase actually erases — including the promised ⌥-to-erase.
• “Pull from photo” now shows its state honestly — a bright pill while armed, quiet while not — and stays wired even after collapsing and re-opening panels.
• Full screen (F11) rebuilt. No more flicker or low-res frames, Esc works immediately, it opens on the monitor the app is on, and closing it can’t crash the app.
• Honest errors. A photo Chromogen lacks permission to read now says so and points at System Settings — it used to claim your camera was unsupported.

Improved

• Faster, smoother feel. One motion system across the app, ⌘1–9 workspace shortcuts, dark tooltips everywhere, a quieter status bar, and the histogram no longer turns comb-like on round-trip files. Corner rotation previews at drag speed and sharpens on release.
• “Reset all color” is a real button now, top-right of the Color panel — it was hidden until you hovered it.

Richer highlights on every RAW, instant opens for the newest cameras, and a right-click menu in the photo tray.

New

• Right-click any photo in the tray. The bottom photo tray now has the same menu as the Library: reveal the file in Finder, rename it, remove it from your library, or move it to the Trash. Remove from Library is new in both places — it clears a photo out of Chromogen and leaves the file untouched on disk.
• The newest cameras open instantly. A RAW from a camera Chromogen can’t yet decode directly used to wait on Adobe’s DNG Converter before anything appeared — up to half a minute on a big file. It now opens straight away from the camera’s own preview and prepares the full 16-bit version in the background, so your next open of that photo is full quality. If a camera can’t be converted at all, Chromogen now says so instead of promising something it can’t deliver.

Improved

• Brighter, more natural RAW rendering. The way RAW photos land their brightest tones has been rebuilt: highlights ease toward white the way film does, and the overall rendering is noticeably brighter, with more life in the midtones. This changes how every RAW photo looks when you first open it. Edits you have already saved are unaffected.
• Film grain that behaves like film. Colour grain now makes a visible, film-like difference. Grain size also re-forms the grain pattern as you change it, instead of magnifying one fixed pattern from the corner of the frame.

Fixed

• Renaming a photo no longer moves it to the end of the filmstrip — it keeps its place.
• Clearer license messages. If there is ever a problem with your license, Chromogen explains what happened instead of leaving you to guess — and keeps every one of your edits saved.

A Capture One round-trip, 16-bit TIFF support, and much faster RAW opens.

New

• Works with Capture One. Send a photo from Capture One’s Edit With, develop it in Chromogen, then press Save — your edit is written straight back into the file, and Capture One picks up the change. The Save button even names where it will go.
• Opens 16-bit TIFFs. High-bit TIFFs from Capture One, Lightroom or Photoshop now open in full quality — and push exposure or shadows as hard as you like without banding.

Improved

• Much faster RAW opens. RAW now decodes across all your Mac’s cores, and several photos can decode at once — so opening a photo, and the sharpening that follows, is dramatically quicker. Big files gain the most; a 60-megapixel file’s full-quality decode dropped from several seconds to around two.
• Natural highlights. The RAW develop now rolls the brightest tones off smoothly instead of clipping them to flat white.
• Faster on relaunch. Library thumbnails you’ve seen before come back instantly from a cache instead of being decoded again.

Fixed

• The Dehaze slider no longer flashes the image while you drag it.
• Clicking a photo right after launch no longer occasionally did nothing.
• A cleaner Heal tool icon.

Select your subject in one click, richer grain by default, and faster RAW opens.

New

• AI masking. Two Auto-select cards now lead the Masking picker. Subject lifts the person or object out of the frame in one click. Object arms click-to-mask — click anything in the photo and it joins the mask, named for what it found. Everything runs on your Mac; nothing is uploaded.
• Realistic grain, on by default. New edits now start with Film Response enabled — grain that follows real colour-negative behaviour, coarsening in the shadows and sitting differently in each channel. Edits you have already saved keep exactly the look they had.
• A persistent update banner. When a new version is available, a banner now waits in the top bar until you use it or dismiss it, instead of a message that disappeared after a few seconds.

Improved

• Faster RAW opens. Unnecessary work was taken out of the open path. Typical RAWs open around a quarter to a third faster.
• The Grain card, reorganised. Grain controls are grouped into Amount, Shape and Character, so the ones that change the look sit together.
• Film stock past 100%. Stock Amount now goes to 150% when you want to push a look harder — matching the Windows app.
• A calmer Library. Dragging the thumbnail-size slider now resizes the grid as you drag instead of rebuilding it, and the Scopes window stops working while it is minimised.

Fixed

• Switches that stuck. Clicking directly on a toggle could flip it twice and leave it looking stuck. Toggles now flip once, wherever you click the row.
• Toggle states in dark mode. On and off were hard to tell apart at a glance; on now reads clearly bright against off.
• Buttons keep their own colour on hover instead of being repainted by the system theme.

Previews that show your finished look, true-to-export colour, and a faster, steadier darkroom.

New

• Previews you can trust. Library tiles, the photo tray and film-stock cards now show the finished look — your film stock, edits, crop and rotation — instead of the camera's own preview. Edit away and the tray thumbnail follows along live.
• Faster hands. Double-click the photo to zoom in and back out, scroll to pan (hold ⌥ to zoom), hold Space to peek at the original, and ⌘, opens Settings — the conventions your other tools taught you.

Improved

• RAW switching, rebuilt for speed. Flipping back to a photo you already opened is instant, first opens show an honest development sooner, and very large files develop in two stages so the canvas never sits empty.
• Photos on network drives. A slow or frozen network share can no longer freeze the app. Originals are staged to a local cache, a stalled share affects only that one photo, and everything else keeps moving.
• The filmstrip stays put. Photos keep their order while you edit, when you switch, and across restarts — and Library ▸ Group ▸ Date now uses the day you shot the photo, not the day you imported it.

Fixed

• The canvas now matches your exports. On wide-gamut Mac displays the canvas rendered slightly more saturated than the exported file — what you see is now what you get.
• Canon colour restored. CR3s from certain bodies opened washed-out with lifted, magenta-tinted blacks. The correct rendering is back.
• Rapid switching between different RAW makes could stick on the previous photo — switching is now latest-wins, and your click always outranks background work.
• Smaller fixes. ⌘Z undoes slider drags reliably, DNGs no longer open with a brief purple tint, and scrollbars stay slim instead of ballooning on hover.

Moodboards that pull from anywhere, new-camera RAW support, and a faster darkroom.

New

• Moodboards, fully unlocked. Drag images straight in from your browser, right-click to paste or add photos, and a new screenshot button snaps any part of your screen straight onto a board. Colour cards now show their hex value (plus an optional name), with a toggle to hide it.
• New-camera RAW support. RAW formats Chromogen can't decode yet — Nikon High Efficiency NEFs and the newest Sony bodies — now open automatically in full 16-bit through Adobe's free DNG Converter when it's installed, or from the camera's own preview when it isn't.
• A rebuilt Presets workspace. Import Lightroom and Capture One presets, install .cube LUTs, save and manage your own looks — matching the Windows app feature-for-feature.
• White Balance: one-click Auto + presets. A three-state As Shot / Auto / Custom mode with six illuminant presets, on RAW and JPEG alike.
• Colour Mixer "Pull from photo". Arm the tool, then drag up or down on the photo itself to shift the colour under the cursor.

Improved

• RAW files open on sight. A developed preview appears in a fraction of a second — already wearing your film look — while the full 16-bit develop finishes behind it.
• A tidier Film Stock library. Filter by All · ★ · Most used · Character, with previews that track what you actually apply.
• A steadier canvas. The photo stays centred as you zoom out, fit accounts for the photo tray, tilted moodboard prints render with crisp smooth edges, and resizing shows proper macOS resize cursors.

Fixed

• Sony a7R VI and a7CR files opened slowly with glitch artifacts — they now open quickly and correctly.
• Interface fixes. Selection handles now sit on a tilted item's corners, panel text no longer clips, and the bit-depth chip truthfully reads 16-bit for RAW.
• Security hardening under the hood.

A clearer film-stock picker and a more polished trial.

Improved

• A clearer Film Stock picker. Premium stocks now wear a PRO badge over a dimmed preview, and Nocta 500T is featured as the popular pick — so what's included, and what the full version adds, reads at a glance.
• A more consistent trial. Once the trial ends, the darkroom reads as "look, don't touch" throughout, with clearer wording on what unlocking gets you.

Fixed

• Licensing fixes under the hood.

Chromogen comes to the Mac — the whole darkroom, now native on macOS.

New

• Chromogen is now on macOS. The complete app runs natively on macOS 11 and later, on both Apple Silicon and Intel: RAW developing on the full 16-bit file, the shelf of film stocks with physics-modeled grain and halation, the zone-system darkroom, masking, multi-photo layouts, text, and clean exports. One license works on either platform, on one computer at a time.
• Local adjustments, fully loaded. Every mask carries a complete set of local controls — Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks, Temperature, Tint, Saturation and Vibrance — so you can dodge, burn, and grade any part of the frame, not just the whole photo.
• True white balance on RAW. Set colour temperature in real Kelvin and tint, anchored to how the shot was taken — the absolute white-balance controls a colourist expects.
• Your details on export. Keep the camera and shooting info from the original, and stamp your copyright into JPEG and TIFF exports. Your location is never written into an export.

Type text straight onto the photo — and a tool bar that behaves in compare mode.

New

• Edit text where it sits. Double-click any text on your photo and a cursor appears right there, blinking, in that text’s own font, size and colour. Click to place the cursor, select, delete, retype — the words change under your hands instead of in a box off to the side. Enter finishes a heading (Shift+Enter starts a new line), Esc undoes your changes, clicking away finishes. Double-clicking an empty spot still makes a new text layer, ready to type.

Fixed

• The tool bar gets the whole canvas in compare mode. Comparing two photos pushed the tool bar sideways into the editing half — and with the bar docked to the left edge it could end up sitting on top of the photo you were editing. It now keeps its own strip and the compare panes lay out around it, so both photos stay whole whichever edge you dock to.
• The selection box keeps up with your text. Dragging text on the photo left its dashed box behind until you let go; box and text now travel together.
• All four tone buttons fit. “Highlights” was cut off in the Color panel’s Apply to row. The buttons are now sized to their own words.

Your photos, edits and settings are untouched by this update, and nothing about how a photo renders has changed.

A quieter interface, redrawn around your photo — in both themes.

The new look

• Panels became floating sections. The sidebar, tool bar, controls panel and photo tray are now rounded panels of the same shade, resting on one calm background with real space between them. Nothing is boxed in by outlines any more — each area is defined by its own surface, so your eye goes to the photo first.
• A colour-neutral interface. Every shade of the interface is now pure neutral grey, in the dark theme and the light one. Nothing around your photo carries a warm or cool cast, so the only colour on screen is the colour in your picture — and your read on it stays honest.
• The light theme, rebuilt. Light mode follows the same design: one soft background, brighter floating panels, clean white cards. Controls, text fields and buttons keep a whisper of an outline so they stay easy to pick out on a bright screen.
• A tool bar that fits its tools. Docked to any edge, the tool bar is now a compact floating bar sized to what it holds, with proper breathing room from the photo and the panels beside it.
• Bright outlines mean one thing: selection. The photo you’re editing and the film stock you’ve chosen wear a bright ring. Ordinary buttons no longer keep a highlight after you click them, and the outline that marks your place while tabbing appears only for the keyboard.

Also better

• Preview backgrounds behave. The White through Black backdrop choices show exactly the shade you pick in either theme, and they colour only the area around your photo — the rest of the app stays as it was.
• Dragging the panel edge resizes it live. The controls panel follows your hand as you drag, with no placeholder bar and no highlight running down the seam.
• A calmer photo tray and scope. The tray opens and closes without the thumbnails shifting, its search and filter are easier to see, and the histogram sits in a clean frame that a bright highlight peak can’t cut through.
• Preview quality is now Speed, Balanced and Quality, and it lives in Settings › Editing. Exports have always used full quality and still do, whichever you pick.
• Toggles, sliders and colour wheels are clearer to read, properly spaced, and consistent across every panel.

Your photos, edits and settings are untouched by this update, and nothing about how a photo renders has changed.

Copying edits now copies everything, and the Library is cleaner to look at and faster to work in.

Copying edits

• Sync Edits carries everything. The RAW develop settings, lens corrections and borders now copy along with the rest — tick what you want in the Sync Edits dialog and the copies match the source.
• RAW to JPEG copies match. Copying from a RAW onto a JPEG translates exposure and tone onto the sliders a JPEG actually uses, so a mixed batch comes out looking consistent.
• The dialog says what it does. It names the open photo it copies from — the tile marked OPEN — and the ticked photos it copies onto, and the Library refreshes the moment you apply.

Library

• The selection box sits around the outside of each photo with a little breathing room — never over your picture, polaroid-framed photos included — and photos float cleanly on the workspace background.
• More in the right-click menu. Edit in Develop opens a photo straight into the editor. Send to Moodboard drops photos onto your board without leaving the app. Remove from Library now works on any folder — parent folders included — and never touches the files on your computer.
• No more flash of the previous photo. Opening a photo into the editor shows the right picture from the first moment.
• RAW thumbnails reflect their exposure edits without you opening the photo first.

Editing

• Two-finger scrolling no longer nudges sliders by accident. Scrolling always scrolls the panel now. If you liked adjusting sliders with the wheel, turn it back on in Settings › Editing.
• The assistant is a proper guide. Ask it questions about the app, have it take you to any Settings page, or let it prepare a private support note that you review before anything is sent. No AI key needed.
• Saving and restoring edits is more dependable in a few rare situations.

Masks stay where you put them, and the assistant now works without an AI key.

Masking

• Masks and gradients stay with their subject when you reframe. Crop, cancel a crop, reset the crop, reset all geometry, rotate in quarter turns, or drag the straighten dial: your masks move with the picture. Paint you add after a crop stays put too.
• Masks land where you painted them on RAW photos after a crop. Cropping a RAW first and then adding a Subject or gradient mask now places the mask on the framing you can see.
• The crop box no longer jumps off the photo after you open and close the photo tray.

Assistant

• It works with no AI key and no internet connection. Type plain requests and it acts: adjust sliders (“warmer”, “more grain”), jump around the app (“show me settings”, “export”), ask where a control lives (“where is vibrance?”) and be taken straight to it, or ask a common question and get a real answer. Connecting your own AI provider is now only the upgrade for open-ended requests, not the price of entry. Type “connect” any time to add one.
• It answers the common questions about using Chromogen: updates, supported formats, importing, Sync Edits, privacy and more. If it cannot answer something it points you to halide@chromogen.app instead of a dead end.
• It follows more of the way you phrase things. “Don’t add grain” leaves grain alone. “Too warm” cools it a step. “Not warm enough” warms it. “Super warm” leans in harder, “a hair warmer” leans in less. Bare words like “grainy” are taken as instructions, a trailing number sets the amount (“warm 300”), and everyday typos still land.
• Questions are treated as questions. Asking something like “why is exposure 1?” no longer changes the setting.
• Say “organize by date” to open the Organize window. You still pick the destination and press the final button yourself.
• With your own AI provider connected, it reaches further: vibrance, shot exposure, push and pull, sharpening and radius, noise reduction, clarity, dehaze, vignette and straighten.

Library and film stock

• Film-stock previews are remembered between sessions. Revisiting a photo brings its cards straight back. In our testing a warm refill is about a third quicker on a JPEG, and switching from a RAW to a JPEG takes roughly half the time it used to.
• PNG-heavy libraries stop rebuilding their thumbnails on every launch. PNG, GIF, WebP, AVIF and TIFF thumbnails are kept between sessions at full quality. The preview cache lives with your other app data, holds up to 2 GB, trims the oldest first, and survives moving or renaming a photo.
• Switching photos brings the film-stock cards up straight away instead of grey placeholders, with the final versions swapping in as they finish.
• Compare in the Library now opens the side-by-side pane you already know from the editor, and it stays in the Library when you use it from the loupe. Drag any photo from the filmstrip into the left side, press Escape to go back to one photo.

Toolbar

• The floating toolbar can stand upright. Right-click it for Float upright (vertical). A toolbar torn off the left or right edge keeps its upright shape, and the choice is remembered.
• You can dock it to the bottom of the window again, and the outline showing where it will land hugs the bottom edge.
• The photo no longer shrinks and springs back while you drag the toolbar to a new edge, and docking it no longer makes the photo redraw itself.
• Starting a toolbar drag tucks the assistant bar out of the way so the two no longer overlap.

Fixed

• Exports and previews keep every edit when a RAW is open. With a RAW photo open, a closed JPEG’s brightness and colour-temperature work could be left out of its film-stock tile, composites, split-screen and carousel output, and batch export. All of those now carry the full edit. Your originals and your saved edits were never touched, and Chromogen refreshes the affected previews itself. If you batch-exported JPEGs while a RAW was open, export them again to pick up the missing tone and white balance.
• Escape works with a non-English input method switched on: leaving the loupe, exiting compare, clearing a selection, cancelling a toolbar drag and backing out of a crop all respond again.
• Under the hood: a security update to the component that reads DNG files.

Nothing about how your photos render has changed: every reference image and every film stock renders exactly the pixels it did before.

The film stock library loads the way it should — previews arrive quickly, stay put while you browse, and settle straight away when you move between photos.

Film Stock

• Stock previews arrive several at a time. The library renders your photo through several stocks at once instead of one after another, so the grid fills in a fraction of the time it used to.
• Browsing the library no longer interrupts it. Running the pointer across the cards while they are still filling now brings the card you are pointing at to the front of the queue.
• Switching photos settles in one step. The library updates to the new photo once, instead of clearing and redrawing itself several times over the seconds after a switch. Changing a setting keeps each card’s current preview on screen and replaces it as the new one is ready, rather than dropping the whole grid back to placeholders.
• RAW files switch more smoothly. The preview image behind the card grid is prepared once per photo, which takes noticeable work off the machine at the moment you move to a new RAW.

Nothing about how a stock looks has changed: every card renders exactly the pixels it did before, and your photos, ratings and edits carry over untouched.

Masks you can actually adjust after you place them, a noticeably faster app, and a sharper image while you work.

Masking

• Gradient masks stay adjustable. Once you place a gradient, the guide stays live on the photo: drag the outer lines to set where the fade starts and stops, drag the middle line to rotate, and drag the diamond to move the whole thing. Hold Shift for 15° steps, or nudge with the arrow keys.
• Two-directional gradients. Choose Both ways and the effect sits in a band through the middle of the frame, fading out to both ends — a strip of light across a scene, or warmth held through a horizon. Each side is shaped on its own.
• Invert any mask. The new Invert switch (or the X key) flips what a mask covers, and it works the same on gradients, radial spots, brushes and brightness masks.
• Amount. One slider scales everything inside a mask at once, so you can dial a whole local adjustment up or down without touching each control.
• See what a mask covers. The overlay is now a translucent wash instead of a solid colour, so the photo stays visible underneath while you judge the edge. Press O to show or hide it.
• The softness control is called Feather everywhere now, and it shapes the edge of a two-directional band too.

Speed and image quality

• The app opens about 30% faster and uses far less memory while it runs.
• A sharper image while you edit. Balanced and Crisp now draw the photo at your display’s full resolution as you work, so the picture no longer softens mid-adjustment. Fast stays a deliberate lower-resolution choice for when you want maximum speed. Exports have always used the full original.

RAW

• Cleaner skies around the sun. Photos with a blown sun no longer show a faint ring where the brightest area meets the sky. The transition is smooth.
• A more neutral starting point. RAW files now open with a truer, more neutral rendering rather than a slight built-in lift — so a RAW you opened in an earlier version will look a little different. Every slider behaves as before, your edits are all still there, and your files were never changed.

Canvas and Library

• The toolbar can take a side. Snap it to any edge of the canvas and it becomes a full bar that the photo makes room for, instead of floating over the picture. Drag it away and it lifts back into a compact floating bar under your hand.
• Compare, improved. The reference photo now zooms and pans on its own — scroll over it to zoom in, drag to move around, double-click to fit — so you can match detail between two shots. The toolbar stays put while you compare.
• Library and filmstrip thumbnails match the canvas, showing the same finished look as the photo you have open.

Straighten a photo by dragging a crop corner, plus a smoother round trip with Capture One and Lightroom.

Crop

• Rotate from the corners. Move just outside any corner of the crop box and the pointer becomes a rotate arrow — drag to level the horizon. The photo turns under a crop box that stays put, so you never end up with empty corners. Hold Shift for fine control, and the angle lands in the straighten dial if you want to nudge it by number afterwards.
• The canvas toolbar steps out of the way while you are cropping, and the crop bar no longer disappears when you open or close the photo tray.

Sending photos back to Capture One or Lightroom

• The save button names its destination. When you are editing a photo sent over from Capture One or Lightroom, the button reads Save to C1 or Save to Lr — and saving brings that app back to the front, so you are never left hunting for the window you came from.
• Chromogen appears in other apps’ Open With and Edit With lists. It now registers itself for all 34 photo formats it can open, so you can hand a photo over without hunting for the program file. Your existing file associations are left alone: nothing changes about what opens when you double-click a photo.
• A truer histogram on handed-over photos. Photos passed in from Capture One no longer show a spiky, comb-like histogram. The readings were always correct; the drawing was misleading.

Color

• “Reset all color” is a real button instead of faint text, so you can actually find it.

Hold a reference photo beside the one you’re editing, plus a calmer toolbar and sidebar.

Compare

• Hold a reference photo next to the one you’re editing. The new Compare button in the canvas toolbar splits the view: your photo stays on the right, fully editable with every slider working as normal, and a reference sits on the left. Made for matching one shot’s look to another.
• The reference shows its real look. If the reference is one of your own photos, it appears with its own edits applied, exactly as it looks everywhere else in the app.
• Drop in anything. Drag a photo up from the tray, drag a file in from a folder, or drag an image straight out of a browser. A new drop replaces the reference. Images from outside your library are kept separate and are never added to your photo library.
• Right-click the reference to swap it into the editor, or clear it with the small × that appears when you hover.

Toolbar

• Dragging the toolbar now only moves it. It can no longer minimize by accident when you push it toward an edge. To minimize it, double-click its grip (or use the right-click menu).
• Tools are grouped more clearly: selection, picking, view, and compare each sit in their own section.

Sidebar

• A calmer collapse. Minimizing the sidebar no longer makes the icons jump to the middle, drift, or shift again a second later. The panel slides and the icons ride with it in one motion.
• The minimized sidebar is tighter, and no longer shows a partly cut-off companion card.

Fixed

• Library cards no longer draw two rings around the photo you have open.
• Pick and reject marks on a card are no longer drawn three different ways at once.
• The heal tool’s icon now matches the Mac version.
• The app window has rounded corners on Windows 11.

Smoother RAW highlights, more cameras, faster opens, and real colour grain.

Your photos

• Smoother, brighter RAW highlights. Bright highlights — skies, sunlit skin, blown suns — now land brighter and softer, with the harsh colour rings that used to appear around very bright suns gone. Skin and sky keep their true colour. This affects the starting look of RAW photos only.
• Real colour film grain. The Colour Grain option now makes a visible, film-like difference, and dragging Grain Size or Crispness now re-forms the grain in place instead of looking like it zooms one corner of the photo.

Cameras

• More cameras open natively, including the Sony A1 II and Hasselblad X2D II, plus fixes for the newest Sony and Canon files.
• Brand-new camera models open too. A camera too new for the built-in decoder now opens quickly, then quietly upgrades itself to full 16-bit quality in the background, so your next open is full quality.

Faster

• RAW photos open and cull faster. The photo you click opens first — it jumps ahead of anything loading in the background — the next photo is prepared in advance, and very large files no longer stall the rest.

Fixed

• Dehaze no longer flashes when you let go of the slider.
• No more “Edits restored” flicker when the app starts. The filmstrip now fills out from the photo you are on instead of from the first photo, and the app opens faster the second time because finished-look thumbnails are saved to disk.
• The before/after compare divider now lines up with the photo split (on tall photos it used to sit off to one side).
• License handling is more reliable, with clearer messages if anything is ever wrong. Every edit stays saved either way.

Better highlights on every RAW photo, thumbnails that show your edits, and a quieter, lighter app.

Your photos

• Highlights roll off like film. Bright areas (skies, windows, sunlit skin) now ease gently toward white instead of flattening out early, and they keep their real colour, so blown-out skin no longer picks up an orange cast. This slightly changes the starting look of every RAW photo: expect a little more room in the highlights.
• Library and filmstrip thumbnails show your edits. An edited photo's thumbnail now previews its finished look (film stock, tone, colour) instead of the flat original, so you can see at a glance what you have already worked on.

Fixed

• RAW photos can no longer decode incorrectly when you open one while another is still loading. Opening a photo during a background load could show it rendered wrongly. Your files were never affected. RAW loading is now strictly one at a time.
• Switching photos no longer locks up the window. Reading a photo's lens information used to block the whole interface behind a background load.

Faster and lighter

• Quiet when you leave it alone. Chromogen kept animating in the background while idle, using power for nothing. It now settles once the sidebar companion falls asleep.
• Uses much less memory. Thumbnails are kept at the size they are actually shown, and the AI tools release their memory after you stop using them.
• Faster launches. Thumbnails are remembered between sessions instead of being rebuilt from every photo each time you open the app.

RAW photos open about three times faster, and what you see while they open is now always the real thing.

Faster

• RAW photos open in about a second. Chromogen now develops a fast preview first and finishes full quality quietly in the background, so you can start editing right away. Exports always use full quality, automatically. (Full Res preview mode keeps loading everything up front, unchanged.)
• More of the machine works on every open. Two heavy steps of RAW loading now use all processor cores. Same pixels, less waiting.

Fixed

• Switching photos could briefly flash back to the previous photo. Flick between RAW files quickly, especially right after editing, and the canvas sometimes jumped: new photo, old photo, new photo again. Two separate timing bugs behind it, both fixed.
• Photos no longer change their look while opening. Chromogen used to show the camera's own JPEG preview first, which has the camera's contrast and colour baked in, so the photo visibly shifted the moment the real develop appeared. Now the canvas only ever shows Chromogen's own rendering.
• Blown-out white backgrounds showed blotchy colour patches. On studio shots against a bright white backdrop, faint pink and blue squares could appear across the background. It now stays clean white. Bright overcast skies benefit too.

White balance you can set in one click, colour you can adjust by dragging on the photo itself, and a fix for Canon's newest camera.

New

• Auto white balance. Pick Auto and Chromogen reads the photo and takes the colour cast out for you. It uses the same maths as the eyedropper, so the two always agree. If a photo has nothing neutral to work from, it tells you instead of guessing.
• White balance presets. Daylight, Cloudy, Shade, Tungsten, Fluorescent and Flash are one click away on RAW photos, under Presets. They set a starting point, then you fine-tune with the sliders.
• A tidier White Balance panel. Mode (As Shot, Auto or Custom), the eyedropper and Presets now sit together in one row, and the panel is a row shorter.
• Pull colour from the photo. Turn on "Pull from photo" in the Color Editor, then drag up or down on any colour in your picture to adjust it. Chromogen works out which colour you grabbed, so you never hunt for the right band. Choose whether the drag changes Hue, Saturation or Lightness, and hold Shift for fine control.

Fixed

• Canon EOS R6 Mark III photos opened washed out in pink and purple. These files now open with correct colour.
• The Curves "Pull from photo" pointer. It flicked back to the normal arrow while you were dragging. Both pull tools now keep the up and down arrows for the whole drag.

A tidy-up of the Color panel, so undoing a colour experiment takes one click instead of a hunt.

New

• Reset all color. One click at the top of the Color panel puts the whole section back to normal: the grading wheels, Master Saturation and Vibrance, and everything in the Color Editor.
• Every colour tool resets on its own. The Color Mixer, Hue curves, Color Unify, and Even out skin each have their own Reset, so you can undo one experiment without losing the rest of your work.

Fixed

• The Lens hide button did nothing. It now previews the photo without lens correction, like every other hide button.
• Consistent hide and Reset buttons. In the Color panel some hide buttons sat on individual sliders, and the Color Editor showed two of everything. Every section now has exactly one hide and one Reset, and they cover the same thing.

A big update: retouching, smarter masking, importing your own presets, a moodboard, and a tidier film-stock picker.

New

• Heal tool. Paint over a blemish, dust spot, or distraction and Chromogen rebuilds the area from the texture around it. It holds up under film grain, and there is a one-click "Fix dust" pass too.
• Import your Lightroom and Capture One looks. Bring your own presets, profiles, and Capture One styles into the new Presets workspace and apply them like a film stock.
• AI masking. Click a person or an object and Chromogen selects it for you, so you can adjust just that area. Keep clicking to add more.
• Per-mask color and tone. Every mask now carries its own Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks, Tint, and Vibrance.
• Moodboard. A space to gather and arrange reference images while you edit.

Improved

• Tidier Film Stock picker. The filter row is now a single clean line with a "Character" dropdown, plus a new "Most used" view that surfaces the stocks you reach for most.
• Library. A new "Imported" view for the photos you add, and you can ask the assistant to sort your library into folders.

Bolder film looks, a big step up in RAW highlight rendering, wider camera support, and interface polish.

New

• Film looks can go further. The Stock Amount slider now goes up to 150%, so you can push a stock past its normal full strength for a bolder result.
• RAW photos take the look at full strength by default. Applying a film stock to a RAW file now starts at 100% (RAW opens flat, so it wears a stronger look well); JPEGs stay at a lighter 70%. You can set both defaults in Settings, under Editing, "Default Film Look."

RAW

• Blown-out highlights render far more naturally. Clipped suns, bright skies, and blown windows now roll off smoothly to film-like tones instead of clipping to a hard edge or a seam, and bright colored areas keep a truer, warmer color instead of being pushed to flat white.
• White Balance is now its own card with a real temperature scale in Kelvin, opening at the photo's as-shot value.
• Black-and-white camera RAWs open correctly. Files from monochrome cameras (such as the Ricoh GR, Leica Monochrom, and Pentax Monochrome) now open as a true black-and-white photo instead of a red-tinted one.
• More cameras open cleanly: Panasonic S1R II, Nikon Z 8 (HE), and a Sony ARW edge fix.

Improved

• Light theme polish. The color-balance wheels, the histogram, the clipping readout, and tooltips now all match the light interface.
• Text tool. The compose grid, its selection, and its toggles are now clean black-and-white with clearer, easier-to-tap controls.
• Your companion, Halide. When you send Halide for a nap he now stays asleep until you poke him, and he walks back to his spot to settle down instead of dozing off mid-stroll.
• Tidier settings. Removed the experimental Color Engine toggles from Settings; how your photos develop is unchanged.

Your darkroom companion comes to life, plus a faster editor and a few fixes.

New

• Halide, your darkroom companion, has been reborn. The little hooded figure in the sidebar now moves with real character: he gathers himself before he darts, lands with weight, and shows how he feels. He's happy when you pet him, proud after an export, curious when you import photos, and gets visibly sleepy before he nods off. He blinks and looks around on his own, and his tricks were reworked so each one is something you can actually watch him do.

Faster

• Snappier editing. Adjustments render about a third faster while you drag a slider, the app starts a little quicker, and finishing a slider drag now does a single clean render instead of two. The results are pixel-for-pixel identical, just with less waiting.

Fixes

• The film-stock "looks" pop-out no longer sticks. Opening the alternate-looks popup and clicking a stock could occasionally leave it stuck open with stocks unswitchable. One click now closes it and applies the stock.
• Fresh installs no longer hit a first-run error. A brand-new install with no photo library yet could show a startup error. Fixed.
• A batch of silent startup hiccups is gone. Some internal errors during launch could make the startup preview show the wrong edits for a moment. Fixed at the source.

A gentler Contrast control, wider file support, and easier updates.

Refinement

• Contrast keeps detail in shadows and highlights. Turning Contrast up used to flatten the darkest and brightest parts of a photo to solid black and white very quickly, which could read as too strong. It now keeps the same punch through the midtones but eases into black and white the way film does, so texture in snow, skies, and deep shadows survives. Pure black and white are still fully reachable. Photos you previously edited with a positive Contrast will render with a little more of that detail back. The negative Contrast direction, and the Whites and Highlights controls, are unchanged.

File support

• Opens JPEG-XL compressed DNG files. Some newer cameras, and Lightroom's "lossy DNG" option, save DNG files using JPEG-XL compression that Chromogen couldn't read before. These now open at full quality, developed the normal way, with no extra software to install.

Updates

• Check for updates from Settings. Settings now has a "Check for updates" button that tells you whether you're on the latest version and takes you straight to the download when there's a newer one.

Fixes

• A thin white line along the top edge of the pop-out Scopes window is gone.
• Reliability and security hardening under the hood.

A fix for the newest Nikon cameras.

Fixes

• Nikon ZR photos now open correctly. In 1.1.1, some Nikon ZR RAW files could still open as coloured stripes — a specific compression pattern slipped past the safety check. Chromogen now catches it and opens the real photo, from the camera's own preview or at full 16-bit quality when Adobe's free DNG Converter is installed.
• One-click link to the free DNG Converter. When a RAW is too new to read, the message now has a button that takes you straight to Adobe's free DNG Converter, which unlocks full-quality opening of the newest RAW files.

Newest-camera RAW support.

What's new

• Opens RAW files from brand-new cameras. Photos from cameras too new for the built-in RAW engine (like the Nikon ZR, and Nikon High Efficiency HE/HE* NEF files) used to fail with a confusing "out of memory" message or open as coloured noise. Chromogen now recognises when a camera is newer than its RAW engine and opens the photo from the camera's own full-size preview, so the picture appears correctly and every edit and film stock still works.
• No more false "out of memory." A RAW that genuinely can't be read now shows a clear, honest explanation of what to do, never a misleading memory error.
• Optional full-quality path. If Adobe's free DNG Converter is installed, the newest RAW files are converted and opened at full 16-bit quality automatically.

The film-look release: grain, edges, and a new film-exposure control, plus a wave of interface polish.

Film rendering

• Film grain realism. A new Film Response control drives grain that behaves like the real stock. Slide and instant film hold their grain into the highlights, colour-negative grain is finer and per-layer, and shadows pick up the coarser grain real film shows. Grain now also tracks push and pull.
• Sharper, truer film edges. The acutance and adjacency ("Mackie line") model reproduces the real over and undershoot asymmetry of film development, so edges read as film-sharp without looking digitally over-sharpened. Pushing a stock adds its edge bite automatically.
• Shot Exposure, a new film-exposure axis. Simulate a frame shot under or over the meter, developed normally, then scanned back. Underexposed reads faded and murky, the real thin-negative look; overexposed goes soft and pastel with clean blacks. Works per film stock and on RAW.
• Cleaner push and pull. Pulled film no longer lifts to milky blacks, whites pin back to paper white on negative stocks (slide and instant keep their honest density), and pushed highlights keep their separation instead of clipping.

Interface

• Colour grading wheels. Lift, Gamma, and Gain now live on colour wheels with brightness strips, replacing the flat slider block. A new option (Settings, Editing) puts red at the top of the wheels, the vectorscope layout colour-grading suites use, if that matches your muscle memory.
• Better sliders. Wheel to nudge, hold Shift to fine-drag, click a value to type it exactly.
• Polish throughout. App-wide dark tooltips and scrollbars, Ctrl+1 to 9 to switch workspaces, window and session persistence (reopen your last photo), loupe EXIF, smoother RAW opening, and a batch of smaller fixes.
• Cleaner photo tray. The tray filter is now a single dropdown (All, Edited, RAW, and star ratings) instead of a row of chips, and it no longer crowds the tray controls on a narrow window.
• Friendlier start. A redesigned first-run and trial experience, with plain-English tips on every slider and a short guided tour.

Under the hood

• Cross-platform licensing groundwork, so one key activates either platform.