What's new
in the darkroom.

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.

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 licence across smoothly. The upgrade now picks up your existing licence on the same computer without asking for the key, and licence 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 licence, 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. RAW thumbnails used the camera’s own punchy JPEG, so the grid disagreed with the editor — and a preview, once shown, could stay stale for the whole session. Thumbnails, the filmstrip, the photo strip and the big preview all render through the real develop pipeline now and refresh whenever edits change. First view of a RAW folder builds its previews once, then they’re instant.

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. Cards no longer flash, go stale, or show the previous photo’s look while you browse, hover, or switch photos rapidly — the preview pipeline was rebuilt with pooled renders and hard fences at photo boundaries. If you saw wrong-looking stock cards in 1.2.3, this is the fix.
• 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 licence messages. If there is ever a problem with your licence, 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).
• Licence 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.