Develop¶

Goal¶

Make non-destructive edits to a selected photo, inspect their effect, and keep or recover the result through the catalog recipe and history.

Last reviewed: 2026-09-03 against the current Develop recipe and Studio presenter contracts.

Applies to¶

Ravo Studio with an open library and selected photo.
CPU Develop previews and exports.

Prerequisites¶

A library is open.
One photo is selected.
The original is readable for preview generation.

How Develop works¶

Select a photo in Gallery, Loupe, or the filmstrip.
Switch the top view control to Edit, or choose View → Edit.
Adjust a control, wait for the preview, and commit the value when you finish editing it.
Use Before / After to toggle the current rendered result against the unedited product baseline, or use the Y|Y toolbar control for a synchronized left/right comparison.
Continue editing, create a snapshot, or return to Gallery.

Ravo stores a versioned recipe for a non-baseline edit in the catalog. The original file is not changed. Preview, ravo catalog, and export use the same engine path, so an edit shown in Studio is the edit sent to local export. When ravo catalog develop (or another catalog client) commits while Studio is open, Studio reloads that photo's recipe and history from the catalog.

Interactive slider movement can show a lower-size preview while the control is being moved. A committed change is saved atomically and then a normal preview is refreshed. If several requests are made quickly, superseded previews are cancelled or discarded; a late result must not replace the newest edit.

Edit pane controls¶

The current Edit pane is a grading stack first: White Balance, Light, Curves, Color Equalizer, Color, then Camera Calibration. Geometry, Tone equalizer, Graduated ND, Detail, Effects, RAW repair, and profiles follow. Every numeric control has a reset action; each section can also be reset from its section menu.

Scopes stay above the Edit list, so they remain visible while you change White Balance, Color Equalizer, or Color Balance RGB.

Geometry¶

Rotate left or right by 90 degrees.
Flip horizontally or vertically.
Enter Crop & Rotate mode.
Choose a free, 1:1, 3:2, 4:3, 5:4, or 16:9 crop aspect.
Drag the crop frame to crop. Return or Done applies the frame and exits the tool; the photo stays in Edit.
Adjust Angle, Vertical, Horizontal, and Shear for manual perspective correction. Choose Bilinear, Lanczos 2, or Lanczos 3 sampling, and use Constrain crop to remove invalid transformed edges.
Use Auto, Vertical, or Horizontal to analyze a bounded in-memory preview. A photo without usable lines reports an error and keeps the current correction.
Enable Enlarge Canvas to reveal independent left, right, top, and bottom growth from 0 through 100 percent, using Green, Red, Blue, Black, or White fill. The checkbox is off by default; those extra controls stay hidden until it is enabled.

Crop values are normalized recipe coordinates. Perspective is rendered before the screen-axis crop overlay; commit the frame to store the crop change.

Canvas keeps masks and Retouch coordinates attached to the original photo and does not select the added area. Perspective/Angle and crop transform that mask overlay with the photo. Rotate, flip, or lens geometry after Canvas, or another masked edit after composed geometry, reports an explicit unsupported composition instead of applying stale coordinates.

Input Profile¶

Input Profile controls declare how the source enters the working color space. The current choices include source metadata, sRGB, Adobe RGB, Linear Rec709, Linear Rec2020, Rec709, Linear ProPhoto RGB, Display P3, and HLG P3. The working-profile list includes Linear Rec709, Linear Rec2020, Linear ProPhoto RGB, Display P3, and Adobe RGB.

Rendering intent options are Perceptual, Relative colorimetric, Saturation, and Absolute colorimetric. Gamut normalization can be disabled or clipped to sRGB, Adobe RGB, Linear Rec709, or Linear Rec2020. RAW blue mapping is available for RAW inputs.

Ravo does not silently substitute sRGB when a required profile is missing, corrupt, singular, or unsupported. The edit or export reports the failure.

Unbreak input profile¶

Enable the opt-in pre-input correction for a profile that expects non-linear RGB. Choose Logarithmic or Gamma mode and adjust the mode's displayed parameters. This correction is part of the recipe and cache identity; it is not the same as the general Gamma control in Light.

Output & Soft Proof¶

Choose an output profile such as sRGB, Adobe RGB, Linear Rec709, Linear Rec2020, Rec709, Linear ProPhoto RGB, PQ/HLG Rec2020, PQ/HLG P3, or Display P3. Choose the output rendering intent, then select:

Proof off — show the normal output profile.
Soft proof — preview through a declared proof profile and proof intent.
Gamut warning — show out-of-gamut regions using the declared proof state.

Black-point compensation is explicit. Studio never infers a monitor profile and does not perform a separate QML color transform.

White Balance¶

The RAW-aware modes are As shot, Camera reference, As shot → reference, and Manual coefficients. Automatic modes use camera metadata before demosaic. Manual mode exposes four coefficients: Red, Green, Blue, and Fourth (G1/G2 or the relevant fourth CFA channel).

On Bayer RAW, enable Pick white on photo and click a neutral patch. Ravo samples the CFA around that point and writes manual coefficients. Straighten and Canvas must be off. JPEG/PNG/TIFF originals report an unsupported pick.

If the source does not provide the metadata required by an automatic mode, Ravo reports the missing state rather than reverting to a generic Kelvin/tint approximation. ravo inspect reports as-shot and camera-reference coefficients for RAW. ravo catalog develop --pick-white=x,y uses the same sample path.

Color Calibration¶

Color Calibration (the later Calibration section) exposes a 3×3 output-row-by-input-channel matrix in the linear sRGB D50 workspace. Keep the diagonal at its identity values when no matrix mix is required. Camera Calibration on the default grading path is the separate RGB-primaries editor.

Light¶

Light controls include:

Exposure mode: Manual or Deflicker.
Exposure black and manual Exposure EV.
Optional exposure-bias and highlight-preservation compensation.
Deflicker percentile and target EV when Deflicker is selected.
The Light-panel Mask editors can attach a circle, brush, or other canonical mask so Exposure, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, or Blacks apply only inside that shape. Contrast, Gamma, and RGB levels stay global. With overlay on, Place on photo lets a click set a circle/ellipse centre or gradient anchor. Canvas, Perspective, straighten, rotate, and flip must be off.

Curves¶

Curves is a first-class grading tool after Light:

RGB (default) is a working-space RGB curve with linked RGB or independent Red/Green/Blue channels, a histogram behind the plot, and Monotonic / Centripetal / Cubic interpolation.
Linked RGB also has parametric Shadows / Darks / Lights / Highlights sliders. Point curve is applied after the parametric map.
Tone is the Lab/XYZ/RGB-linked luminance curve. Lab independent exposes Master, a, and b.
Click to add a point (up to 20); drag to reshape; double-click or Delete removes an interior point; arrow keys nudge the selected point.
The Curves-panel Mask editor can attach a circle, brush, or other canonical mask so the RGB or Tone curve applies only inside that shape. The RGB editor shows with the RGB family; the Tone editor shows with the Tone family.

Compensate middle grey and region splits stay under Curves · more.

For RAW, the Sigmoid Display · Standard SDR group exposes Contrast, Skew, and Preserve Hue. RAW uses Sigmoid as its default display transform and a mild Lab unsharp mask (amount 0.5). Those import-baseline values are not themselves marked as a user edit.

Deflicker is a RAW analysis mode. It does not synthesize an automatic result for unsupported raster analysis cases.

Color Equalizer¶

Color Equalizer is the default eight-band hue partition (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Aqua, Blue, Purple, Magenta). Choose Saturation, Hue, or Lightness, then edit all eight bands. It is separate from Graduated ND; bypassing one does not bypass the other.

Camera Calibration¶

Camera Calibration adjusts working-space primaries: shadow-tint hue/purity and red/green/blue hue and saturation. It is the same ravo.color.primaries operation as before, placed on the default grading path.

Color¶

The Color section currently exposes:

Vibrance and Saturation.
Velvia, with an enable switch, strength 0..100, and mid-tones bias 0..1. It boosts low-saturation colours with the frozen weighted response; imported canonical masks remain preserved/read-only in this panel.
3D LUT, which selects a .cube file and declares its input and output colour spaces, tetrahedral or trilinear interpolation, and strength. Choose the spaces the LUT was authored for; Ravo does not infer them from a file name. Missing, changed-to-invalid, 1D, or malformed files stop preview/export with an explicit error rather than silently applying an identity look.
Color Balance RGB · linear sRGB D50 / Filmlight Yrg, with Shadows / Midtones / Highlights wheels for hue and chroma plus a luminance slider. Formula, global, and extra numeric fields stay under Color Balance RGB · more. The Color panel Mask editor can attach a circle, brush, or other canonical mask so the grade applies only inside that shape.
Split Toning, with independent shadow/highlight hue and saturation, balance pivot, midtone compression, and mix. It preserves HSL lightness while blending the selected endpoint outside the compressed midtone band. Imported canonical masks remain preserved/read-only in this panel.
Monochrome, with a D50 Lab a/b virtual colour filter, filter size, highlight preservation, and mix. It uses a scale-aware bilateral base before neutral output; it is not a simple saturation slider. Imported canonical masks remain preserved/read-only in this panel.

Color · Advanced keeps the overlapping tools off the default path:

A D50 Lab Color look-up table with eight built-in presets and direct source and target patch fields.
Color Balance · legacy Lab / ProPhoto RGB, with Lift/Gamma/Gain or Slope/Offset/Power paths.
Color Correction · D50 Lab, with highlight/shadow a/b endpoints and saturation.
Color contrast, with independent a/b slopes and offsets plus an Allow extended chroma switch.
Color Harmonizer, with an enable switch, ten harmony rules, anchor hue, pull strength, neutral protection, pull width, custom nodes 2–4, four custom hues, four node saturations, and smoothing from 0 through 2. The engine applies positive smoothing through its canonical working-image scale and private recursive path.
Color Reconstruction, with an enable switch, none/saturated-color/hue precedence, highlight threshold, spatial and lightness range extents, and a hue selector when hue precedence is active. It propagates surrounding D50 Lab colour through a full-frame bilateral grid immediately before Output Color. A non-proportional preview fails explicitly instead of using a tile-local approximation.
Color Zones, an optional D50 Lab editor separate from the default Color Equalizer. Choose lightness, chroma, or hue as the selection axis; edit the current band's lightness/chroma/hue curves, choose cubic, Catmull–Rom, or monotone interpolation for each curve, and set mix strength. Imported custom 2–20-node curves and masks remain visible/read-only in the eight-band Studio projection so ordinary edits do not reshape them.

The two Color Balance paths are separate operations. Ravo does not treat one as an automatic fallback or alias for the other.

Canonical masks for Color Harmonizer and Graduated ND¶

Both Color Harmonizer and Graduated ND include a Mask editor. Choose None, All, Linear gradient, Circle, Ellipse, Parametric, Group, Path, or Brush. The available controls change with the selected kind; parametric thresholds remain ordered while you edit them. Selecting a non-None kind makes that operation an explicit enabled Develop edit, including a Graduated ND with density 0.

Show mask overlay tints the live preview with the selected operation's mask. It is a view setting only: it is not saved with the recipe and does not change export. Group attachments can add and combine children. Path and brush masks expose ordered points plus, for a brush, radius, hardness, and density.

Some recipes can contain masks that Studio did not create, masks shared by two operations, or group masks. Studio shows those attachments as read-only so an ordinary control cannot alter the wider graph. You can still use Detach mask to remove the attachment from the current operation without deleting the external/shared graph. Reset to all keeps an editable attachment and returns it to the All kind; use Detach mask when you want no attachment. Detaching does not disable or reset the owning operation, because Studio cannot infer whether that operation was already an explicit edit before the mask was created. Use the operation's enable/reset control separately when needed.

Detail and Effects¶

The current pane exposes:

Detail: Texture, Sharpen, Radius, Masking, luminance/color denoise plus radius, Retouch, Clarity, and Grain. Texture is a hue-preserving two-band guided luminance control for fine and mid-scale surface detail; its scale and iteration controls stay under Texture · more. Zero leaves the image unchanged, negative values soften texture, and positive values strengthen it without clipping positive HDR highlights. Sharpen applies a scale-aware separable unsharp mask to D50 Lab lightness only; Radius uses a 0–8 Studio working range while versioned recipes retain the full 0–99 source range. Masking is the existing sharpen threshold (0–100). Denoise is the accepted post-demosaic profile denoise and follows the Detail bypass lamp, including on JPEG. Borders and chroma remain unchanged by sharpen. Retouch adds ordered circle regions for Clone, Heal, Gaussian/Bilateral Blur, or Erase/Color Fill. Target position, radius/feather/opacity, clone/heal source position, blur radius, fill color, and fill brightness are explicit. Remove deletes that region; reset of the Detail section removes all Retouch regions.
Effects: Vignette (signed amount, midpoint, feather, roundness, and centre), Bloom, Soften, Dehaze, Output Dither / Posterize, Output Frame, and Text Watermark. Positive vignette darkens the corners; negative lightens them. Highlight-priority, colour-priority, and paint-overlay vignette styles are not offered. Dehaze exposes Strength, Distance, and adaptive window scaling. It runs on source-linear RAW using dark-channel ambient/depth estimation and a guided transmission filter; encoded raster input returns an explicit unsupported result. Output Dither runs after Output Color and offers deterministic random noise, all supported Floyd–Steinberg bit-depth/gray/RGB modes, and 2–8-level posterization. Auto applies Floyd–Steinberg only to integer export targets; preview and float output are range-clipped without automatic diffusion. Random damping is in dB, and Reset output dither removes the explicit operation. Output Frame runs after Dither and exposes orientation, dimension basis, constant/image/custom aspect, size, horizontal and vertical image position, border colour, plus optional line size, offset, and colour. It is visible in preview and is part of JPEG, PNG, and TIFF export dimensions. Text Watermark runs after the frame and uses a portable fixed 5×7 font. Set its text, colour, opacity, short-side height, rotation, alignment, and offsets. {stem} and {asset_id} expand from the current recipe source; unsupported characters or tokens fail explicitly.

Use the reset button beside a control when you want to remove only that effect.

Reuse edits as styles and presets¶

Use File → Save Edits as Style… to write the selected photo's complete canonical edit state to .rstyle.json. The artifact includes operation order, profiles, masks, Retouch regions, and section bypass state, but not the source asset identity. Use File → Apply Recipe Style… on another selected photo to replace its current edit recipe; the result enters normal history and can be undone during the session.

This complete replacement is recipe-style schema v1. Ravo validates the whole template before applying it. Legacy .dtstyle files are not partially imported because their dynamic IOP parameters may not have accepted Ravo equivalents.

The Edit left rail lists Presets above History:

Import… copies a Lightroom Classic .xmp or a Ravo .rstyle.json into a Ravo Presets folder next to the open library, then applies it to the selected photo. File → Import Preset… is the same command.
Save… opens the modified-parameter chooser. Only changes relative to the selected photo's product baseline are listed, nothing is selected by default, and a name plus at least one explicit selection is required. Successful save creates a schema-v2 .rstyle.json in Ravo Presets; an existing name is a conflict and is not overwritten.
Clicking a schema-v2 preset overlays only its selected logical fields while preserving every unselected target edit. Compound curves, profiles, Retouch, output layout, and mask-backed operations remain atomic choices; required mask nodes are merged and validated. A schema-v1 preset still replaces the complete recipe.

Right-click a listed preset and choose Copy Info to copy its name, path, kind, size, and SHA-256. Paste that block together with a photo Copy Info block to identify the exact library photo and preset file.

File → Apply Recipe Style… also accepts a Lightroom Classic .xmp preset (crs: Camera Raw settings). Ravo maps that look onto White Balance, Light, Curves, Color Equalizer, Color, Camera Calibration, Detail, and Effects, then commits through ordinary history. Crop, masks, Retouch, and profiles stay with the destination photo. Adobe Standard is not loaded. Unknown CRS keys and Kelvin/tint white balance fail instead of applying a partial look.

RAW Repair / Denoise / Lens¶

For supported Bayer and X-Trans RAW inputs, Demosaicing defaults to Auto: RCD for Bayer and Markesteijn 3-pass for X-Trans. PPG is a Bayer compatibility choice; Markesteijn 1-pass is the faster X-Trans alternative. Explicit modes for the wrong sensor fail instead of silently choosing another algorithm.

This group also includes:

Hot pixels, threshold, and the permissive three-neighbor mode.
RAW chromatic aberration iterations and Avoid CA color shift.
Highlight reconstruction.
RAW denoise for Bayer and X-Trans.
Manual lens distortion and lens vignetting controls.

Hot-pixel repair, highlight reconstruction, and RAW chromatic-aberration correction currently remain Bayer-only. RAW-only operations return an explicit unsupported result for raster or otherwise unsupported sources; they are not replaced by a raster approximation.

Tone equalizer and Graduated ND¶

Tone equalizer has five bands: Blacks, Shadows, Midtones, Highlights, and Whites.

Graduated ND provides graduated density and rotation. A positive graduated density follows the current gradient orientation; use the on-image crop/edit surface and the control values together when checking the result. Color Equalizer is a separate earlier section.

Before and After¶

Press Before / After in the Edit pane, use the View compare command, or press \. The image surface toggles between the current edited result and the selected photo's product baseline. It does not replace the stored recipe and does not rewrite the preview cache as a new edit.

For a simultaneous comparison, press the Y|Y toolbar button or Y. Studio shows the immutable product baseline on the left and the live edited preview on the right. Both panes share Fit/Fill/1:1, zoom, and pan. This comparison is transient and closes when the selection changes, Edit closes, or crop, white-balance pick, or mask editing takes the image surface.

Undo, redo, reset, and snapshots¶

Undo, Redo, Before / After, Reset all, Copy Parameters, and Paste Parameters live on the left History rail. Undo and Redo are the session stack for Develop-panel commits, history restore, Original, snapshot restore, paste, and reset. Live slider or crop drags stay in memory until they are committed. Undo and Redo then save the resulting recipe through the same catalog transaction.
Consecutive commits from the same control replace that control's latest ordinary History row, so repeated adjustments keep only the final value and one Undo returns to the value before the sequence. Changing controls, leaving Edit, selecting another photo, using Undo/Redo or History, creating a snapshot, or an intervening external edit starts a new row.
Copy Parameters (Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+C) opens the same initially-empty chooser as selective preset saving and lists only baseline-relative modifications. After you explicitly select fields, Studio stores that immutable parameter snapshot in a session clipboard. Paste Parameters (Cmd/Ctrl+Alt+V) overlays only those selected logical fields on the active photo through normal history, undo, validation, and preview. Paste Parameters to Selection (Cmd/Ctrl+Alt+Shift+V) applies the same clipboard to every photo in an explicit multi-selection through the catalog. Unselected destination edits and target-only mask state are preserved. Session undo does not revert the other destinations; those photos keep per-photo history. The clipboard is not a file or the system pasteboard; a style remains the portable artifact.
A control reset changes one field back to its default.
A mask-control reset keeps its attached editable mask. Reset to all changes that mask to All, while Detach mask removes only the current operation's attachment. Resetting one parametric threshold restores the complete canonical four-threshold ramp so it remains ordered.
A section reset clears the fields owned by that section.
Reset all returns the photo to the product baseline. RAW keeps its default Sigmoid display behavior.
Snapshot stores the current recipe into the separate Snapshots list as Snapshot 1, Snapshot 2, and so on. Double-click a snapshot name to rename it. History keeps only sequential edits. The bottom row is Original; click it to restore the product baseline. Click any later edit or a snapshot to restore that recipe as the current edit.

Result¶

The current edit is visible in the preview and marked as Edited in the photo information and thumbnail when it differs from the baseline.
Reopening the catalog restores the recipe and history.
Export uses the committed recipe, not a stale interactive slider preview.

Common questions¶

Why did the preview briefly show Loading?¶

Develop previews are asynchronous. A newer request cancels or supersedes an older one, and the UI keeps the newest accepted result.

Why did an automatic white-balance or profile control fail?¶

Those modes require a valid camera/profile contract. Ravo reports missing, corrupt, singular, or unsupported state instead of silently choosing a generic fallback.

Does Reset all restore the original file?¶

No. It removes the stored Develop changes and returns to the Ravo baseline. The original file was never modified by normal editing.

Why is a control visible but unavailable for my file?¶

Some controls are media-specific, especially RAW repair, camera metadata, and profile-dependent transforms. Availability is evaluated by the current engine contract, not by converting the file to a different hidden path.