What we wrote down, and why it is not in the panel
The inspector on the right of the corrector has room for a figure and a unit. It can tell you the pass added two thirds of a stop and took 1,100 K of warmth out; it has no room at all to say what a stop is, why the warmth was there, or why it sometimes declines to remove it. These three pages are that second half.
None of them is a tutorial and none of them ends by telling you to press the button. They are about the photograph rather than the interface, which is why they are worth reading once and then never again — and why each one is honest about the point where measuring a picture stops being able to help you.
- rangeWhy your photos look flatter than the room didYour eye works across roughly twenty stops of brightness and a phone sensor across ten or eleven. This is what happens to the other nine, and why the file never looks like the memory.
- kelvinIndoor light and the colours it inventsWhy a kitchen comes back amber, why a tube light lays green over the top of that, and how to tell a cast that should be removed from one that was the whole point of the photograph.
- clippingThe one thing correction cannot undoHow to read the right-hand wall of a histogram, and why nothing on this site — or any other — gets over it. The shortest page here, because the answer is short.
What is deliberately not written about here
There is no page on sharpening, none on retouching a face and none on repairing a damaged scan, because none of those operations exists on this site and a guide to something a tool cannot do is an advertisement dressed as help. The written layer stays inside the same fence the corrector does: whole-frame, measured, and about light and colour rather than about content.
Two of the three pages end on a limit rather than a result, which was not planned but is probably the truest thing about them. A photograph carries a fixed amount of information, and most of the skill in correcting one is knowing which parts of it are still there to be recovered.
Back to the picture
Every route below is the same corrector with a different control already under your hand, and every one of them prints its workings in the same panel these pages explain.
- The correctorOne press, then seven controls if the press did not get you all the way there.
- Brighten a dark photoOpens with Brightness under your hand and the shadow lift already measured.
- Take the yellow outOpens on Warmth, for tube light, warm LEDs and everything else that turns a room amber.
- Shot in a dim roomOpens on the low-light starting point: shadows well open, contrast held back.