imagic Complete User Guide 2026: From Installation to Export

imagic: Complete User Guide for 2026

This guide walks through imagic 1.4.9 the way the app itself is laid out: five steps down the left-hand sidebar, from importing a folder to exporting finished photos. It uses the real screens, menu names and keyboard shortcuts, so you can follow along with the app open. If you would rather watch than read, the tutorials page has an 11 minute walkthrough of every feature and a 2 minute quick start, both recorded in the real app on a real shoot.

What imagic is

imagic is a desktop app for Windows and macOS that culls and edits RAW photos on your own computer. The AI scoring runs locally, there is no catalogue to build and nothing to sync. It reads CR2, CR3, NEF, ARW, RAF, ORF, RW2, DNG and PEF RAW files, plus JPEG, PNG and TIFF, and it decodes RAW with its own built-in engine, so there is no separate RAW converter to install.

The sidebar shows the whole pipeline: 1. Import, 2. Analyse, 3. Review, 4. Edit and 5. Export. Each step hands off to the next, and the Next button at the top right of a page moves you along. The Home screen above the steps shows your library at a glance, your plan, tips, what is new, and the Remote control card used for connecting an AI assistant.

Installing and starting the free trial

Download the installer for Windows or macOS from imagic.ink/desktop. The free trial needs an email address but no card: you get a trial key, install the app, and activate the key on first launch. The trial includes everything in the Max tier.

The trial counts exports and nothing else. You can import, cull, compare and edit as many photos as you like, and the counter ticks once for each finished photo you export, up to 500. The key also carries a 90 day date as a backstop, so it stays good for the next time you shoot. When the trial ends you choose a tier (covered below) and the license is yours permanently.

Step 1: Import

Click Import Photos on Home, or use File > Import Folder, and pick a folder. Tick Scan subdirectories if the shoot is split across cards or day folders. Import adds the photos to your library and builds previews. It does not move, copy or change your files: they stay exactly where they are.

Step 2: Analyse, the AI cull

On the Analyse Photos page, analysis starts by itself while the Auto box is ticked. You can also press Run AI Analysis, or Re-Analyse All to score everything again. Every photo is scored from 0 to 100% using several checks:

• Sharpness, detail and noise: how well-defined the photo is and how much grain it carries.
• Exposure: tonal range and clipping.
• Composition: where the subject sits in the frame.
• Faces, eye by eye: a closed or half-closed eye counts against a shot, which is the blink check.
• Subject focus: whether the thing you focused on is the sharp part of the frame, which is the focus check.

Serious blur or a nearly black frame goes straight to the trash. Then imagic looks at the shoot as a whole. Near-identical frames taken seconds apart count as one moment, and only the best frame of each moment is kept. The rest go to review, never straight to trash. When it finishes, every photo has a score and one of three decisions: Keep, Review or Trash.

Choosing how many to keep

The card at the top of the Analyse page asks How many photos should the AI keep?. Best of every moment is the default. Choose Keep only the best, type a number, and press Apply to analysed photos to re-cut the whole shoot to that number. It re-ranks from the stored scores instantly, nothing is re-scored, your own keep and trash decisions are respected, and the photos over the limit go to Review rather than Trash.

People mode and action mode

Open File > Settings and go to the AI Culling tab. The Subject setting has two modes. People lets faces count toward the score, with both eyes visible scoring best. Action and sports ignores faces and leans on sharpness and subject focus, which is the right choice when your subject is turned away mid-movement. The same tab holds Auto-keep at score (0.50 by default), Auto-trash at score (0.35 by default), Keep at most, and Duplicate sensitivity, plus two Max options: the slower, more accurate perceptual quality model and AI captions for search. Subject and model changes apply to the next analysis.

Step 3: Review and cull

The Review step opens a page titled Review & Cull that shows every photo with its score, its decision and a bar for each thing it was scored on. Make the tiles bigger or smaller with the slider. Keep or trash any photo with one click: your decision always wins over the AI's, and it is saved as you go. The filter menu switches between All photos, Needs review, Kept and Trashed, and Next to review (or the N key) jumps to the next photo that still needs a decision.

The culling gallery and its shortcuts

Double-click any photo to open the culling gallery: one large photo at a time at full quality, with the next ones loaded ahead.

• Arrow keys (or A and D) move between photos.
• K keeps the photo.
• L trashes it.
• J (or H) sends it back to review.
• Esc closes the gallery.

Keep your right hand on J, K and L and your left on the arrows and a whole card goes by in minutes. These are the only culling shortcuts. Nothing is ever deleted from disk: trashed simply means left out of the export.

Detailed Culling View

Detailed Culling View lists every photo with its score, its decision and the reasons behind that decision. Hover a reason to see the full breakdown, filter by decision, change any row with its buttons, or press Adjust to change the keep and trash thresholds in Settings.

Find Duplicates

Find Duplicates groups bursts and near-identical frames, best first. Auto Pick keeps the best of each group, you can click any photo to keep it as well, and double-click opens a full preview. Applying the result marks the rest as trash. How strictly frames are grouped is the Duplicate sensitivity setting.

Choose Style

Choose Style, also on the Review & Cull page, sets a starting look for the whole library. Pick an edit style per scene, or a colour grade from eight families. Every thumbnail previews your own photo rather than a swatch.

Step 4: Edit

Click Edit in the sidebar, or double-click a photo on the Analyse page, to open the editor. Press Done Editing when you are finished to move on to Export, or Apply & Export to go straight to the export dialog. Your photo sits in the middle, the filmstrip is below, the histogram and shooting details are on the left, and every tool is on the right. Every slider is real RAW processing, not a filter laid over a JPEG.

Keyboard shortcuts in the editor

• Arrow keys or the filmstrip move between photos, and Del trashes the current photo.
• Backslash toggles the before and after view.
• 1 and 2 zoom to 100% and 200%, F fits the photo to the screen, and the mouse wheel zooms where you point.
• C starts a crop, Enter applies it and Esc leaves crop mode. The square bracket keys turn the photo 90 degrees either way.
• Ctrl+Z undoes, including a heal, and Ctrl+Shift+Z redoes.
• Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V copy and paste an edit, Ctrl+Shift+V pastes to all photos, Ctrl+Alt+V pastes to a batch you pick, and Ctrl+S saves all edits.

Sliders

• Light and white balance: auto white balance or presets for tungsten, fluorescent, daylight, cloudy and shade, then temperature, tint, exposure (in real stops), contrast, highlights, shadows, whites and blacks.
• Presence: texture, clarity, dehaze, vibrance and saturation.
• HSL: hue, saturation and luminance for eight colour ranges, red through magenta.
• Detail: sharpening amount and radius, noise reduction and colour noise reduction.
• Colour grading, vignette, grain, tone curve and colour wheels. The tone curve works on luminance or each colour channel.
• Colour grades and effects: 44 colour grades from film stocks to cinematic and black and white, blended in with an intensity slider, and 20 experimental effects such as bleach bypass, infrared and cyanotype.
• Expert mode adds advanced tone, advanced detail, and a RAW engine panel with the demosaic method, highlight recovery and the colour space of your exports.

Crop and geometry

Press C, pick a ratio, drag the box or its edges, and straighten with the angle slider. Enter applies the crop. AI Crop suggests a composition for you. Lens and geometry corrections cover lens profile corrections, rotation, distortion, and horizontal and vertical perspective.

Masks

Masks limit a set of adjustments to part of the photo. Manual Masking paints a mask with a brush or lasso, and linear and radial filters are there too. AI Masking selects the subject, the sky, people or the background for you, and Select Object finds the outline of anything you draw a box around. Keep a mask and it becomes a layer with its own tab, where the sliders only change the masked area. Edge and feather settings refine it, and you can stack as many mask layers as you need.

One-click tools and batch editing

Auto-Enhance sets the main sliders for the photo (press it again for a variation), Auto White Balance neutralises a colour cast, and there are one-click Denoise, Smart Sharpen and black and white tools. Heal removes a spot or distraction by painting over it. Further tools cover lens blur, face detection, super resolution, adaptive presets, portrait polish, chromatic aberration and red-eye removal.

The toolbar across the top of the editor holds AI Optimize All, Crop, the rotate buttons, Before/After, Copy and Paste, Presets, Snapshots, Reset Photo, Expert and Save All Edits. To work across a set, copy an edit and paste it to the next photo, every photo, or a batch you pick (crop and rotation always stay with their own photo). Save a look as a preset and it appears in the presets menu for every future shoot. Snapshots store named versions of a single photo. AI Optimize All edits every photo in one go and learns from the photos you have edited yourself, and you can run it again for a different take.

LUTs, coming in 1.5.0

LUT support is merged for the next release, version 1.5.0, and is not in 1.4.9. It reads .cube, .3dl and Hald CLUT files, adds a LUTs section to the editor with a strength slider, and bakes the LUT into your exported files. Lightroom sidecars cannot carry a LUT, so a LUT you applied in imagic will not appear in Lightroom (see the handoff section below).

Step 5: Export

On the Export page, press Export All Kept to open the export dialog. It renders every kept photo at full resolution with every edit, mask and crop applied.

• File Format: JPEG, PNG or TIFF, with a quality slider (95 by default) and an optional long-edge resize.
• Destination: a fixed export folder or the same folder as the source, with an optional subfolder per shoot.
• If a file already exists: keep both (rename the new file), overwrite, or skip.
• Copy originals: export the untouched source files with no re-encode.
• Add watermark: a text or logo watermark with position, opacity and size (a Plus feature).
• Export Recipes: save the format, quality, resize and watermark setup under a name for next time.

After an export, Open Folder jumps to the result, and Re-export Broken retries any photo whose export failed. While you are on the trial, only exported photos count toward the 500.

The Lightroom XMP handoff

If you finish your edits in Lightroom, tick Lightroom handoff in the export dialog. imagic writes a .xmp sidecar next to each RAW file, translating your imagic edits into Lightroom develop settings. When you export a rendered format such as JPEG or TIFF, the original RAW and its sidecar are also copied into the export folder, because a rendered image alone gives Lightroom nothing to reprocess. Import the RAW into Lightroom and your edits come up as the starting point.

Three limits are worth knowing. The handoff is for RAW files only (JPEG, DNG and TIFF keep their metadata inside the file, so Lightroom ignores sidecars for them). The translation is a close match, not pixel-identical. And a sidecar holds sliders only, so it cannot carry a LUT.

Settings tour

Everything lives under File > Settings, in four tabs:

• RAW Engine: the built-in engine works out of the box. You can optionally point imagic at darktable or ExifTool if you have them installed.
• Processing: interface size, how many photos are processed at once, and your default export format, quality, size limit and folder.
• AI Culling: the thresholds, subject mode and duplicate sensitivity described above.
• About: your version, your license, where your library lives, a switch to show first-time tips again, and a checkbox for sharing anonymous usage data.

The Help menu starts the in-app tutorial, the Shortcuts menu lists the keys, and the Contact / Feedback button at the bottom of the sidebar opens the contact and feedback form.

Lite, Plus and Max

imagic is a one-time purchase, not a subscription. There are three tiers, and an upgrade costs only the difference.

• Lite (EUR 19): the complete cull-to-export tool. Import, the full culling stack including duplicates, the full manual editor, single-mask local adjustments (brush, linear and radial), presets, batch export, the Lightroom handoff and export recipes.
• Plus (EUR 49): adds the retouch and masking toolkit: mask layers, AI masking, Select Object, Heal and clone, portrait polish, AI Crop, adaptive presets, lens blur and watermarking.
• Max (EUR 99): adds the automation surface, the headless CLI and the MCP server, plus the heavier models: the perceptual quality scorer, neural denoise and super resolution, search by meaning, People grouping, AI captions and style calibration.

Every pre-tier purchase keeps all features, and the free trial includes everything in Max. Current pricing is on the desktop page.

MCP and agent mode (Max)

With Max, an AI assistant can run imagic for you. imagic runs an MCP server on your computer, and an assistant such as Claude connects to it and calls imagic's tools: import, cull, presets, crops, exact slider values, AI masks and export. The assistant decides what to do and imagic does the actual work on your own files. Edits are real slider values, not AI-generated pixels, and your RAW files are never changed.

• Claude Desktop: in Claude Desktop open Settings, Developer, Edit Config, add imagic as a server, and restart Claude. The MCP setup pages have the exact config.
• ChatGPT or Claude in the browser: switch on Remote control on imagic's Home screen, add the connector it gives you, and enter the 6-digit code imagic shows. It is off by default and one click to disconnect.

Max also includes a headless command line for scripting. imagic --headless --scan DIR --analyse --export scans a folder, scores it and exports the kept photos with no window, using the AI Culling and Processing settings your install already has. To use different settings for a run, pass a YAML file with -c. imagic tools lists the tools an agent or script can call and imagic tool <name> runs one. The CLI guide covers scripting in more depth, and the tutorials page has a four minute video of Claude culling and editing a whole shoot by prompt.

Search by meaning and People grouping are Max features inside the app itself: type a word such as sunset or cat and imagic finds matching photos, and People groups the faces in your library so you can name someone once and find every photo of them.

Where to go next

For a first run on your own photos, the step-by-step walkthrough at imagic.ink/about follows a full shoot with real screenshots, and the tutorials page covers every feature on video.

Frequently asked questions

Does imagic move or change my original files?

No. Import reads files where they are and nothing is moved, copied or edited. Trashed photos stay on disk and are simply left out of the export, and edits are stored separately from the RAW files.

What does the free trial count?

Only exports. You can import, cull and edit freely, and the trial ticks once for each finished photo you export, up to 500. The key also carries a 90 day date as a backstop.

Which keyboard shortcuts does the culling gallery use?

The arrow keys move between photos, K keeps, L trashes, J sends a photo back to review, and Esc closes the gallery. A and D also move, and H also sends a photo to review.

Can I carry my edits into Lightroom?

Yes. Tick Lightroom handoff in the export dialog and imagic writes .xmp sidecars next to your RAW files. It works for RAW files only, it is a close match rather than pixel-identical, and it does not carry LUTs.

Which tier do I need for the MCP server?

Max. The headless command line and the MCP server are both Max features, and both are included in the free trial so you can test them first.