Changelog

• Pasted edits are saved as you paste them: copying an edit onto other photos with Ctrl+Shift+V or Ctrl+Alt+V used to live only inside the editor until you pressed Ctrl+S, so Export All Kept could export those photos with their older edits. A paste is now saved to your library at once, the same way Apply to All Photos already was.
• Importing from iCloud Drive no longer freezes the window: photos that iCloud has not downloaded to this Mac are skipped with a count instead of stalling the import, and they are picked up on the next import once they are local.

• Large libraries open in seconds again: on a big catalogue imagic could sit unresponsive for close to a minute at launch and climb to many gigabytes of memory, far enough that Windows would report it as not responding. A 9,790-photo library now opens in about 7 seconds and uses a small fraction of the memory it did. Your photos and decisions were never affected.
• Thumbnails are no longer enlarged past their real size, which spent memory without adding any detail.
• The Review screen is prepared when you open it, instead of being rebuilt every time anything in the library changed. On a large catalogue that alone was most of the wait at startup.

• The Review and Analyse numbers update again: in 1.3.3 the out-of-date score notice, the keep-limit counts, the status bar totals and the processing list stopped refreshing while you worked. Your photos and decisions were never affected, and the grid itself kept working.

• Big imports no longer run out of memory: drawing the library used to load data it never shows for every photo, which could end a session on a shoot of several thousand photos. It now reads only what the grid renders.
• Clearer trial wording: the trial is measured in photos, and the app now says so when it runs out.
• The AI setup command works as shown: the command for connecting imagic to Claude and other AI tools now matches what the installed app ships.
• Crash reports carry no file paths: if the app crashes, the report it sends now strips folder paths in both Windows and Mac form before it leaves your machine.

• Anonymous usage and crash reports: imagic now tells us when an import, cull or export finishes (counts and durations only) and when the app crashes, so first-session hangs get fixed instead of guessed at. Never your photos, file names, folder paths or camera details. Switch it off under Settings › Share anonymous usage data.
• News from the Home screen: the Home view's news items can now carry a link, so a release note or an offer is one click away.
• Update check knows your version: the app tells the update service which version it is running, which lets us see how many people are on the current build before we retire an old one.

• Apple Silicon Macs get the full AI toolkit: the arm64 build now ships the same AI stack as Windows (Intel Macs keep the lighter build, because PyTorch no longer publishes Intel macOS wheels). Subject, people and background masks, CLIP scene analysis and captions, the perceptual quality scorer, lens blur and face detection all work on macOS, and the editor uses the fast OpenCV path instead of the slow fallbacks. The DMG is larger because of it.

• One engine, no RawTherapee: imagic now decodes and renders every photo with its own engine. The installers no longer bundle RawTherapee, so they are smaller and install faster, and every export is exactly what the preview showed. Nothing else changes for your photos: edited and styled photos were already rendered by this engine.
• Lens corrections: a new "Lens corrections" switch in Lens & Geometry undoes your lens's distortion, vignetting and colour fringing from its lensfun profile, matched from the photo's camera and lens data. It applies to the preview and the export.
• RAW engine controls that work: Expert › RAW ENGINE now drives the decoder itself. Choose the demosaic algorithm (AHD, DCB, DHT, AAHD, VNG, PPG), how clipped highlights are handled (clip, blend, reconstruct) and the export colour space (sRGB, Adobe RGB, ProPhoto, Rec. 2020, Display P3, each tagged with a matching profile). Changing the decode re-renders the preview.
• Expert tone and detail sliders now do something: Highlight and Shadow Compression, Local Contrast Radius, Darkness and Lightness, Sharpen Threshold and Halo Control used to have no effect on the picture. They now act in the engine, and every earlier edit renders exactly as before.
• Settings › Tools simplified: the RawTherapee path is gone. darktable stays as an optional renderer for photos you never edited or styled; ExifTool stays optional for richer metadata.

• The price you see is the price you pay: the Home screen and the trial-ended screen now show the live tier prices, sale included, instead of a fixed list price.
• Trials lead with the purchase: the Home plan card during a trial now puts "Buy Lite" first, with the MCP setup guide one click away.
• The free trial is 3 days with everything in Max, and leaving a review extends it to a full week. Trials already running keep their original end date.
• Licence check-in while the app is open: the app re-confirms its activation every half hour in the background, the same check it already makes at launch.

• Sliders follow your hand: the editor no longer freezes while you drag. Adjustments render in the background from a small preview while a slider is held and snap to full quality the moment you let go, and the processing engine itself is about three times faster with the same results.
• Process version 2, a new tonal engine: new photos are edited in linear light. Exposure +1 EV now really is one stop, the Highlights slider recovers to the left like Lightroom, lifted shadows keep their colour instead of going milky, and pushed highlights roll off instead of clipping. Photos you edited before this release keep looking exactly as they did (version 1); Expert › Process switches either way and converts the sliders so the picture stays close.
• Colour specks in the blacks are gone: pushing vibrance, saturation, shadows or exposure used to sprinkle red, green and blue dots across dark backgrounds. That was sensor noise in the deepest blacks being amplified; it is now kept neutral, while real dark colours keep every bit of their saturation.
• HSL sliders leave neutrals alone: the Red luminance slider used to brighten the whole image and speckle grey walls.
• Noise reduction keeps edges: Luminance NR was blurring the whole frame; it now smooths noise and leaves detail standing.
• Grain no longer flickers between slider moves, and the exported grain matches the preview.
• Lightroom handoff lands at the right brightness: sidecars now carry exposure and highlights the way Lightroom reads them, for old and new edits alike.
• Nothing gets cut off on a small window: the editor toolbar wraps onto a second row instead of clipping its buttons, the right-hand panel stays fully in view, and the left column scrolls.

• Straighten while you crop: a straighten slider in the crop toolbar rotates the photo live under the crop grid, with the alignment grid showing while you line up the horizon.
• The export dialog remembers: format, quality, resize, destination, subfolder, conflict policy, watermark and selected recipe all persist from your last export. "This photo vs all photos" still asks every time, on purpose.
• Readable pop-ups on a light Windows theme: dialogs no longer render dark text on a dark background.

• Export straight into Lightroom: the export dialog has a new "Lightroom handoff" option that writes a Lightroom-compatible sidecar file next to your RAW photos, carrying over your crop, rotation, white balance, tone, color grading, and effects edits so they're already applied the moment you import into Lightroom Classic.
• Cropping no longer resets on a stray click: after adjusting a crop, clicking anywhere else in the image used to throw the whole crop away and start a new one. It now takes an actual drag to start fresh — a click leaves your crop exactly where you left it.
• New alignment grid while cropping: dragging a crop handle now shows the same grid overlay the rotation slider already had, so you can line things up as you adjust.
• The culling gallery stopped freezing mid-review: a background analysis finishing, or "Apply to analysed photos," used to rebuild the whole review grid and drop your keyboard focus (and the J/K/L/H shortcuts with it). Status changes now patch in place instead.
• Zoom is noticeably faster while actively scrolling in and out in the editor — it was re-smoothing a full-resolution image on every scroll tick.
• Settings dialog is easier to read: tab labels no longer get cut off, the dialog opens larger, and every tab now scrolls properly instead of clipping its content.
• Quick-rotate 90°/180°: new buttons (and [ / ] shortcuts) to fix a photo that came in sideways or upside down, separate from the fine straighten slider.
• Lightroom handoff now works with any export format: exporting a JPEG/TIFF with the handoff checked now automatically brings the original RAW and its sidecar along too, so Lightroom actually has something to reprocess.

• MCP server crash on launch, fixed for real: if you use imagic Max's AI-agent server and hit a crash dialog on startup, this closes it. An unguarded startup path could throw before the server's own error handling was in place; it now runs inside the same try/except as everything else.

• The multi-minute startup freeze is gone: on some libraries imagic could hang for minutes right after launch while it built export thumbnails. A background thread was preparing images in a way only the main window is allowed to touch, and the two threads were fighting over the same lock. Thumbnail prep now stays fully on the correct thread.
• Analysis progress now actually moves: the "Analysing X of Y" counter could sit on 0 for the entire first photo before ever ticking up. Fixed the off-by-one behind it.
• Face detection is up to 2.3x faster on RAW files: it was decoding the full-resolution RAW just to shrink it down for detection. It now reads the small JPEG preview every RAW file already carries, with a full decode only as a fallback when no preview exists.

• The free trial is now built into the app: the activation screen used to assume you already had a product key, with no way to get one without leaving the app. It now leads with the trial: enter your email, get a 6-digit code, and you're in — activated through the exact same path a purchased key uses.
• Tightened license security: closed two ways a cached activation could be tampered with locally. Server-side enforcement on every online launch was never affected; this closes offline edge cases.
• macOS updates actually install now: updating used to mount the disk image and leave you to drag the app over yourself. It now swaps the app in place like you'd expect.
• Your version is visible in the sidebar, and a crash that could happen when the license server was briefly unreachable is fixed.

• macOS first-launch fixed: the "Apple could not verify imagic is free of malware" warning is gone. The bundled RAW engine now loads everything from inside the app, and every build must pass Apple's pre-distribution checks before it can ship.
• Updates no longer ask you to quit first: installing a new version over a running imagic now closes the app cleanly (including the background AI-agent server) instead of aborting the install.
• Faster, calmer imports: thumbnails decode on a small shared pool instead of one thread per photo, and if your shoot lives in iCloud-synced folders, imagic now tells you which files are still in the cloud instead of silently crawling.
• Your AI agent gets a shell too (Max): imagic tools and imagic tool <name> expose the full 20-tool automation surface from any terminal, no server setup needed, and sandboxed runs with -c now genuinely keep your real library untouched.
• Smarter about its own scores (Max): every quality score records which scorer produced it. When the scoring engine improves, imagic shows how many photos carry outdated scores and re-scores just those, never touching your manual keep/trash decisions.
• Launch resilience: if the license server is unreachable, imagic starts anyway on your cached activation with a 14-day offline grace period.

• imagic 1.0: the first photo editor your AI can drive. A built-in MCP server and CLI (imagic Max) let Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Codex, or Copilot run the real pipeline: scan a shoot, score and cull it, apply your style, and export the keepers from one plain-language prompt. Setup is one command; see the MCP guide.
• It learns YOUR editing style (Max): a short guided calibration picks up to 8 photos from your own library across different scenarios (portrait, low light, golden hour, landscape...), you edit them the way you would deliver them, and imagic builds a per-scenario profile it can apply to new shoots. Run it again any time to refine it. Non-destructive, fully local.
• Instant re-culling: after analysis, changing the keep/trash thresholds or "keep at most N" updates the selection immediately from the stored scores, no re-analysis. Your manual keep/trash decisions are never overridden. Great for "pick my best 100 of 3,000" portfolio passes, in the app or through the new reselect tool for AI agents.
• New pricing, still one-time: imagic Lite (€19), Plus (€49), and Max (€99). No subscription, ever, and you can upgrade any time by paying only the difference. Everyone who bought before tiers existed has been upgraded to Max, free, permanently.
• The heaviest AI models live in Max: neural denoise, neural upscaling, semantic search across your library, and perceptual quality scoring.
• A cleaner site and app polish throughout, including a rebuilt navigation header and working mobile menus on every page.

Desktop builds for Windows and macOS are rolling out; existing installs update automatically.

• Built from a working photographer's test report: a partner studio ran imagic over a real 263-photo race shoot and filed 29 findings. Every one of them is addressed in this release.
• Your exports keep their EXIF: camera model, exposure, ISO, focal length and lens data now travel into every exported file. Watermarks with © or any accented character render correctly instead of as "??", and you can preview the watermark on your own photo right in the export dialog.
• Exports never silently replace a file: if the name is taken you choose keep-both, overwrite, or skip — and an export can never overwrite your original, whatever the settings. The export dialog now shows the destination folder and lets you change it for that export, including "same as source folder" with a subfolder.
• Culling-only export: copy your kept photos byte-for-byte — original file, format, and metadata, no re-encode. Perfect when you cull JPGs and want the originals preserved.
• Smarter, fairer scoring: grass and foliage no longer read as "noise", distant faces are actually detected (detection now runs on a proper-size colour image), and photos without faces are no longer dragged toward the middle by a meaningless face score. A crisp distant subject is now treated as competence, not a defect.
• Review that works like reviewing: the photos set aside for review are finally visible everywhere — badges on the Analyse grid, a working status filter, a "Next to review" button that steps you through them with their neighbours still on screen, and double-click opens a full preview with keep/trash buttons instead of throwing you into the editor. The Detailed Culling View counters now agree with the status bar.
• Import on your terms: picking a folder no longer starts scanning before you can change "Scan subdirectories", and you see live progress — "Scanning — found 180 photos…", then "Importing 42/263" — instead of a frozen label on slow network drives.
• Editing quality: zoom to 100% and the preview re-renders from the full decode; film-style grades no longer speckle dark areas (previews and exports); after a reset, the histogram agrees with your eyes; thumbnails show the edited version of each photo; and switching photos shows your edits instantly instead of re-applying them in front of you.
• Editing flow: Ctrl/Shift-click selects multiple photos in the film strip and applies a look to just those; the mouse wheel scrolls the panel instead of yanking sliders; keyboard shortcuts keep working after clicking a thumbnail; "Reset Photo" says what it does and "Reset All Photos" now exists; the Hue/Saturation/Luminance groups fold like every other section; and there is a plain "None" filter tile.
• AI batches behave: the optimize overlay shows each photo's result live so you can cancel early, "Done Editing" and the sidebar are locked while a batch runs (no more wedged modals), the Export tab gets the same options dialog and Esc-to-cancel as the editor, and closing the app mid-export actually stops the export.

Available for Windows, and for macOS on both Apple Silicon and Intel, signed and notarized by Apple.

• Your exports finally match your edits: Heal / Remove, Red-Eye, Portrait Polish, super-resolution and lens blur used to look right in the editor and then disappear from the exported file. They now render into your exports at full resolution, so what you see on screen is what lands on disk. This was the biggest known gap in v0.6.0 and it is closed.
• Mask layers: Every mask you make (AI, manual, lasso, Snap, Select Object) becomes its own named layer with its own tab and its own settings, so you can build up several local adjustments on one photo and come back and edit any of them later. Masked adjustments now save with the photo and reach your exports, which they previously did not.
• Global edits leave your masked area alone: A masked region is now governed by its own layer, so pushing exposure on Global no longer drags the masked pixels with it.
• Much sharper mask edges: AI masks are refit to your photo's real edges instead of being scaled up and left blocky, measured at 45% better boundary alignment. Hair and shoulders come out crisp. Sky selection now finds the actual horizon rather than guessing from brightness, and new feather plus grow / shrink controls remove the bright halo that local exposure lifts used to leave around a subject.
• Select Object: Drag a box around anything and imagic cuts it out as a mask, with options to keep it, refine the edges, or flip to selecting the background instead.
• Snap to Object for Heal / Remove: Scribble roughly over the thing you want gone and the selection tightens to its real outline. Heal now hands you a brush straight away, is fully undoable, and repairs with matched grain and a feathered blend, so blemishes and sky spots heal seamlessly instead of leaving a smooth plastic patch.
• Search your library by meaning: Type what you are looking for, like "bride laughing" or "sunset on the cliffs", and imagic finds it without you having ever tagged a thing.
• People view: imagic groups the faces across a shoot, you name each person once, and then you can filter the whole library down to them with a click.
• Sensor dust, marked once: Mark a speck on one frame and imagic cleans it across the whole shoot, skipping the frames where it falls over detail and would do more harm than good. It tells you what it plans to touch before it touches anything.
• Smarter culling: Culling now compares the frames covering the same moment and picks the best one, instead of judging each photo against a fixed bar. Frames that lose out are set aside rather than trashed, and each one tells you why.
• Cancellable Export All: Start a 700 photo export by mistake and you can now stop it. Everything already exported is kept.
• Every tool is unlocked: Heal / Remove, mask layers, Portrait Polish and watermarking were showing a padlock to customers who had already bought the licence. There is one imagic licence and it now includes everything.
• Fixed: AI masking was quietly broken on Windows. Choosing People, Subject or Sky returned a mask covering roughly the wrong half of the frame, because the segmentation model was never actually loading. It loads now, and the masks are correct.
• Also fixed: the film strip scrolls with a normal mouse wheel, "Press Esc to cancel" genuinely cancels, grade previews use your own photo as you have edited it, and the licence agreement in the installer no longer shows garbled characters.
• New, on the web: share.imagic.ink client proofing galleries. Upload proofs, give everyone on the client side their own private link, and get back an edit queue ranked by how many of them picked each frame. Plus password reset on your imagic account, which previously had no recovery at all.

Available for Windows, and for macOS on both Apple Silicon and Intel, signed and notarized by Apple.

• Native Apple Silicon build: imagic now ships a native macOS build, signed and notarized by Apple, so it installs and runs cleanly on modern Macs — no more workarounds. A separate Intel build is available too.
• No more freezing: Exports, AI tools, and app startup were rebuilt to stay responsive — the "Export All" freeze, the AI-masking stall on large RAWs, and the startup hang are all gone, each replaced with real progress feedback.
• New AI editing tools: One-click Portrait Polish (skin smoothing), Heal / Remove to erase distractions inside a mask, Red-Eye Removal, and sharper subject masking with a smarter model plus Keep / Invert / Discard controls.
• Non-destructive editing: Deeper undo/redo that survives switching photos, plus named snapshots you can save and restore per photo.
• Copy & paste edits: Copy a photo's edits and paste them onto the next photo, every photo in the workspace, or a batch you pick — with a preview of the copied source in the sidebar.
• Watermarking & export recipes: Add a text or logo watermark, resize on export, and save your favourite export settings as reusable recipes.
• New Home dashboard: A proper landing screen with quick start, the video tutorial, live library stats, tips, and what's-new.
• Clearer Settings: Every setting now explains what it does, including which RAW engine is in use, plus new options for export format, duplicate sensitivity, and optional AI models.
• Organised exports: Exports are grouped into a per-shoot folder, and "Open Folder" jumps straight to your latest session.
• Dozens of polish fixes across culling, the style chooser, dialogs, and readability throughout the app.

• Instant Manual Culling: Keep, trash, and review decisions in the culling gallery now update immediately instead of freezing the app while status changes are saved.
• High-Quality Culling Preview Restored: The gallery keeps the larger RAW preview experience, but loads bounded high-quality previews after the decision UI is responsive.
• Batched Gallery Saves: Gallery culling changes are collected while you work and flushed when the gallery closes, so rapid keyboard decisions stay smooth across long review sessions.
• Safer Status Persistence: Manual culling metadata is persisted through a dedicated background worker and flushed during shutdown so decisions are not lost.

• JPG and PNG Imports Fixed: Folder import now accepts the file types the app already advertised: .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .tif, .tiff, and RAW files. Non-RAW images no longer disappear during import as if they were unsupported.
• Safer Export Completion: Batch export now reports partial failures honestly and only marks an export as successful when the expected output file exists.
• Responsive Editor Sidebar: The editor controls panel is now resizable and its controls reflow at narrow widths instead of pushing beyond the screen edge.
• macOS Installer Branding: The custom DMG background now regenerates from the current project version so the installer no longer shows stale version text.
• Windows and macOS Hotfix: This release ships the customer-facing JPG/PNG import fix with matching Windows and macOS package metadata.

• Reliable macOS Imports: Import now waits for the real background scan to finish, refreshes the library immediately, and respects the recursive folder option.
• Clearer Import Feedback: The app now reports how many photos were imported, surfaces scan errors, and avoids silently advancing when a folder has no supported images.
• JPG/PNG Import Clarity: The import screen and built-in tutorial now explain that regular JPG, JPEG, PNG, and TIFF files are supported alongside RAW files.
• No More Stale RAW Loop: New imports clear the previous editor batch so customers are not repeatedly returned to an older RAW file after importing a different folder.
• Mac/Windows Build Parity: Release metadata now stays aligned with the shared desktop version so macOS packages ship with the same app updates as Windows.

• White Balance Presets: A new WB row at the top of the BASIC panel gives you one-click presets — Auto, Tungsten (3200K), Fluor (4000K), Daylight (5500K), Cloudy (6500K), and Shade (7500K). Click a preset and Temperature jumps to that colour temperature; Tint resets to neutral. Auto runs the grey-world WB estimator on the current image.
• Live Kelvin Readout: The WB row also shows the current Temperature slider value as a Kelvin estimate, such as 5500K, that updates in real time as you drag, so you always know roughly where you are on the colour-temperature scale.

• AI Optimize All No Longer Wrecks Backlit Photos: The batch optimizer was lifting exposure on cafe/window/sunlit-subject scenes that already had blown highlights, then piling on contrast and saturation from your user-style blend. v0.4.7 now detects backlit and high-dynamic-range scenes and switches to a recovery-only profile: highlight pull-back, gentle shadow lift, no positive exposure, and no extra contrast.
• Stopped User-Style Bleed Into Tonal Sliders: The “learn from your first 10 edits” blend was leaking into contrast, saturation, exposure, highlights, shadows, whites, and blacks. The blend now only touches taste keys like temperature, tint, vibrance, clarity, texture, and dehaze, and is clamped to ±50.
• Saturation Removed From Auto Recommendations: The auto-enhance algorithm no longer suggests raw saturation, which could push skin tones out of gamut on JPEGs. Vibrance is still used and capped tighter at 12.
• Visual Refinement No Longer Adds Contrast: When the post-edit proxy looked flat, the refiner used to pile +8 contrast on top. It now reduces shadow lift or highlight recovery instead of adding contrast.
• Tighter Auto-Enhance Caps: Exposure capped at 14, contrast at 10, vibrance at 12, and dehaze at 6–8, so optimization feels like an assistant rather than a maximalist filter.

• Editable Slider Values: Every adjustment slider in the right-hand panel now shows its value in an editable spin box. The numbers are no longer cropped off the edge of the panel and you can click the field to type an exact value.
• More Precise Slider Control: Sliders now move in single-unit steps and clicking anywhere on the track jumps the handle directly to that point instead of paging by 10. Keyboard arrows and the spin box give exact integer control.
• Snappier Live Preview: The on-screen preview proxy was downsized from 1800px to 1100px max dimension, cutting per-frame pixel work by roughly 2.5× while keeping visual fidelity at typical canvas sizes.
• AI Optimize Tuned Down: Auto-enhance caps were lowered for exposure, contrast, vibrance, dehaze, and sharpening, and the user-style blend was rebalanced in favour of per-photo analysis. Each photo now keeps its own character instead of being pushed toward a single look.
• No More Console Window Spam on Import: Importing TIFF files and other already-decoded images no longer pops empty terminal windows on Windows. Thumbnails for TIFF, JPEG, PNG, BMP, and WebP now use a fast in-process Pillow path instead of shelling out to RAW CLIs.
• Quieter RAW Tooling: External CLI calls such as RawTherapee, darktable, and exiftool now run through a hidden-window helper so background processing cannot flash console windows over your work.

• Stopped Phantom Update Prompt: v0.4.4 installs reported the runtime version as 0.4.3, so the update checker kept saying a new version was available even after installing the latest build. The desktop app now reports its true installed version.
• Release Version Hygiene: Aligned the runtime app version, packaging metadata, and installer default so future builds cannot silently drift apart.
• Server Fallback Bumped: The latest-version endpoint’s built-in default now matches the current release, so a missing environment variable can never accidentally downgrade the advertised version.

• AI Masking Stability: Fixed crashes when selecting Subject, Sky, People, or Background masks on systems missing ONNX runtime backends.
• Safe Fallback Masking: rembg initialization now fails gracefully and automatically uses fallback mask generation instead of aborting the task.
• Cleaner AI Error Handling: Suppressed noisy backend startup output and improved runtime handling for AI masking worker failures.
• AI Cancel Reliability: Esc/cancel handling in the AI loading modal now consistently interrupts active masking tasks and closes cleanly.

• Fixed RAW Decode Hang: Resolved a bug where the editor would stay stuck on "Decoding RAW…" forever if a file failed to decode — the overlay is now properly dismissed on error
• 4x Faster Batch Optimize: AI Optimize All now uses half-resolution DHT demosaic instead of full-resolution AHD, dramatically speeding up processing for large batches (1000+ photos)
• Non-RAW File Support in Editor: JPEG, PNG, and TIFF files are now loaded directly via Pillow instead of being passed to rawpy, preventing decode errors for non-RAW imports
• Decode Error Reporting: All RAW decode workers now surface failures with warnings in the log instead of silently swallowing them

• Neutral Dark Theme: Removed all blue and purple tints from the app UI, with clean light and dark grey backgrounds throughout
• Fixed Text Encoding: Resolved garbled text (mojibake) in editor panel headers and toolbar labels
• Color Wheel Visibility: Boosted opacity for Shadow, Midtone, and Highlight colour grading wheels
• Auto-Upgrade Installer: Automatically detects and silently removes any previous imagic installation before upgrading

• AI Masking: Select Subject, Sky, People, or Background with AI-powered mask generation for targeted edits
• AI Lens Blur: Depth-based bokeh simulation using MiDaS depth estimation for realistic background blur
• AI Face Detection: Detect and highlight faces in photos with OpenCV DNN and optional dlib embeddings
• AI Super Resolution: 2x and 4x upscaling via Real-ESRGAN or enhanced bicubic with sharpening fallback
• AI Enhance Details: Multi-scale detail decomposition for fine-detail enhancement without upscaling
• AI Adaptive Presets: Scene-aware automatic adjustments — detects Portrait, Landscape, Night, Indoor, Macro and applies targeted corrections
• 3-Way Color Wheels: Shadow, Midtone, and Highlight colour grading with interactive visual wheels and luminance sliders
• HSL Hue Sliders: 8-channel hue shift control (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Aqua, Blue, Purple, Magenta) added to HSL panel
• Texture Slider: Fine-frequency detail enhancement in the Presence panel
• Rotation Control: Precise rotation slider in Lens & Geometry panel
• Tone Curve and Lens & Geometry promoted from expert-only to always-visible main panels
• Premium UI Overhaul: Neutral dark theme with refined colour palette, gradient section headers, improved scrollbar styling, and polished visuals across all views
• AI Cancel: Press Escape or click cancel to interrupt AI batch processing mid-run without losing completed results
• AI Model Caching: Background-removal model loaded once and reused across multiple operations for faster processing
• Fixed thumbnail cache eviction off-by-one error that could cause spurious cache misses
• Fixed AI worker race conditions and proper thread cleanup on batch completion

• Fixed crop tool: crop now persists across undo/redo, save, and editor reopen
• Crop preview: applied crops are shown in the live preview after confirmation
• AI Suggest Crop: new button in crop mode uses composition analysis to suggest optimal framing
• Aspect ratio lock: choose Free, Original, 1:1, 3:2, 4:3, 16:9 etc. while cropping
• Clear Crop button to remove crop and return to full image
• In-app auto-updater: download and install updates directly from the app instead of opening the browser
• Progress bar in update banner showing download status with MB counter
• Automatic fallback to browser download if in-app download fails
• Export options dialog: choose file format (JPEG/PNG/TIFF), quality, and export scope (single photo or entire batch) before exporting

• Added TIF/TIFF as supported input formats (scanner, config, and defaults)
• Fixed product key activation for licenses without a linked user account

• Simplified installer to always bundle RawTherapee — no separate "standard" variant
• Fixed activation token not persisting between app launches
• Disabled heavy AI models (Florence-2, pyiqa) by default to speed up small batch analysis
• Parallelized thumbnail generation with thread pool for faster startup
• Added visible update notification banner in the main window
• Fixed build script stderr handling for PyInstaller on Windows

• Desktop purchase flow with Stripe checkout and automatic email delivery
• License activation system with device-bound tokens
• RawTherapee bundle option in installer
• Scene-aware PP3 profile auto-selection (portrait, landscape, low-light, high-contrast)

• Initial public release of imagic Desktop for Windows and macOS
• AI quality scoring across 5 metrics: sharpness, exposure, noise, composition, detail
• Burst & duplicate detection with perceptual hashing
• Full editing suite: histogram, exposure, colour grading, sharpening, noise reduction
• 6 editing style presets with live preview thumbnails
• 30+ cinematic colour grades (LUT-based)
• Batch export with multi-threaded processing
• Crash-resilient export pipeline with auto-resume
• RawTherapee integration for true RAW demosaicing
• PP3 profile generation for RawTherapee
• Feedback learning AI that adapts to your keep/trash decisions
• CLI & headless mode for automation
• 9 RAW format support: CR2, CR3, NEF, ARW, RAF, ORF, RW2, DNG, PEF

• Linux desktop builds
• Browser-based version (coming later in 2026)
• Portrait-aware culling with automatic face quality ranking
• Plugin system for custom export pipelines
• Improved feedback learning with per-category style models
• Cloud sync for edits and library across devices
• Batch AI presets — apply adaptive corrections to entire folders in one click