Changelog

imagic 1.5.12 lets you cull one shoot or one part of a shoot at a time, explains what the AI edit did to each slider, and fixes a crash when closing the culling windows.

• Folder filter in Review & Cull: every import lands in one library, so an unfinished shoot used to pile up under the next one. A Folder drop-down now shows one shoot at a time, and the counts, Next to review and Export keepers follow it. After you import a single folder, that folder is picked for you. Nothing on disk is moved.
• Best N per chapter: imagic now splits a shoot into chapters (the morning walk, the market, dinner) from pauses in capture time and changes of scene, and can keep the best few from each chapter instead of letting the strongest part of the day take every place. Pick a chapter in Review & Cull to work through it on its own, and rename chapters as you like.
• Why these edits: after AI Auto-Enhance or AI Optimize All, a new section in the editor says in plain words why each slider moved, for example that the blacks were deepened because the shadows looked hazy. Open Details for the measured numbers behind each line.
• No crash when closing the culling windows: pressing Esc in the culling gallery or Close in the culling preview while thumbnails were still loading could crash imagic. Both windows now finish their background work safely first.

imagic 1.5.11 exports RAW files faster on Macs, gets Smarter picks working again, and makes the Export window fit a laptop screen.

• Faster RAW exports on Mac: while one photo renders, imagic now reads the next RAW files on the other cores, so a big batch of RAWs (Fujifilm files especially) exports faster on Apple silicon. The exported files are exactly the same as before.
• Smarter picks and Deep Learning Analysis work again: a component the AI features need was missing from the installed app, so Smarter picks could stop with "The image-understanding model could not be loaded". It is back, a second try really tries again, and a damaged model download is repaired by itself.
• Export window fits a laptop screen: on smaller or scaled laptop screens the Export and Cancel buttons could end up under the taskbar. The settings now scroll and the buttons always stay in view. Watermark and Export Recipes start folded unless you are using them.
• Each shoot exports to its own folder: exporting keepers from Review no longer makes every later export reuse the first shoot's subfolder name. A subfolder you type yourself is still remembered.
• Steady zoom in the editor: zooming in on the Edit screen no longer jumps when the full-resolution render arrives, and the zoom percentage now means real pixels.

imagic 1.5.10 looks right on Macs set to Light mode, lets you zoom into a photo in Review, and fixes a crash when closing the duplicate cleaner.

• Readable on Macs in Light mode: with macOS Appearance set to Light, some tooltips were black on black and some Settings text was pale grey on white. imagic now keeps its own dark look everywhere, whatever your Mac is set to.
• Zoom in Review: double-click a photo in Review and you can now zoom with the scroll wheel or a trackpad pinch, click (or press Z or Space) to jump between fit and 100%, and drag to pan, so you can check focus before you decide.
• RAW previews match the grid: a RAW photo opened large in Review no longer looks darker than its thumbnail; both now show the same camera colours.
• Review buttons fit smaller windows: the Review action buttons now wrap onto their own row instead of getting squeezed when the window is narrow.
• Resizable film strip: drag the top edge of the editor film strip to make the thumbnails bigger or smaller (double-click to reset), and hover a thumbnail to see its name and position. imagic remembers the size you pick.
• No crash closing the duplicate cleaner: closing the duplicate cleaner while a RAW preview was still loading could crash imagic. It now lets the preview finish quietly in the background.

imagic 1.5.9 makes big exports easier to stop and steadier during updates.

• Esc always stops an export: pressing Esc during a large export now reliably cancels it, so you are never stuck waiting for a batch you no longer want.
• Calmer Export tab: the Export tab no longer flickers or lags while a batch is running, so you can keep working while your photos export.
• Steadier updates: downloading a new version of imagic no longer risks an error if the update window is closed part way through.

imagic 1.5.8 adds a way to swap tips with other imagic users, and lays the groundwork for a native version on Windows laptops with ARM processors.

• Meet other imagic users: the Home screen now has a card linking to the imagic.ink users group on Facebook, where you can ask questions and share edits. Dismiss it once and it stays gone.
• Windows on ARM groundwork: imagic now recognises Windows laptops with ARM processors correctly, which is the first step towards a version built natively for them.

imagic 1.5.7 speaks your language: the whole app is now translated into German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, French and Spanish.

• imagic in six more languages: menus, buttons, culling, editing and export screens now appear in German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, French or Spanish, so you can work in the language you think in.
• Follows your computer, or pick one: imagic uses your computer's language when it is one of these, and English otherwise. Choose a language in Settings to override it; it applies the next time imagic starts.
• Layouts checked: longer translated labels were checked so buttons and panels still fit without cut-off text.

imagic 1.5.6 stops re-exporting photos you have already exported, and fixes sideways phone photos, lost editor edits and slow-looking Apple Photos saves.

• Export All Kept only exports what is new or changed: pressing Export no longer re-renders every photo from earlier runs. imagic tells you how many photos need exporting, skips the ones that are up to date, and offers an “Export everything again” box when you want a full re-run. A photo whose exported file you deleted counts as needing export again.
• Phone photos stand upright: JPEGs shot in portrait no longer show up sideways in thumbnails, culling, the editor or the exported file, and they reach Apple Photos the right way up.
• Edits are saved before you export: any edit you made in the editor is now saved when you go to the Export step, so a look you saw on screen can never export as an unedited copy.
• Clearer Apple Photos saving: the progress shows “Saving 2 of 3 to Apple Photos” with a seconds counter, and the export time estimate no longer jumps around when one slow iCloud photo turns up.
• Apple Photos from the editor on Mac: Apply & Export in the editor now offers Apple Photos as a destination, for this photo or all of them.

imagic 1.5.5 imports a RAW and its JPEG as one photo, brings your Apple Photos library into imagic on a Mac, and exports 60-megapixel RAW files two to three times faster.

• RAW+JPEG pairs import as one photo: if your camera saves a RAW and a JPEG with the same name, imagic now shows them as a single photo instead of two. You cull, edit, export and hand off to Lightroom once per shot, and the JPEG stays with the RAW. It is on by default and can be turned off in Settings.
• Apple Photos on Mac: choose File › Import from Apple Photos to pull in your Recents or any album. imagic copies the original files (including ones stored in iCloud), shows what it will bring in before it starts, and treats a RAW+JPEG as one photo. When you export, you can send the finished photos back to Apple Photos, either as a new album or as an edit of the original so you can still revert it there.
• Much faster exports of big RAW files: exporting 60-megapixel photos is two to three and a half times faster and uses less than half the memory. The pixels are identical to before. On a Mac M1, an AI edit of a 61-megapixel photo dropped from about 99 seconds to 29, and exports now show a time-remaining estimate.

imagic 1.5.4 gives high-ISO photos a much cleaner result with rebuilt noise reduction and an Auto setting, counts your exports more accurately, and signs the Windows installer and every file inside it.

• Cleaner high-ISO photos: noise reduction has been rebuilt. imagic now measures how noisy your photo really is, per brightness, and removes that noise first, before Shadows, Texture and Sharpen can boost it. Before, a high-ISO photo could look clean on screen and still come out grainy when exported. Fine detail such as fur, fabric and hair is kept, and the blotchy colour noise in dark areas goes. The luminance and colour sliders now mean “how much of this photo's noise to remove”, so the same setting behaves alike on an ISO 100 and an ISO 12800 file.
• Auto noise reduction: one button in the Detail panel sets the sliders for you from the photo's ISO and its measured noise. AI Denoise and AI Optimize use the same Auto amount. For the hardest files there is a High quality option that searches wider for a cleaner result, at under a second more per 24-megapixel photo.
• Texture and Sharpen leave the grain alone: with noise reduction on, they no longer boost detail that is only grain, which is how a denoised photo used to turn grainy again.
• Exports with noise reduction stay quick: on a 24-megapixel photo, Auto noise reduction adds about a second and a half to an export. Photos that already have noise reduction set will come out cleaner than before; edits made in the first versions of imagic keep their original look.
• More accurate export counts: the anonymous usage report missed exports made from the editor's Apply & Export and from Review's Export keepers button, and a short session that exported and then closed. Both are now counted, so we can see where people really get stuck instead of guessing. The report still never contains your photos, file names or folder paths.
• Windows installer and every file inside it signed: from this version, the installer and every program file it installs are signed by Luke Fenech through Microsoft's Artifact Signing, not only the installer and imagic.exe as in 1.5.3. This is also what the Microsoft Store requires. Windows SmartScreen can still warn on a new signature until enough people have downloaded it.
• Updated bundled libraries: imagic now ships with patched versions of the image and AI libraries it relies on.

imagic 1.5.3 fixes how AI assistants edit your photos: people masks follow the person, masks and skin brightening no longer dull the photo, and the editor shows an assistant's edits straight away. It also adds automatic exposure masks to AI edits, and an optional Smarter picks re-rank for your culls.

• People masks follow the person: when an AI assistant asked imagic for a people mask, it could get a rough rectangle around the person instead of their outline, which left a hard brightness step in the sea or sky around them. A people mask now only comes from imagic's person-outline model, so it follows the person. If that model cannot run on your computer, imagic tells the assistant so instead of quietly using a rectangle.
• Masks and skin brightening no longer dull the photo: on a photo you had not edited yet, adding any mask, or brightening oranges and reds to lift skin, made the whole picture duller and less colourful, even outside the area you changed. The first edit was swapping the photo's own automatic look for a flat starting point. Edits now build on the look the photo already had, so only what you changed moves.
• The editor keeps up with your AI assistant: edits an assistant made while the editor was open did not show until you restarted imagic, and pressing Save All Edits could write the old state back over them. The editor now picks up those edits when you switch photos and within a couple of seconds on the photo you are looking at, including colour grades and looks that were hidden before, and Save All Edits never overwrites a newer edit.
• Automatic exposure masks in AI edits: AI Auto-Enhance and AI Optimize All now also balance the light inside the photo: they gently lift a subject that sits in shadow, hold back a bright sky and ease the background. Each shows as its own Auto layer in the masks panel, so you can tweak or delete it, and running the AI again replaces only those layers.
• Smarter picks (experimental): an optional second pass that re-ranks your cull by how appealing each photo is, not only how sharp and well exposed it is. In our tests it picked noticeably more of the shots a photographer kept. Turn it on in Settings › AI Culling, or use Re-rank with smarter picks in Review. It downloads a model the first time and adds a little time per photo, it never touches photos you have already marked yourself, and Cancel leaves your cull exactly as it was. The normal cull stays as fast as in 1.5.2.
• Steadier AI analysis: fixed a crash that could hit on some computers while imagic processed several photos at once.
• Signed Windows installer: the Windows installer and app are now code-signed by Luke Fenech through Microsoft's Artifact Signing, so Windows shows a named publisher instead of Unknown publisher. SmartScreen builds trust in a new signature as more people download it, so you may still see its warning for a while.
• For AI assistant users: start_style_calibration now runs as a background job on big libraries, so it no longer times out over a remote connection; poll get_job_status for the result. Mask results also say how the mask was made.

imagic 1.5.2 lets you enter a product key at any time, and keeps very large libraries (tens of thousands of photos) responsive.

• Enter a product key from inside the app: bought imagic while your trial was running, or upgrading Lite or Plus? Open Settings › About and click Enter a product key, or use the same button on the Home plan card, and paste the key from your purchase email. Your library, culls, edits and settings stay exactly as they are.
• Buying with the same email just works: if you buy with the email your trial used, the app that ran the trial moves to your new key by itself the next time it starts (or within 30 minutes if it is open).
• Large libraries no longer freeze: with tens of thousands of photos imported, opening the editor could freeze imagic for several minutes while it built the filmstrip. The filmstrip now shows a few hundred photos at a time, while Paste to all, Apply to all, AI Optimize All and Harmonize still reach every photo, and their buttons say how many.
• No more regular stutter on big libraries: imagic re-read the whole library every 5 seconds even when nothing had changed. It now only re-reads when something has actually changed.
• Quitting no longer hangs: the check for photos on unplugged or sleeping drives could keep imagic running for many minutes after you closed it on a large library. It now stops as soon as you quit.

imagic 1.5.1 stops Macs asking for the product key every time you open the app, and previews Harmonize series: matched exposure and white balance across drone mosaics, timelapses and event sets.

• No more asking for your key on every launch on Mac: imagic recognised a Mac partly by its network name, which macOS changes on its own (for example iMac.lan at home and iMac.local elsewhere). Each change looked like a new computer, so the app asked for the product key again even though it was already filled in. A Mac is now recognised by its hardware, so it stays activated across restarts and network changes. Your existing activation carries over when you update. Windows was not affected.
• Move your key between computers: you can use your key on another computer whenever you like, as long as it is not in use on two at the same time. When you activate it on one computer, the other asks for it the next time it opens, and now says so plainly, so moving it back is one click.
• Harmonize series (preview): a new Series section in the editor matches exposure and white balance between neighbouring photos, so drone tiles blend in an orthomosaic, a timelapse stops flickering and an event set reads evenly. Each photo keeps its own edit: Harmonize only adds small Exposure, Temperature and Tint adjustments on the normal sliders, so export and the Lightroom handoff carry them, and Undo harmonize takes them off again.
• Mosaic preview: for drone shoots with GPS, preview the frames laid out by position, before and after side by side, with a heatmap that shows where the seams still disagree. It is an approximate layout from GPS, not a georeferenced map.
• For AI assistant users: assistants connected to imagic get two new tools, harmonize_series and preview_mosaic. If you use imagic in ChatGPT, click Refresh tools for the imagic app in ChatGPT after updating.

imagic 1.5.0 opens your RAW files the way your camera saw them, and its AI edits now finish a photo with a real look instead of a timid correction. It also brings LUT support: grade your photos with the .cube, .3dl and Hald LUTs you already own, right in the editor. Plus one-click Auto Color, and photos in Review and the Library are finally full sharpness on Retina Macs.

• RAW files open the way your camera saw them: an untouched RAW used to open much darker and flatter than your camera's own preview, so every edit started from a dull picture, and the same edit looked brighter when you opened it in Lightroom. New photos now open close to the brightness and contrast of your camera's JPEG (Process version 3, in the editor's Process menu). Photos you have already edited keep their exact look, and JPEG, TIFF and PNG files are unchanged.
• AI edits you can actually see: AI Auto-Enhance and AI Optimize All now fix the exposure, open the shadows and hold the highlights, then finish each photo with a look chosen for its light: a golden glow on sunsets and warm light, a moody grade on grey days, cinematic colour at night, bold film colour in bright daylight. Dark scenes stay dark. Everything lands on the normal sliders and colour grade, so you can dial it back, and running the AI again on the same photo tries the next look that suits it.
• Use the LUTs you already own: a new LUTs section in the editor takes .cube, .3dl and Hald CLUT files. Add single files or a whole folder, and each LUT shows as a preview tile of your own photo with that look on. Set the strength from 0 to 100, apply it to one photo, a selection or the whole shoot, and your other edits stay as they are. If you shot in S-Log3, V-Log or F-Log you can tell imagic, so a LUT made for that camera lands correctly. The LUT is baked into every export. Three sample LUTs are included to try it out. If you hand photos to Lightroom, the sidecar carries your sliders but not the LUT, and imagic tells you so when you export.
• Auto Color in the editor: a new row at the top of Basic sets clean black and white points and removes a colour cast in one click, which is a big help on faded scans, old prints and indoor light. There is also an Auto Contrast mode that keeps the original colours, and a strength slider so you can take it as far as you like.
• Sharp photos in Review and the Library on Retina Macs: on Mac screens, the Review grid, the large review preview, the Library and the photo viewer were showing every photo at half resolution, so focus was hard to judge right where you decide what to keep. They are now drawn at the full sharpness of your screen. Windows was not affected.
• Monochrome cameras and black and white files no longer crash: RAW files from monochrome sensors, and other single-channel images, could still crash parts of the app such as thumbnails, export, Auto enhance and masks. Every step now handles them like any other photo.
• Very large libraries stay open: on libraries with tens of thousands of photos, refreshing the Library could run out of memory and crash. It now loads your library in smaller pieces, and if memory is still tight it keeps the grid on screen with a warning instead of closing.
• Closed-eye detection works offline: the model that spots closed eyes used to download on first use, so without an internet connection it quietly did nothing. It now ships inside the app.
• Same file name in two shoots shows the right photo: two photos with the same name from different folders or cameras, for example DSC04973 from two trips, could share one thumbnail, so the grid showed the wrong picture and the AI scored it from the other image. Each photo now gets its own thumbnail, and an affected library repairs itself the next time you import.
• Lightroom crops land in the right place on rotated shots: a crop made in imagic on a photo your camera recorded as rotated (shot in portrait orientation) now opens in Lightroom framed exactly as you cropped it.
• For AI assistant users: assistants connected to imagic can now list and apply your LUTs, apply Auto Color, and export with the Lightroom handoff switched on. If you use imagic in ChatGPT, open Settings › Plugins in ChatGPT, choose the imagic app and click Refresh tools after updating, so ChatGPT picks up the new tools.

• Fixes a crash that could hit as soon as you opened a photo: when imagic received a single-channel (greyscale) image, for example from a black and white file or a RAW decode, the preview could fail over and over while you moved through the filmstrip or opened the photo. It now opens like any other photo. If you saw repeated errors on 1.4.8, update to this version.
• Relink a moved photo folder: if you moved a shoot, or an external drive came back under a different letter, imagic can now find it again. Pick the new folder and every photo whose file name and size match is reconnected, with your edits and ratings untouched. Anything that does not match is left alone and still shown as missing, and no file on disk is ever moved or changed. The Library now shows a banner for folders with missing photos so you can fix them in one place.
• Sharp sunsets and silhouettes are no longer culled as blurry: a photo that is mostly smooth sky or water with a crisp horizon or subject could be scored as out of focus and sent to the trash. imagic now judges sharpness on the detailed part of the frame, so those shots are kept, while genuinely blurry ones still fail.
• No more endless "Decoding RAW" when a drive is unplugged: opening a photo whose file is offline used to leave the editor stuck on the decoding message. It now says the file is not available and where it was looking, and Export skips that one photo with a clear message instead of failing in a confusing way.
• Brush and mask tools work again on Apple Silicon Macs: on some M-series Macs, using the brush or a manual mask in the editor could crash with a missing-library error. The Mac build is now packaged so that cannot happen.
• Anonymous diagnostics are a little more complete: the existing usage and crash reports now include your computer's processor type (for example Apple Silicon or Intel), and a few more anonymous setup milestones such as opening the editor or the Export dialog, so problems that only hit one kind of machine can be found and fixed faster. Your photos are never uploaded.

• A first-run checklist on Home guides you through Import, Cull, Edit and Export: each step is a button straight to that part of the app, ticked off from your own library as you go, and it tells you culling takes about 6 minutes per 1,000 RAWs so AI culling does not feel like it is doing nothing. Dismiss it any time, or it hides itself once you have exported 10 or more photos.
• One-click "Export keepers" on Review: once you have finished going through a shoot, a button on the Review screen opens Export already filled in with sensible first-run defaults (JPEG, original size, keep both on conflicts, saved under Pictures/imagic). If you have exported before, your own remembered settings are used instead.
• The in-app Contact form no longer crashes imagic: closing or cancelling the feedback/bug-report/review box while your message was still sending could crash the app. It now waits for the send to finish first.
• Remote control and other background activation is more reliable: on machines where imagic could not read a real network address, ChatGPT/Claude Remote control and other headless connections could get a different device ID on every run and be wrongly rejected as a new, unrecognised device. Device identification is now stable across runs.

• Trial users see how many exports are left, with the current offer: a calm banner on Home now appears at 100 and 25 exports remaining, instead of the trial just running out mid-session with no warning.
• A Home tip points first-time users to Export once their photos are analysed: once you have analysed or edited photos but not exported any yet, Home now says so and links straight to Export.
• Face detection works on a fresh, offline install: imagic now ships its face-detection model inside the app instead of downloading it on first run. If that first run had no internet, or the download was blocked, face detection silently found nobody in any photo. It now works immediately, online or off.

• Colour noise reduction works: the NR Color slider in Detail now clears the coloured speckle from high ISO shadows without softening detail. Photos you edited before keep exactly their look.
• AI Crop on photos shot in 16:9: on cameras set to a 16:9 aspect ratio, AI Crop always said no crop was needed. It now looks at the full photo and suggests a real composition.
• Ctrl+S saves your edits: the shortcut was taken by Choose Edit Style, which moves to Ctrl+Shift+S.
• Esc never exports: pressing Esc in the editor could finish the Edit step and, with automatic export on, export every kept photo. Esc now only leaves crop mode.

• Your AI assistant can do much more: in agent mode, Claude, ChatGPT and other assistants can now mask the subject, sky, people or background as real layers you can open and tweak, crop to any aspect ratio, apply the presets you saved in imagic, use all 20 experimental effects, and find photos by when they were taken or by file name. The new agent tutorial shows all of it on a real shoot.
• Agent connections no longer stall on Windows: a connection from Claude Desktop could hang while the first analysis started, or fail with garbled messages. Both are fixed.
• Closed and half-closed eyes, caught per eye: culling now checks each eye of the main subject and tells you which one is closed or half-closed, instead of guessing from the whole face. Portraits with open eyes are no longer marked down by mistake.
• Subject masks keep the whole subject: on shallow depth of field, Select Subject could leave out the soft, out-of-focus parts, such as a cat's ears or the back of someone's hair. imagic now double-checks the mask and keeps them.
• Highlights runs the right way on every photo: on photos imagic had analysed, dragging Highlights down brightened them and dragging it up darkened them. Those photos now open on the current editing engine, where minus recovers detail in bright areas, and the automatic looks and AI Enhance recover highlights instead of brightening them. Photos you already edited keep their look; Expert > Process moves one to the current engine.
• Clear message on older Macs: imagic needs macOS 14 or later. On macOS 12 and 13 it now says so instead of quitting at launch.

• Older libraries open on first launch: updating imagic over a library from an older version could crash on the first start with "no such column". The library upgrade now retries when the file is busy and never skips a step quietly. If it still cannot finish, imagic tells you to close every imagic window and start again, instead of showing an error dump.
• Brushes and healing work on Intel Macs: on Macs with an Intel processor, the first brush stroke, mask or heal could make imagic quit. The Intel download now includes everything these tools need.
• Know how many free exports you have left: on the free trial, the export window now shows how many of your 500 exports remain and warns you when a batch is bigger than that. When you use the last one, imagic tells you right away, with the current plan prices, instead of waiting for the next launch.
• Two imagic windows keep their own previews: on Windows, with two imagic windows open, an AI assistant's photo preview could show the other window's library. Each window now gets its own preview.

• Exports never overwrite each other: two photos in one shoot with the same name, such as photo.jpg and photo.png, used to export to the same file, so one silently replaced the other. The second now gets its own name (photo_1.jpg), so every photo you export is really there.
• A full disk tells you so: when your drive ran out of space the library grid quietly stopped updating. imagic now shows one clear warning asking you to free some space, instead of looking frozen.
• No crash when closing the editor mid-AI: closing a photo while the AI spinner was still showing could make imagic quit. It now closes cleanly.
• Learn my style works on RAW-only folders: teaching imagic your editing style through an AI assistant found nothing to learn from when a folder held only RAW files. It now reads them from their previews, so your RAW shoots count.

• Nikon High Efficiency NEFs can be edited: RAW files saved as High Efficiency or High Efficiency★ on the Z8, Z9, Zf, Z6III and Z50II imported fine, but the editor could not decode them, so the sliders did nothing. imagic now edits, scores and exports the full-size image these files carry.
• No more silent editor failures: if a photo cannot be opened for editing, imagic now says so, once per file, instead of leaving the sliders doing nothing.

• Remote control starts on Windows: on some Windows PCs the Remote control card stayed on "Starting" with "Unable to configure formatter 'default'". It now connects.
• Codex and other MCP clients see your licence on Windows: when an AI client started imagic's MCP server, every request could fail with "not activated for headless use" even though imagic was activated. The licence check now recognises the same PC whichever program starts imagic.

• Control imagic from ChatGPT or Claude: a new Remote control card on Home lets ChatGPT (Plus, Pro or Business, on chatgpt.com) or Claude.ai drive imagic on your computer. Switch it on, add https://mcp.imagic.ink/mcp as a custom app or connector, and type the 6-digit code imagic shows you. Then ask in plain words: import this card, keep the best 50, give them a moody look, export them. Your photos never leave your computer; the assistant sees file names, camera settings, scores and imagic's short descriptions. Off by default, one click to disconnect. Included with Max and during the trial.
• Big jobs no longer time out for assistants: importing, analysing and exporting a whole card now run in the background and report progress, so an assistant can start a 3,000-photo cull and check on it instead of giving up.
• "Best 8" means eight different moments: when an assistant asks for the best N photos, imagic now takes one frame per burst, so three near-identical frames can no longer fill three slots.
• Fewer permission prompts: reading your library no longer asks for approval in ChatGPT or Claude, only changes do, and slider edits can be applied to many photos in one step.
• Exports stay where you expect: when an assistant exports remotely, files go inside your export folder unless you allow another folder.

• Experimental looks: a new EXPERIMENTAL section in the editor, under Color Grade, with 20 one-click finishing looks: Bleach Bypass, Steel, Tobacco, Noir Accent, Teal Bleach, CineStill Night, Neon Bloom, Cross Process, Faded Matte, Infrared Colour, Infrared B&W, Cyanotype, Solarize, Thermal, Gold Duotone, Deep Teal, Pink Duotone, Pop Poster, RGB Split and Glitch. Every tile previews on your photo as you have edited it, an Amount slider blends the look in, and the export matches the preview. The look is saved with the photo and travels with copy, paste and presets.
• The trial counts exports: the trial badge and the activation screen now say how many of your 500 trial exports are left, which is what the trial has always measured.
• Your edit survives a locked export: if the previous export of a photo was open in another program, Apply used to fail and lose the edit. The edit is now always kept.
• No crash on quit: closing imagic while a background check was still running could abort with a thread error. Those workers now shut down cleanly.
• Re-export Broken counts only broken photos: the Export page button counted every photo with a crop suggestion, so a healthy library showed a large number. It now counts only photos whose export actually failed.

• AI Lens Blur works: the blur was estimated but never applied, on every build since the feature shipped (a Plus and Max feature). It applies now, and the check that catches this class of bug before a release now covers every file in the app, not just the main one.
• Interface size: Settings, Processing, Interface size lets you make every panel, label and button larger (Default, Larger, Largest). Pick Larger on a 13 or 14-inch laptop; it takes effect the next time imagic starts. Asked for by a Max customer editing on a 14-inch MacBook Pro.
• Readable grade names: the label under each colour grade preview in the editor was the smallest text in the app, grey on black. It is now larger and in the normal text colour, and the dimmed captions across the editor, export dialog and main window are a lighter grey.

• Action bursts are grouped by pose, with the peak moment marked: with Subject set to Action and sports, a burst used to be grouped by how alike the whole frame looked, and in a gym or on a pitch the background wins, so an approach, the contact and the landing could land in one group. imagic now reads the athlete's pose in every frame and starts a new group whenever the body position changes substantially, so a vault becomes approach, contact, flight and landing, and a bars routine becomes its phases. Inside each group the frame nearest the peak of the action (most extension, highest point, sharpest subject) is marked so it is the one you see first. Everything runs on your own machine; the pose model downloads once, like the others.

• Learning is kept per subject: imagic learns from the photos you keep and reject, and until now it kept one model for everything. So your calls on a sports shoot, where the right answer is often "she is turned away, keep it anyway", were teaching it something wrong for your next portrait session. Learning is now kept separately for People and for Action and sports, and switching the Subject setting switches which one is used. Everything you taught it before this update moves into People, so nothing is lost.
• Linux: a portable build is now available from the download page. The update check on Linux offers the Linux archive, and offers nothing at all when a release has no Linux build, rather than the Windows installer.

• The app now describes the trial correctly: the trial has been 500 photos rather than 3 days since early September, but the activation screen, the confirmation after activating and the automation upsell all still said "3-day trial", and the review prompt offered to add days that were never the limit. Everything now reads from the key you actually hold, so a metered trial says how many photos are left and older date-based keys keep their original wording.

• The duplicate cleaner now says what it does: marking duplicates as Trash has never deleted anything, it only changes their status inside imagic and your files stay on disk. Nothing in the dialog said so, so it looked like a delete. It now states it plainly, tells you how to undo it (in Review, filter to Trashed and press K), and the button reads Apply and Mark as Trash.

• An action profile for sports: Settings, AI, Subject now offers People or Action. On People a detected face counts toward the score and a face with both eyes visible scores best, which is right for portraits and wrong for sport: your subject is usually turned away mid-move, so the podium shots win and the competition goes to Review. Action ignores faces entirely and leans on sharpness and subject focus. It also skips face detection, so analysis is quicker.
• Duplicate groups stay one moment: frames shot close together were chained to their neighbours, so a continuous sequence at 10 frames a second could link end to end and put hundreds of photos of different subjects in a single group. Each frame is now compared to its group as a whole, and a group stops at 24 frames. Real bursts and re-imported files still group as before.

• Review opens fast on big libraries: opening Review used to build a card for every photo in the library, which on a few thousand photos took half a minute, used gigabytes of memory and could run the app out of memory. Review now builds only the cards you can see, so a 10,000-photo library opens in a fraction of a second and memory stays flat while you scroll.
• No more crash after manual masking: finishing or cancelling a manual mask could leave a hidden link to its Undo button behind, and the next mask or spot heal crashed the editor. That link is now removed when the masking toolbar closes.
• Thumbnails stay on the right photo: scrolling quickly through Review or the library could leave a thumbnail that finished loading late on the wrong card. A late thumbnail now only lands on the photo it belongs to.

• 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