Develop a RAW photo in Litria

Litria's editor develops a photo on your device. You open a RAW file from your library, move the sliders, and the photo and its histogram change as you go. This post walks through an edit in the order you would make one.



Adjustments

Light

Exposure

Contrast

Color

Temperature

Saturation

Open a photo

In the library, click a photo. It opens in the editor, with the rest of its folder in a filmstrip below it. The Left and Right arrow keys take you to the previous and next photo.

Litria edits nine RAW formats: DNG, ARW, NEF, CR2, CR3, RAF, RW2, ORF and PEF. It also edits JPEG, PNG and WebP files. A RAW file is developed on your graphics card where Litria can use it for that, and on the processor where it cannot.

Work through Adjustments

The first time, the editor opens on the Adjustments panel. Its groups run from top to bottom:

1. Light holds EV Shift, Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites and Blacks. EV Shift is a true stop of light. Exposure lifts the midtones and eases off toward black and white.
2. Curves remaps tone. Drag points by hand, or shape four tonal regions with sliders.
3. Color holds Temperature, Tint, Saturation and Vibrance. Under them sit Color Mixer, Color Calibration and Color Grading, whose wheels tint the shadows, midtones and highlights.
4. Detail holds Sharpening and Noise reduction.
5. Effects holds Vignette, Grain and Creative. Creative has Glow, Halation and Light flares.

Below them, LUT applies a color look. Light and Color start open. Open the others as you need them.

Drag a slider to change it. Hold Shift while you drag for finer control. Double-click a slider to reset it.

Highlights and Shadows recover detail that only a RAW file holds, so a JPEG, PNG or WebP does not have those two sliders. Every other slider works on both.

To set the white balance from the photo, press W for the White balance picker and click a spot that should be neutral gray. Temperature and Tint move to match.

Read the histogram

The histogram sits at the top of the Adjustments panel and follows every change. A badge on it tells you when the shadows or the highlights are clipping. Press Shift+H to hide it or bring it back.

Start from Auto

If you do not know where to begin, press Auto adjust Light, beside the histogram button. It reads the photo and sets Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites and Blacks for you. It leaves EV Shift and color alone. The result is one step, so a single undo takes it back.

Compare, undo and reset

The Before / after button in the top bar compares your edit with the original. Its menu has four views: In place, Side by side, Top and bottom, and Split. The button turns on the view you chose last and remembers it, and Space or \ does the same as the button.

Undo and Redo are in the top bar too, on Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Shift+Z, or Cmd on a Mac. The History panel lists the steps you have made to the photo, newest first. Click a step to go back to it. Litria keeps the last 200 steps for each photo.

Each group has its own reset, and Reset all edits, on Shift+R, resets the photo's adjustments in one step.

Carry an edit to another photo

Press Ctrl+C to copy the adjustments from the photo you are on, go to another photo, and press Ctrl+V to paste them. The same two buttons, Copy adjustments and Paste adjustments, sit under the filmstrip. Choose what to copy, beside them, picks which adjustments travel.

Press ? to see every keyboard shortcut. You can change most of them there.

Where your edit is kept

Litria saves the edit as you work. Your edits and their history are kept in your browser's storage on this device, or in the desktop app's own storage.

Litria reads your photos where they are and never moves, renames or overwrites them. The edit is a list of settings that Litria keeps for the photo, and the file your camera wrote stays as it was.

Open Litria

Open Litria in Chrome or Edge, or download the desktop app. On the first run in a browser you can try it with sample photos, or open a folder of your own.