fotoARRAY contains a developer for RAW and JPEG files. It opens with F3 or from the tile menu, works on the picture under the cursor and writes a recipe into the catalog. The original file is never changed. The recipe can be copied to other pictures, it is used by the previews, by the slideshow and by every export, and it can be reset at any time.
The developer is not meant to replace your favourite RAW program, it is meant for the many pictures that need a quick correction before they go into a book or a slideshow, and for those who like to play with light and colour without leaving the catalog. If you prefer Capture One or DxO PhotoLab for the important pictures, fotoARRAY will hand them over and take the results back, see Work with other programs.
fotoARRAYRAW was written by people who love working with images themselves. Its development pipeline is clean and clearly structured, and it preserves all the information contained in the RAW file. Values are clipped only at a few well-defined points in the pipeline, not just at random places as seen in other software. As a result, the tone/curve tools work together instead of against each other: If one adjustment darkens the image to much, another can bring back the details.
It implements a clean auto-curve adjustment which is applied to any RAW image so most images look good from the start. The curve can be switched off and with "Pro" als adjusted. And lost detail in the sky can be brought back with "Highlights".
In the Free Edition the developer shows four groups. Tone has exposure, brightness, contrast, shadows, highlights, blacks and whites, plus a fill light. Colour has saturation, vibrance, the colour wheel and the adjustment of single colours by hue, saturation and luminance. White balance has temperature, tint and a pipette. Detail has sharpening and noise reduction for luminance and colour. With these four groups most pictures can be brought into shape. The before and after view is available, and Auto tone gives a starting point.
The developer in the Free Edition
A picture developed with PRO keeps its complete recipe when it is opened in the Free Edition. Nothing is lost, the additional groups are simply not editable.
The PRO RAW Engine works directly on the sensor data. It handles demosaicing, white balance, and highlight recovery with full precision before the image is ever reduced to 8 bits. Colors, tonal range, and fine detail therefore stay close to what the camera actually captured, and you can correct exposure, color, or perspective afterwards without visible loss in quality. Every adjustment is non-destructive and saved as a recipe, so your original RAW file stays untouched and you can export it again at any time with different settings.
High-precision processing: Demosaicing, white balance, and tone mapping work on the full bit depth of the sensor data. The image is only reduced to 8 bits for the final export.
Highlight recovery: If one colour channel is overexposed, the engine rebuilds the missing detail from the channels that still hold information, so bright areas keep their structure instead of turning flat white.
Detail and sharpening: Optimised routines restore fine detail and sharpness without adding halos or amplifying noise.
A layer carries its own set of adjustments and a mask that decides where they apply. Masks are painted with a brush, drawn as a linear or radial gradient, built from a colour range or from the depth of the scene. Holding Ctrl while painting restricts the stroke to the area that looks like the spot where the stroke started, so a sky or a face is masked with a few strokes. Masks can be combined, inverted, rounded and copied between layers.
The repair tool removes sensor dust and small objects, the clone stamp copies an area. Perspective corrects converging lines, by hand or automatically. The crop inside the developer works with the rotation, and the developer keeps the full picture so the crop can be changed later.
Beyond the classic sliders the developer has a chain of effects that were written for this program. Among them are physical film grain, black and white film characteristics, split toning, a virtual lens with its own bokeh and vignette, dehaze, clarity and structure, HDR tone mapping and relight with a movable light source. Each effect is a layer, so it can be masked and weighted. We built these to give you ideas, not to give every picture the same look. More effects are in the works and will be added when they run reliably.
Several effects and masks use the depth of the scene: relight, the virtual lens and the depth mask. The depth can be painted by hand, or estimated by the AI model that is part of the PRO package. This model is the one piece of AI in fotoARRAY. It measures the scene, it does not paint over your picture.
A development you like can be saved as a template with a rule that says how it is applied: replace the whole recipe, blend into the existing one or add its layers. Templates are assigned in the developer or to a whole selection in the grid. A small preview shows every template on the current picture before it is applied.
A black and white work - with special pre-stage layer which makes it possible to darken areas which are blown out by the development
Copy the recipe of one picture and paste it on a selection. A dialog lets you choose which groups are pasted, so you can transfer the white balance without the crop. This works in both editions.
Every slider movement can be undone and redone in the developer, and the recipe of a picture is part of the catalog history.
RAW files are decoded by the built in engine with several demosaicing methods, or on request by LibRaw. Cameras whose formats need it, for example Nikon HE or Canon CR3, are handled through the Adobe DNG Converter if it is installed; fotoARRAY creates a temporary DNG in its cache and tells you so in the log. During the import, RAW decoding runs in a separate process with memory and time limits, so a damaged file cannot stop the creation of the previews. The developer itself decodes the open picture in its own process. A RAW preset per camera decides whether the catalog preview is developed or taken from the embedded JPEG.
Two settings in the menu control how much the developer computes while you move a slider: the maximum edge of the preview and the demosaicing quality. On a notebook you work with the fast settings, the export always uses the full quality of the recipe.
FREE Developer with tone, colour, white balance and detail, auto tone, before and after, copy and paste of parameters, undo, RAW engine, JPEG output from the developer.
PRO Layers, masks, context brush, repair, clone, perspective, crop inside the developer, the effect chain, depth, templates, TIFF and DNGoutput, depth AI model, batch export from the grid. Also included Liquify, ray/star and light mask, structure mask ... and also an advanced demosaicing algorithm.