image-editor — User Guide

What is image-editor?

image-editor is a desktop photo editor with Photoshop-grade capabilities and phone-app-level ease of use — that always saves at full original resolution.

It exists because phone editing apps downscale and re-compress your photos: you get a soft, smaller JPEG back. image-editor edits non-destructively and renders the final image at native resolution with real quality control.

The Workflow at a Glance

1. Open a photo.
2. Adjust the whole image, or draw a selection and adjust only that part.
3. Retouch: erase distractions or a whole person, reshape/slim, paste something in.
4. Save As at full resolution — or Save Project (.iedit) to keep editing later.

Everything is non-destructive: your edits stack as layers you can hide, re-opacity, delete, or undo, and the original pixels are never thrown away.

Opening & Saving

• Open — pick a photo (JPEG, PNG, TIFF, BMP, WEBP). Paths with accents, ñ, or non-Latin characters work on every platform.
• Save As — renders the full-resolution result. JPEG saves at your configured quality; PNG/TIFF are lossless.
• Save Project / Open Project (.iedit) — stores the whole edit (layers, masks, adjustments, curves) next to the source image so you can reopen and refine it.
• Zoom with the mouse wheel, pan by dragging with the Move tool, double-click to reset.

Adjust — whole image or a selection

The Adjust tab has two modes, toggled at the top:

• Whole image — the sliders affect everything.
• Selection only — brush a region with the 🖌 tool, and the sliders affect just that area, blended so it doesn't look edited.

Adjustments: Exposure, Brightness, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Saturation, Vibrance, Temperature, Tint, Clarity, Texture, Dehaze, Sharpen. (Local contrast is applied to luminance only, so a boosted region keeps its natural colour.)

• Clarity adds midtone punch and dimension; Texture brings out fine detail; Dehaze cuts atmospheric flatness; Sharpen is an unsharp-mask — use it last.

Border smoothing

When editing a selection, the Border smoothing (feather) slider controls how softly the edit fades at the edge, and Snap border to edges makes the boundary follow real edges in the photo (e.g. stop at the horizon). Together they make a local edit invisible.

• Show selection outline — toggle the outline off to judge the clean result without losing the selection, then back on to keep refining.
• Apply to selection bakes the current sliders (and curves) into one layer.

Film & camera looks

The Film look dropdown carries camera picture profiles (Standard, Vivid, Neutral, Faithful, Flat/Log, Landscape, Portrait, Monochrome, High/Low Contrast) and 20 Fujifilm-inspired film simulations.

Curves

The Curves tab is a draggable tone curve — click to add a point, drag to shape, right-click to remove. An S-curve adds contrast; per-channel R / G / B shifts colour. Curves follow the Adjust tab's Whole image / Selection target, and can be applied to a selection just like the sliders.

Colour grading (the Color tab)

The Color tab is where a photo gets its "look" (whole-image):

• Split-tone — tint the shadows and highlights toward chosen hues. A classic cinematic grade is cool shadows (hue ≈ 210°) with warm highlights (≈ 45°) at low amounts. Set each hue, then raise its amount.
• HSL — saturation by colour band (red / yellow / green / cyan / blue / magenta). Deepen a blue sky, calm an over-orange skin tone, or make foliage greener without touching the rest.
• Finishing — Vignette (darken the edges to draw the eye to the subject; a negative value lightens) and Film grain for a filmic texture.

Reset colour returns the whole tab to neutral.

See pro-guide.md for a step-by-step recipe that ties all of this together into a professional-looking edit.

Retouch

Erase distractions / a person 🩹 🧍

1. Switch to Selection only and brush over what you want gone.
2. Erase selection removes it — a small blemish uses fast classical inpainting; a larger object uses LaMa AI, which fills the background convincingly and colour-matches it. (LaMa is an optional install; see the install guide.)
3. To remove a person, brush roughly over them and press 🧍 Remove person — SAM cuts them out precisely, then LaMa fills the gap. 🎯 Select subject just refines a rough brush to the exact object.

AI steps run on a background thread, so the window stays responsive.

Reshape / slim 🫳

The Reshape tab is a liquify push-brush. Turn on the Reshape brush, set the Brush size and Strength, then drag on the image — for slimming, drag a body edge inward. Apply keeps it (undoable). It's non-destructive: a smooth warp field is stored, not baked pixels.

Insert / paste an image 📎

The Paste tab composites another image into your photo. Insert image (a cutout PNG's transparency is used as the shape), then set Position and Size. It's Poisson-blended and colour-matched to the surroundings so it belongs in the scene. Mixed clone preserves destination texture over busy backgrounds.

Crop & Rotate

From the toolbar: Crop draws a rectangle (drag, then Apply Crop), and ⟲ / ⟳ rotate 90°. Crops compose and follow rotation, so the frame never desyncs.

Layers

The Layers tab lists every committed local edit — a local adjustment, an erase, a reshape, a paste. For each you can toggle visibility, change opacity, or delete it. Whole-image sliders, curves, and the film look apply on top and aren't listed here.

Undo / Redo (toolbar) step through your edits.

Tips

• Work at any zoom — the preview uses a fast proxy, but Save always renders full resolution, so what you see is what you get.
• Small, soft edits look most natural: keep feather up for selections, and use gentle reshape pushes.
• Save an .iedit project before a big session so you can always come back and tweak instead of starting over.