Photos

The Image node

Drop a photo on the canvas, or add an Image node and Choose image. It opens RAW files from most cameras (CR2, CR3, NEF, ARW, DNG, ORF, RW2, RAF, PEF and others) and JPEG, PNG, TIFF, WebP, AVIF, GIF, JPEG XL, PSD and BMP.

Some files have limits: HEIC photos show in a Folder node but can’t be adjusted, HDR AVIF can’t be adjusted, PSD only in RGB or grayscale, TIFF at 8 or 16 bits.

Adjusting

Select the node (and make it big enough) and the panels appear: Light, Color, Optics.

• Light and Color: Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks, Temperature, Tint, Vibrance, Saturation, and a tone curve in four zones (Shadows, Darks, Lights, Highlights).
• Drag a slider, or click the number to type a value. Double-click a slider to reset it.
• The histogram has zones you can drag, and warnings for closed shadows and blown highlights: click them to see where.
• Auto sets light and white balance for you (it says itself it’s not meant for sunsets).
• The eyedropper sets white balance from a neutral gray you click in the photo. Esc cancels it.

Ctrl Z undoes the last adjustment on the photo.

Optics

Lens correction uses the lens profile found in the photo’s data, or one you choose. Then vignetting (amount and midpoint), lateral fringes, and purple and green defringe with their hue. If the lens isn’t recognized or the photo has no lens data, the panel says so.

Crop

Press Crop. Choose the proportions (Free, Original, the usual presets, or Custom from 1:10 to 10:1); X swaps portrait and landscape. Rotate 90° left or right, flip, or Straighten. Enter confirms, Esc cancels. A crop applies only to that photo.

Where the adjustments go

Warpstead never changes your original image. Adjustments are written as XMP: inside the file when the format allows it, otherwise in a .xmp file next to it. If writing would change the image data, or the file is read-only, Warpstead doesn’t write and tells you why.

Save into the photo

For JPEG, PNG, TIFF and WebP there’s also Save: it bakes the adjustment and the crop into the pixels. The previous version goes to the Recycle Bin; where there’s no Recycle Bin, Warpstead asks before overwriting. RAW files have no Save button: their adjustment lives in the XMP. Save also works in a review, on the photo you’re looking at.

Save is off, with the reason, when there’s nothing to save or when the photo takes its adjustment from a wire (saving would apply it twice).

Culling

Wire a list of files into an Image node (from a Folder node’s All files output, for example) and the node becomes a review of those photos.

The node counts what’s flagged and what’s left, and shows a strip of thumbnails. Its Flagged output sends on only the flagged photos. Selecting a photo in the review selects it in the folder too, and the other way round.

One adjustment, many photos

An Image node has an output called Its adjustment. Wire it to other photos, or to a Folder node, and they all get the same adjustment, and follow it when you change it. The crop doesn’t travel. If you adjust one of the followers by hand it goes its own way; Reattach makes it follow again, and its own adjustments are lost.

Delivery

Wire photos into the To deliver input of a Folder node and the bar at the bottom of that folder becomes a delivery bar. It tells you how many photos are coming, how many are new, renamed or in a different format, or that everything is up to date.

• Export makes the files, Update remakes the ones that changed, Rename applies the naming scheme, Remove deletes the ones you unflagged.
• Stop, Retry, and Undo for the last delivery action.
• Format settings: Originals, JPEG, TIFF or WebP; full size or long side; quality (lossy or lossless, TIFF compression); color space, grayscale, CMYK (JPEG and TIFF), your own ICC profile and rendering intent; the file name scheme.

Where the folder has no Recycle Bin, Update and Remove are final and Warpstead asks first.

Copying a memory card

The Ingest node copies a card to two places and checks both before it tells you it’s done.

Choose the Source (the card), Copy 1 (your working copy, which is also the node’s output), Copy 2 (the mirror), a job name and a naming pattern. Before copying, the node shows the plan: how many shots, how many to copy, which are already there with the same content (skipped), and name clashes (a file with the same name but different content is never overwritten).

Press Ingest · two copies. You can stop it (it stops at the end of the current file), resume it, resume only the second copy, or choose another second destination. At the end there’s a report you can copy, and a button to eject the card. Nothing is ever written to the card.

The option also verify the card reads the card a second time. It’s slower, and it’s the only way to check that the card itself was read correctly: without it, the two copies are checked against each other and against what was read.