Photo Core is the page in Accord Suite for working on a single picture — "layers, the Critic and History." It is a layer-based editor: every adjustment, mask and retouch can sit on a layer of its own, so nothing you do to a photograph has to be permanent until you export it.
Photo Core in sixteen seconds.
This guide goes through the work in the order a photograph usually needs it — develop, select, correct, retouch, finish, export — with the technical terms explained as they come up. Every menu path is the app's own.
Start from the sensor: developing RAW
A RAW file is the camera sensor's own data, before the camera decided on white balance, exposure and sharpening. Shooting RAW leaves those decisions open, and developing is where you make them.
Open the RAW photograph and select it. Under RAW Development in the Inspector panel you set:
- Exposure — overall brightness, in stops.
- Temperature and Tint — the white balance: Temperature moves the picture from blue to amber, Tint from green to magenta. Set them so something white in the scene is neutral, then push for mood.
- Boost — how much contrast the RAW decoder adds on its way to a picture.
- Shadows — lifts the dark tones at the decoding stage, where there is the most data to lift.
- Detail and Sharpness — how much fine edge contrast is recovered.
- Luminance NR and Colour NR — noise reduction: luminance noise is the grain-like speckle of brightness; colour noise is the blotchy coloured speckle in dark areas.
Making these choices on the RAW data rather than on a finished JPEG is what keeps skies from banding and shadows from turning to mud.
Develop: light and colour with the sliders a photographer expects
The Adjust panel has a Develop section in groups: Light, Colour, Curve, Detail, Effects, Blur and Optics. The ones that matter most:
- Exposure brightens or darkens everything.
- Contrast spreads the tones apart or pulls them together.
- Highlights and Shadows recover the brightest and darkest areas — a blown sky, a face in shade — without moving the rest.
- Whites and Blacks set the very ends of the range: where pure white and pure black begin.
- Temperature and Tint warm, cool or correct the white balance, as above.
- Vibrance and Saturation both strengthen colour, differently: Saturation turns every colour up equally, while Vibrance turns up the quiet colours more than the strong ones, which keeps skin tones from going orange.
Develop works on the photograph as a whole. For changes to part of it, read on.
Adjustment layers: change everything beneath, undo it any time
In the Layers panel, open the add menu at the top and choose an adjustment under Light, Colour or Creative. It arrives as a layer of its own and changes everything beneath it. Because it is a layer, you can hide it, mask it to one area, lower its opacity or delete it, and the photograph underneath is untouched. This is what "non-destructive editing" means in practice.
Selecting: telling the next change which pixels to touch
One step, no drawing. Edit ▸ Select Automatically picks out the subject or the sky for you. On a portrait taken on an iPhone it can also choose Select Hair, Select Teeth or Select Glasses — using the selection the camera itself recorded with the photograph. Then Edit ▸ Feather, Grow or Shrink… softens or adjusts the edge. Feathering means fading the selection's edge over a few pixels, so a change blends in rather than ending in a hard line.
By colour. Edit ▸ Colour Range Tool, then click a colour in the photograph — a sky, a dress. Colour Range to Mask keeps it as a mask on the layer; Colour Range to Selection lets you work with it now.
By pointing. Sometimes you want to lighten a sky or warm a face without drawing anything. Choose the colour range tool in the Masking panel and click the part to change; Shift-click for more points. Each point takes in what is near it and looks like the colour under it. Reach sets how far each point goes, Range how alike a colour must be, Softness the edge. Then select the adjustment that should change it and click Mask Near the Points. (Photographers who have used control points elsewhere will know the idea.)
By hand. Rectangle Select (M), Ellipse Select or Lasso. Edit ▸ Select All (⌘A), Deselect (⌘D), and Invert Selection (⇧⌘I) to swap what is chosen for what is not.
Masks: hiding without erasing
A mask hides part of a layer without deleting it, so it can always come back.
- Select the part to keep, right-click the layer and choose Add Mask from Selection (or Add Mask in the toolbar).
- Or select the part to hide and choose Edit ▸ Delete: it is taken out of the layer's mask, and the pixels underneath are kept.
- Right-click the layer for Disable Mask, Invert Mask or Remove Mask; Copy Mask To… in the Masking panel gives another layer the same mask.
- Where an automatic selection missed a strand of hair, select the layer, choose the Mask Brush and paint the correction. Each stroke is one undo.
Retouching and reshaping
Blemishes and dust. Choose Retouch (J). Option-click somewhere clean to set the source, then drag over the mark. The source travels with the brush, so a long scratch is covered by a matching stretch of clean picture rather than one point smeared across it.
Remove something entirely. Select a person, a wire or a mark and choose Edit ▸ Fill from Surroundings: it is filled from the rest of the photograph. Or choose Edit ▸ Fill from a Prompt… and describe what should be there instead. Fill from a Prompt uses an image model you download once — about 2 GB — which then runs on your Mac. (On the version from this site you may instead connect Google Imagen through your own Google Cloud account; it is off by default and asks for permission for each document.)
Reshape. Liquify (R) pushes the picture where you drag, like soft clay. Perspective (K) shows four corners you drag to fit a picture onto a screen or sign at an angle; Mesh Warp (G) bends it on a grid.
Paint. Brush (B) adds strokes by hand without touching the photograph underneath.
Making one photograph from several
File ▸ Merge Photos has three ways:
- As a Panorama… — join overlapping shots into one wide picture.
- As Exposures… — blend bracketed exposures of one scene, so the highlights come from the dark frame and the shadows from the bright one (what is usually called HDR merging).
- As a Focus Stack… — blend shots focused at different distances, for sharpness from front to back (macro and product photographers live on this).
Check the result before keeping it.
Size and shape
- Crop to a shape. In the Geometry panel, under Shape, choose Square, 4:5, 3:2, 4:3, 16:9 or 9:16; the largest frame of that shape is kept, centred. Or select an area and click Crop to crop to the selection.
- Smart Crop. Open Smart Crop in the toolbar and choose Subject, Face or Auto to reframe around what matters, worked out on your Mac.
- Enlarge. Picture ▸ Enlarge ×2 (or ×3, ×4) makes a small picture larger while keeping detail. The first time, download the enlarging model from Picture ▸ Download the enlarging model…; it stays on your Mac.
- Narrow without squashing. Picture ▸ Narrow Without Squashing… fits a wide photograph into a narrower frame by taking out sky or wall rather than squeezing the people. Select something first to keep it exactly as it is; the result is a new layer, with the original hidden underneath.
- Turn or flip. Geometry panel ▸ Turn it: Rotate 90° Left or Right, 180°, Flip Horizontal or Vertical.
Putting a design onto a photograph
Picture ▸ Place Artwork onto This… puts artwork onto a sign, a screen or a shirt in a photograph. Follows the folds and Takes the light set how closely it follows the surface — so a print on a creased shirt creases with it. Replace Artwork… in the Inspector swaps in a different design and keeps the corners. This is how a client sees their logo on a mock-up without a photoshoot.
A second opinion: the Critic
The Critic panel looks at the picture and lists what it would change. Every finding carries its basis — Measured or Judgement — so a matter of taste is never presented as a fact. Choose how much it says: Beginner hears only the biggest problems; Professional and Art Director add smaller ones, the numbers behind them, and matters of taste.
Doing it once, using it everywhere
- Looks. When a photograph looks right, choose Save these edits as a look in the Looks section. On the next photograph, click your look's picture to apply it.
- Actions. Edit ▸ Actions ▸ Record Action, make the edits, then Save Recording…. Play it on any photograph from Edit ▸ Actions ▸ Apply — the same series of edits, every time.
Before it prints: soft proofing
Picture ▸ Proof For and pick the printer and paper. Simulate Paper and Ink shows the paper's white and the ink's black too, so you see the duller, warmer print before paying for it. Proof For ▸ Off goes back.
Review with someone else
File ▸ Review ▸ Comment on the Picture (or on the Selected Layer) leaves a note; replies and resolving happen in the Review panel, where a remark can be rewritten or a whole thread deleted.
Exporting a photograph
File ▸ Export… writes PNG, JPEG, TIFF, HEIC, OpenEXR, Radiance HDR or DNG, in the colour space you choose — or converted to an ICC profile, CMYK print profiles included. OpenEXR and Radiance HDR keep light brighter than white, for compositing and lighting work. Two more exports worth knowing:
- Keep highlights for HDR screens (JPEG or HEIC): a bright sky or lamp still glows on an HDR screen, and the photograph looks as before everywhere else.
- DNG: keeps an edited or merged photograph as a RAW file — its light written at 16 bits a channel, brighter-than-white included — so white balance and exposure can still be changed in any RAW developer.
The free version exports pictures up to HD size (1920 pixels on the long side); Accord Suite Pro exports them at full size. More in every way to export.
Where to go next
Design in Graphics Core · Grading in Colour Core · Importing media · The overview
Download Accord Suite — free, for the Mac.