Features • Aphera

Keyboard-first

Dedicated keys for ratings, balance, and looks. Keep your eyes on the image.

Aphera's keyboard shortcuts for Ratings and Culling, Balance Controls, and Assignable Looks, mapped across the number row, home row, and modifier keys

Ratings + Culling

1–5 to rate, ⌥⌫ to reject.

Balance Controls

Exposure, Temperature, Tint, Contrast, Shadows, Highlights, and Saturation on Q–U and A–J.

Assignable Looks

Build your own palette of styles, ⌘1–9 applies a look to selected photos.

Everything Else

Switch modes, control your view, copy/paste adjustments and more.

Ratings and rejects

Star and reject; the Starred view shows photos by rating

Balance

Photometric controls applied before image formation. Hold Shift for 3× steps, Option for ⅓

Looks on keys

Assign looks to ⌘1–9; a look applies its image formation and effect layers in one step

Copy and paste adjustments

Copy and paste selected adjustments, or apply Balance or adjustments from the previous photo (⌘B, ⌘J)

Filter by rating

Show at least or exactly N stars in the grid

Groups

Sets of photos within a project that you can filter by rating

Collect to a group

Press B to add or remove photos from the group you're collecting into

Before/after

Hold \ to see the original, or turn on View › Before Edits

Modes

Switch between Grid, View, Develop, and Crop with one key (Esc, Space, Return, K)

Configurable keys

Split the number row between ratings and looks, or give it to either

Speed that keeps you moving

Aphera decodes and caches photos in the background, with performance tuned for your Mac's memory and disk. Edit one image or hundreds at once.

Import speed

100 RAW photos (100MP each) import in about a minute on an M2 Max

Bulk operations

Apply edits, ratings, or exports to hundreds of selected photos at once

Grid priority

Scrolling takes priority over background work such as importing

Adaptive caching

Memory and disk caches sized from your Mac's RAM and disk

Tunable performance

Set decode concurrency, memory cache, and disk cache yourself — defaults come from your Mac's hardware, with live memory stats

Apple Silicon

Built for Apple Silicon with Metal processing

Colors that feel alive

Film-inspired colors and handcrafted looks bring authentic analog character to digital files. Your images look great right away, and even better with a few quick edits.

Looks

Built-in looks, plus your own — a look stores the image formation and effect layers

Looks as references

Update a look and every photo using it changes

Import and export looks

Looks belong to a project; move them between projects as .apheralook files

Image Pipeline

From-scratch design from RAW to display. Scene-referred with tooling in a fixed order: Input, Balance, Formation, then effect layers you control.

Image Formation

Aphera's 2499, or your own LUT

Film Response

12 base curves, from Cinema Negative and Classic Print to Instant Film and Strong B&W, plus split toning for shadows and highlights

Grading

Video-style primary grading — contrast, pivot, saturation, gain/power/lift/offset, and targeted highlight/shadow control

Color Controls

A dedicated skin-tone control, plus independent hue, saturation, and luminance for red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, and magenta

White Balance

A creative warm/cool layer, separate from photometric temperature controls in Balance

Texture effects

Grain, halation, and diffusion

Vignette

Optical (lens-style) or Print (darkroom-style), with Temp and Tint to color it

Sharpen

Frequency-aware sharpening with halo and grain-overshoot reduction

Film and cinema LUTs

Fujifilm's GFX Eterna Film Simulation LUTs, or cinema LUTs in log formats from ARRI, RED, Sony, Canon, Panasonic, Apple, Fujifilm, and DaVinci, plus ACES

Scopes

Histogram, Waveform, and Color scopes above the pipeline in Develop

Crop

Aspect ratios, straighten, and 90° rotation

Perspective correction

Guided or manual correction of converging lines, with Auto Crop to keep the frame filled, and desqueeze for anamorphic lenses

Lens corrections

Embedded lens data, DNG profiles, or Lensfun, for distortion and vignetting.

RAW controls

Denoise and highlight recovery

Choice of RAW engine

Decode each photo with Apple's engine or Aphera's

Balance presets

Fixed white balance values for known light sources

Import to Export

Repeatable systems for import, editing, and export keep your work quick and consistent. Set up once and use on every project.

Projects

Each project references photos on disk; projects can overlap, and removing one doesn't touch your photos

Non-destructive editing

Original files are never modified

Supported formats

Most camera RAW formats and DNG, plus JPEG, HEIC, TIFF, and PNG

RAW + JPG pairs

Shoot both and they import as one photo — switch source files anytime, each keeps its own edits

Resilient imports

Files are tracked by macOS bookmark, so renames and moves resolve automatically — relink in place if a drive goes missing

Four-tier removal

Remove from a group, reject (a soft hide), remove from the project, or move the file to the Trash — undo any of it

Zoom

Fit to View (three insets) or Pixel Accurate, 25%–400%

Lightbox

A full-screen view of the photo without the interface — opens on a second display if you have one

Surround color

Set the color around the photo while you edit

Export presets

Archival, Web, Social, or your own

Export formats

JPEG, HEIC (8/10-bit), PNG and TIFF (8/16-bit)

Export settings

Color profiles (sRGB, Adobe RGB, Display P3, BT.2020, ProPhoto RGB) and output size

Naming patterns

Tokens for naming projects and exports

Get from a full card to finished photos