Immage

History, undo and copying settings

Every edit is a step you can undo, and any part of an edit can be copied to other photos.

If you’ve used another editor: the History card is the usual history panel, and Copy / Paste / Previous are the usual copy settings, paste settings and paste settings from the previous photo, with the usual keys.

Undo and redo

⌘Z undoes the last edit; ⇧⌘Z redoes it. The undo and redo buttons in the toolbar under the filmstrip do the same. A continuous slider drag counts as one step.

The History card

The History card in the Library panel lists the edit, newest at the top:

  • this session’s steps, named after what changed, such as Exposure or New mask. Click one to go back to it; steps above it turn gray, and redo brings them back.
  • below them, what the photo opened with: original, any edit from darktable or an earlier session, and what Immage started it with (the tone mapper, profile, the new-photos preset, Auto).

The eye button hides modules that are in the history but switched off.

Pointing at a row of what the photo opened with shows its buttons:

  • for a module Immage has no sliders for, such as one added in darktable: a switch, which turns it off or on again, and delete. A deleted module is switched off and gone from the history once the photo saves. darktable starts every photo with some modules, and those come back if removed, so deleting one of them puts it back to darktable’s defaults instead.
  • for a module behind Immage’s sliders, such as exposure: reset, which puts those sliders back where a new photo starts. Moving the sliders is how to change it, so it has no switch of its own.

Modules every photo needs, such as demosaic, and the modules a mask uses (the Masks panel’s) have no buttons. Each of these is one undo step.

The compress button, beside the eye, is darktable’s compress history stack: the session’s steps fold into the photo’s history, which then lists each module once, as darktable stores it. Steps you have undone are dropped, and the steps before cannot be undone any more. Immage saves the history compressed in any case, so the photo’s sidecar stays small whether you press it or not.

Reset all

Reset all, in the Adjustments panel’s head, takes the photo back to its starting point: sliders, crop, look, masks and spots. It is one step, so ⌘Z brings everything back.

Copying settings to other photos

The buttons at the bottom of the right panel:

  • Copy… (⇧⌘C) opens Copy Settings: tick what to copy, then copy it.
  • Paste (⇧⌘V) pastes those settings onto the selected photos in the grid or filmstrip. A single selection is also the target, even if another photo is open. Without a selection, Paste uses the open photo. The open photo and selection stay in place.
  • Previous (⌥⌘V) pastes the previous photo’s settings, the parts ticked in Copy Settings.

Copy Settings groups: Profile, Treatment, White Balance, Tone, Presence, Tone Curve, HSL / Color, B&W Mix, Color Grading, Sharpening, Profiled Denoise, Lens Corrections, Transform, Post-Crop Vignetting, Grain, Crop, Look and Masks. Crop and Masks start unticked. Your choice is remembered.

Only the groups ticked in Copy Settings change; other edits stay as they were. Look, ticked by default, includes the film style’s own module settings and Look amount. It reapplies the saved style definition, rather than copying manual changes to its individual History instances. The style file must remain available. Masks, when ticked, replaces the target’s masks; Crop and Negative also need to be explicitly ticked.

Virtual copies are independent targets. Paste does not automatically include an unselected RAW/JPEG partner. Remote results that have not been opened into the local library are skipped and counted in the status message.

Each paste is one step: ⌘Z undoes it, and ⇧⌘Z redoes it. A batch step restores all of its targets, including their native look and mask settings. Undo is part of the current photo’s editing history; switching photos or compressing history clears it, as with other editing steps. Previous remains a single-photo action. Paste requires an open photo and is unavailable while cropping.

A progress overlay prevents editing or navigation during a batch. Immage saves each target’s XMP sidecar and refreshes its thumbnail. If a target fails, the batch attempts to restore all targets. If recovery cannot write a sidecar, the status reports it and Undo can retry recovery once the problem is fixed. Undo/redo refuses a batch if a target’s saved edit has since changed outside that step; it does not overwrite the newer edit.

This page is part of immage's own docs, at v0.41.1. View the source on GitHub.