Editor Overview

After Macro Studio finishes a stack (or when you press Return/Enter to edit a single frame), the window switches to the Editor. This is where you refine the result: masks, adjustments, crop, spot correct, defringe, retouch, compare, and finally save.

Press E from anywhere to jump to the Editor; press L to go back to Library.

Not sure which tool to use? See Improving Your Image — a problem-by-problem guide to which tool fixes what, and when to use each Adjustment slider.

Standard and Advanced modes

The Editor has two experience levels, switched with the Standard / Advanced toggle in the top-right of the mode bar:

Standard keeps the surface minimal — the center canvas, Compare, Crop, Save, the Look and Species Identification panels in the right sidebar, and your history strip. It’s the default for new installs.
Advanced adds the full toolkit on top of that: the Masks, Adjustments, and History panels in the right sidebar, plus the Retouch, Spot Correct, and Defringe buttons in the header. History only appears once the current result has edits to list, so it stays out of the way on an untouched stack.

Crop is available in both modes. It’s a basic operation rather than a power-user one, and its R shortcut has always worked in Standard mode — the button now matches. Switching to Standard mid-crop leaves your crop in progress; the other four tools are cancelled on the way out, since their buttons disappear.

Flip to Advanced whenever you want the power-user tools; the choice is remembered between launches. The first time you open a stack in Standard mode, a dismissible hint — “Switch to Advanced Mode to access more features” — points at the toggle; dismiss it and it stays gone (short of a Reset Welcome Tour in Preferences). The rest of this page describes the Advanced layout, since that’s where every tool lives.

The layout

The Editor has four regions:

Header toolbar at the top — Compare, Crop, Retouch, Spot Correct, Defringe, Save.
Center canvas — your image, with zoom/pan.
Right sidebar — Look, Masks, Adjustments, History, Species Identification.
History strip at the bottom — every stack and edit you’ve produced this session.

Six buttons live at the top of the Editor:

Button	Shortcut	What it does
Compare	`C`	A/B-compare two history entries side by side. See Compare and history.
Crop	`R`	Open the crop + straighten editor. See Crop.
Retouch	`T`	Paint pixels from an aligned source frame into the result — useful for thin features the stacker softened. See Retouch.
Spot Correct	—	Open the spot-removal brush. See Spot Correct.
Defringe	`D`	Brush out chromatic-aberration color fringing on out-of-focus highlights. See Defringe.
Save…	`⌘S` / `Ctrl+S`	Open the Save dialog. See Saving.

Compare, Crop, Retouch, Spot Correct, and Defringe are disabled until a result loads (i.e. immediately after a stack starts, they’re greyed out; they enable when the stack completes). Retouch additionally requires a multi-frame stack produced by v2026.5.27 or later — single-frame edits and older stacks keep it greyed out.

To the left of these buttons, a small green status label appears during certain operations (Building mask… with an animated …) and disappears when ready. If something goes wrong, the same label position shows the error in red.

Banners

Bigger messages — a stack that failed, a memory warning, an occasional notice from us — appear in a full-width banner below the tab bar, so you see them in either Library or Editor.

Banners stay until you dismiss them with the X on the right, or until a newer banner replaces them. That’s deliberate: an error like Stack failed: not enough memory is worth reading properly, and worth still being on screen when you go to report it.

A long message wraps onto a second line rather than running off the right edge. If it is longer than even two lines, the banner ends in … — hover over the message to read the whole thing.

The exception is low-stakes nudges — “open an image first” and similar — which clear themselves after about 6 seconds. Those draw a thin draining bar along the bottom edge of the banner so you can tell it’s going to leave on its own rather than hunting for the X.

Some banners carry an inline action button next to the message (for example, sending us a diagnostic report). Click it to act on the banner directly.

If a “stack failed” message takes itself back

Macro Studio watches a running stack for signs that it has stopped, so a stack that really has died doesn’t leave you staring at a frozen progress bar. Very occasionally that check is wrong: on a machine whose drive stalls badly, a stack can go quiet for minutes while it is still working perfectly.

If that happens you’ll see Stack failed unexpectedly and then, when the stack finishes after all, an amber banner replacing it to say so. Trust the second message. The finished image is put into your history exactly as normal, and there’s nothing to redo.

The recovery only works while nothing else is stacking. If you start another stack after the failure message — the natural thing to do — the first one’s image is dropped when it eventually arrives, and no amber banner appears. So if you can spare a couple of minutes, wait before restarting.

If you see it often, the drive Macro Studio is using for scratch space is the thing to look at — see Disk space.

The center canvas

The center area shows your active result — the one currently selected in the history strip. You can:

Scroll to zoom in/out (centered on the cursor).
Click-drag to pan when zoomed in.
Double-click to reset zoom to fit.
Pinch (trackpad) to zoom.
Z or Space to toggle between Fit and 100% (1:1).
⌘= / Ctrl+= and ⌘- / Ctrl+- to step the zoom in and out.

The zoom readout

A small dark pill in the bottom-left corner of the canvas shows the current magnification, and clicking it opens a picker: Fit, then 25%, 33%, 50%, 66%, 100%, 150%, 200% and 300%. Picking one jumps straight there, centered on the middle of the view.

The percentage is against your image’s real pixels, so 100% means one image pixel per screen pixel whatever size the window is. Percentages the current image and window can’t reach are greyed out rather than hidden — you can never zoom out past Fit, so on a large image in a small window the low percentages sit below Fit and stay unavailable.

The same readout appears on the Library preview and inside the Retouch, Spot Correct, Defringe and brush-mask editors, so the magnification you are working at is always on screen.

The coordinate readout

A second pill sits next to the zoom readout showing the pixel your pointer is over — for example (4210,980). It follows the pointer and vanishes when you move off the picture. It’s on by default; Show cursor coordinates in Preferences → General turns it off.

0, 0 is the top-left corner of the image and y counts downwards — the standard everywhere, so a position you copy out lines up with what any other tool would call the same pixel. The numbers are your image’s real pixels (after any crop), so they don’t change as you zoom or pan.

Right-click the canvas for Copy coordinates, which puts the position you clicked on the clipboard — handy when you’re telling us where a problem is. The same menu carries the on/off switch, so you don’t have to go to Preferences to find it. Copy works even with the readout switched off.

The readout also appears on the Library preview and on both Retouch panes. Retouch has no right-click menu of its own, because right-drag pans it. Spot Correct, Defringe and the brush-mask editor deliberately don’t show it — they work on the photo before it was cropped, so a position read there wouldn’t match one read here.

When you enter a sub-mode like Crop, Brush, or Spot Correct, the center canvas swaps to that editor and the rest of the Editor dims slightly to keep your attention focused.

The right sidebar holds five sections, top to bottom:

LOOK

A slider that sets the base look of the stack, from Natural to Enhanced. It reads first because it’s the base decision — masks and adjustments composite on top of whatever it bakes. See Look.

MASKS

Six mask buttons in two rows — Global, Subject, Background on top; Radial, Linear, Brush below — choose which pixels your adjustments affect. The eyeball icon to the right of the buttons toggles a visualization overlay so you can see exactly what’s masked.

The button below the cluster adapts to the active mask: Refine Mask for an auto-detected Subject/Background mask, Open Brush for the freehand Brush mask, and Reset Mask for a Radial or Linear gradient. The two gradients are positioned with handles right on the canvas — Lightroom-style radial and graduated filters.

See Masks for the full guide.

ADJUSTMENTS

Twelve sliders for exposure, color, tone, and sharpness. They apply to whichever mask is currently selected. The eyeball icon at the top of the panel toggles the entire adjustment effect on and off — useful for a quick before/after.

Double-click any slider to reset it to default. The Reset All button at the bottom resets every slider in one shot.

See Adjustments for what each slider does.

HISTORY

The edit timeline for the current result — every slider change and every Retouch, Spot Correct, or Defringe gesture, as a step you can click to return to. It appears once the result has steps to list. See Edit history.

SPECIES IDENTIFICATION

Identify your subject and generate a draft caption for social posts. The panel shows EXIF metadata, lets you pick a kingdom (Plant / Insect / Mushroom), runs an AI species-ID lookup, and offers a Draft Social Post button that builds a caption with the species name and your custom tags.

See Species ID and social posts for details.

The history strip

The bottom of the Editor is the history strip — every result you’ve produced in this session.

Each thumbnail is captioned with the name it would save as — bee - 2026-07-30 over 20.27.04 MS Enh-60 — so you can tell variants apart at a glance, including two stacks of the same folder built at different Looks. A single-image edit shows the filename you opened instead. Click any thumbnail to make it active.

In-progress jobs show a green progress bar overlay; right-click one for Cancel Stack.

See Compare and history for the full picture.

A typical edit flow

Stack completes; you land in the Editor with the result loaded.
Crop if needed — straighten and remove the edges chewed up by alignment.
Retouch if the stacker softened any thin features (antennae, hair, wing edges) you want to restore from a single frame.
Adjust — exposure, contrast, color. Start with everything on the Global mask, then refine with the Subject/Background or Radial/Linear gradient masks if needed.
Spot Correct any blemishes or dust spots, or Defringe any color fringing on out-of-focus highlights.
Save — pick formats, optionally a watermark, hit Save.

Most edits don’t need all six steps. A clean stack with good exposure often just needs Crop + Save.