Quick Start

This guide walks through the full Macro Studio workflow — from loading a folder to saving a finished image. If you’ve shot focus-bracketed photos before and just want the shortest path to a stacked result, this is it.

Prefer to watch? Here’s a 13-min video walkthrough covering the same flow.

The two-mode layout

Macro Studio has two modes that swap the main view:

• Library (L) — folder browser, frame strip, stacking controls. This is where you start.
• Editor (E) — the post-stack editing surface with masks, adjustments, crop, and Save.

You can tell which mode you’re in by the mode bar at the top of the window: the active tab is white with a green bar under it, the other is grey. Each tab also names its keyboard shortcut — LIBRARY [L], EDITOR [E] — so it stays accurate even if you remap those keys. In the Editor, a Standard / Advanced toggle sits at the right-hand end of the same bar.

1. Add a folder

In the FOLDERS section of the left panel, click + Add a folder and pick the parent folder that holds your macro shoots (for example, ~/Pictures/macro/). The folder appears in the tree as a top-level root that you can expand.

You can add multiple roots — one for each shoot location, drive, or year — and they persist across launches.

2. Load a stack

A single click on any subfolder in the tree loads every supported image inside it as one stack. Thumbnails appear in the filmstrip at the bottom of the window.

You can also right-click a folder for Load N images, Add to Favorites, Reveal in Finder, and other options.

Star a folder to add it to the FAVORITES section at the top of the panel — handy for shoots you’ll come back to.

3. Select the frames

Above the filmstrip is the source-control bar with four buttons:

• Set First [F] — marks the first frame of the range.
• Set Last [L] — marks the last frame.
• Select All [A] — selects every frame in the folder. When they’re all selected it reads Deselect All and clears the selection instead.
• Compare [C] — opens A/B compare for two selected frames.

Most of the time, A to select all is what you want. For partial stacks, click the first frame, then Shift-click the last. To throw out a stray frame, ⌘-click (Ctrl-click on Windows) its thumbnail — or arrow onto it and press D.

The bottom-right CTA button always tells you what will happen next:

• No folder loaded yet — it reads Stack selected → and is greyed out.
• Fewer than two frames selected — it turns blue and reads Edit single image [Enter] →, which opens that one frame in the Editor.
• Two or more selected — it turns green and reads Stack selected images [S] →.

4. Stacking is automatic

There’s nothing to set up. Macro Studio uses a single unified stacking engine — no method to choose, no detail or depth sliders, and alignment runs automatically. (Earlier versions exposed Pyramid vs. Depth Map methods and a row of advanced sliders; those are gone, replaced by one engine that picks the best approach for you.)

Select your frames, press Stack, and you’re done. See Stacking for what happens under the hood.

5. Stack

Press S or click the CTA button (Stack selected images [S] →). Macro Studio:

1. Aligns the frames (corrects for focus breathing, camera movement, rotation).
2. Builds the stacked composite with the unified engine.
3. Switches to the Editor with the result loaded.

You’ll see the in-progress job appear in the history strip at the bottom of the Editor — when the bar fills, the result is ready.

You don’t have to sit and watch it. Stacking runs in the background, and browsing stays responsive while it does — thumbnails and previews load on their own threads, and anything you actively do takes priority over the queue. So you can keep going back to the Library, look through frames, or queue up another stack. Autostack works the same way for whole folders.

6. Refine the result (optional)

Standard vs. Advanced. New installs open the Editor in Standard mode, which keeps things minimal — Compare, Crop, Save, the Look slider, Species ID, and your history strip. Flip the Standard / Advanced switch in the top-right of the Editor to reveal the full toolkit: the Retouch, Spot Correct and Defringe buttons, plus the Masks, Adjustments and History sections in the sidebar. See Editor overview.

In the Editor, the right sidebar holds five sections, top to bottom:

• LOOK — a slider from Natural to Enhanced that sets how much extra sharpening and local contrast the image carries. Visible in both Standard and Advanced. See Look.
• MASKS — Global / Subject / Background, the Radial / Linear gradients, and Brush. Pick one and your adjustments apply only there. (Advanced)
• ADJUSTMENTS — 12 sliders (Exposure, Contrast, Shadows, Highlights, Temperature, Tint, Texture, Clarity, Vibrance, Saturation, Sharpness, Denoise). (Advanced)
• HISTORY — every edit as a step you can click back to. Appears once the image actually has edits. (Advanced) See Edit history.
• SPECIES IDENTIFICATION — identify your subject and generate a draft caption for social posts.

At the top of the Editor, six header buttons cover the rest of the editing surface:

• Compare [C] — A/B-compare two history entries side by side.
• Crop [R] — straighten and crop with rule-of-thirds guides. Available in both modes.
• Retouch [T] — paint pixels from an aligned source frame into the result.
• Spot Correct — spot-removal brush for blemishes.
• Defringe [D] — brush out chromatic-aberration color fringing on out-of-focus highlights.
• Save… — open the Save dialog.

You can do all, some, or none of this. A stack with no edits is fine — just hit Save… when you’re ready.

7. Save

Click Save… in the top-right corner of the Editor. The Save dialog lets you check multiple formats at once and write them all in one pass.

• TIFF 16-bit — archival master, opens in anything.
• JPEG — sharing and social.
• DNG — 16-bit lossless, Adobe RAW-style format. Good for Lightroom catalogs that prefer DNG, smaller on disk than TIFF.

Optionally enable Add watermark and pick which raster formats get watermarked. (DNG output doesn’t support watermarking.)

That’s it — you now have a fully sharp macro image, ready for archive, sharing, or further editing.

Next steps

• Browse and organize: Folder browser
• How stacking works: Stacking
• Batch-stack a folder: Autostack
• Edit the result: Editor overview
• Save and export: Saving