Loading and Selecting Frames

After you load a folder from the folder browser, the filmstrip at the bottom of the Library view fills with thumbnails of every supported image in that folder. This page covers what you can do with that filmstrip — which frames to pick, how to filter by file type, and a few power-user shortcuts.

Loading a hand-picked set of files

Loading a whole folder is the common path, but you don’t have to. When a folder holds more than one bracket — or more frames than you want — you can load just the ones you need:

File → Open Files… (⌘⇧O / Ctrl+Shift+O) opens a picker where you can select any set of images, even spanning different folders. Only the files you pick land in the filmstrip.
Drag image files from Finder or Explorer straight onto the Library. Dropping a selection loads exactly those files — not the whole folder they came from.

A hand-picked set stays put across a refresh: re-scanning only drops files that have actually left the disk, so an unrelated change in the folder won’t reset your selection.

Supported formats

Macro Studio reads the following image types straight out of the folder — no pre-conversion needed.

TIFF (8-bit and 16-bit)
PNG (8-bit and 16-bit)
JPEG
RAW — CR2, CR3, NEF, ARW, DNG, ORF, RW2, PEF, SRW, X3F, RAF, and generic .raw (decoded via LibRaw)

RAW files are demosaiced in-app. The aligned, stacked result preserves the bit depth of the input where possible — 16-bit in, 16-bit out for both TIFF and PNG.

Colour profiles

If a TIFF, PNG, or JPEG carries an embedded colour profile — Adobe RGB, ProPhoto RGB, Display P3, Rec. 2020 and the other common working spaces — Macro Studio reads it and converts to sRGB as the file is loaded, so the colours you see in the stack match what you saw in the app you exported from.

This matters most if you edit elsewhere first. Exporting 16-bit TIFFs from Lightroom, Capture One, or Affinity and stacking those is a perfectly good workflow, and you no longer need to remember to set the export to sRGB to keep the colour right.

A few practical notes:

Files with no embedded profile are read as sRGB, which is the safe assumption and what nearly every untagged file actually is.
Colours outside sRGB can’t survive the conversion. ProPhoto RGB in particular describes far more colours than sRGB can hold, so the most saturated ones are pulled to the nearest colour sRGB can show. This is the same trade-off any editor makes when you convert to sRGB, and it’s why exporting sRGB directly is still the most predictable option.
Stacked results are always written as sRGB — see Saving your work.

Frames are sorted alphabetically by filename. Most cameras write sequential filenames out of the box (IMG_0001.tif, IMG_0002.tif, …) so this usually “just works.”

Cameras too new to decode

RAW decoding depends on a bundled decoder that has to know your camera body. When a body is newer than the decoder, Macro Studio tries three things in order.

1. Adobe DNG Converter, if you have it. Adobe’s DNG Converter is a free download that recognises new bodies long before other decoders do. If it’s installed on your computer, Macro Studio converts a copy of each RAW to DNG and stacks that — at full 16-bit RAW quality, with all the editing latitude intact. Nothing is downloaded or installed for you. The converted copies are cached while you work, so returning to the same frames doesn’t re-convert them, and they’re cleared the next time you restart Macro Studio.

A file that opens normally is never converted just to open it. Within a stack it’s all or nothing: if the reference frame needs converting, every frame is, because converted frames come out a few pixels different in size and a stack can’t align two different sizes. That costs no quality. (One other feature converts files on its own terms: a stack run in camera-raw mode converts one frame, so the camera’s colour profile is ready for a Raw DNG save.)

Macro Studio finds the converter automatically in its usual install location. Preferences → Advanced → Adobe DNG Converter shows whether it was found, lets you point at it if you installed it somewhere unusual, and lets you turn the automatic conversion off.

2. The camera’s embedded JPEG preview. Without the converter, Macro Studio still doesn’t fail the stack — it falls back to the JPEG preview the camera embedded in the RAW file and stacks that instead. The Editor shows a banner naming the camera when this happens, with a link to Adobe’s download page.

The stack works, but it’s worth knowing what you’re getting: those previews are 8-bit and already camera-processed, with white balance, sharpening, and noise reduction baked in and none of the RAW file’s editing latitude.

The same fallback applies to Edit single image, not only to stacks — one of these files opens from its embedded preview and shows the same banner.

3. A clear error, if there’s no usable preview either.

When a stack was built through the converter, the Editor’s Info panel notes it on a RAW decode row.

File-type filter

If a folder contains more than one file type — say JPEGs from the camera plus TIFFs from a previous export — a File type filters label appears above the filmstrip with a row of colored toggle pills (one per file type detected). Click a pill to hide all files of that type from the strip; click again to show them.

The filter is per-folder and resets when you load a different folder. Useful for:

Skipping JPEG previews when you only want to stack the RAW originals.
Comparing your previous stacked output (TIFF) against the source frames (RAW) without having them mixed together.

The filter doesn’t change selection — if a filtered-out frame was selected before you filtered, it stays selected but hidden.

Turning every pill off doesn’t hide everything — it falls back to showing the whole folder, so you can’t lose the strip to a stray click. The Filter box next to the pills narrows the strip by filename instead, and that one can match nothing: when it does, the preview pane reads No images match the current filters. so it’s clear the folder’s images are still there, just hidden. Clear the box and they come straight back.

Online-only cloud files

If your photos live in iCloud Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, or Box, some of them may be online-only — listed in the folder, but with the actual image data still on the server rather than on your disk. Macro Studio detects this without ever reading the file, so browsing a cloud folder never quietly triggers a pile of downloads in the background.

Online-only frames show a cloud glyph (☁) in place of a thumbnail. Select one and the preview pane shows a This file is online-only page with a Download to view button. With several frames selected, the button reads Download N files to view and pulls down the whole selection at once. Thumbnails and previews fill in on their own as the bytes land.

Nothing downloads unless you ask it to — that’s deliberate, so a folder of a few hundred RAWs can’t start a multi-gigabyte sync just because you clicked into it.

Download your frames before stacking them. The stack itself doesn’t check for online-only files, so a bracket that still has placeholders in it won’t stack correctly. If you see any cloud glyphs in your selection, select all and download first. (On Linux, cloud clients download files fully anyway, so there’s nothing to detect and nothing to do.)

Selecting frames

You don’t stack every frame automatically — you pick which frames go into the stack. Five buttons in the source-control bar above the filmstrip help:

Button	Shortcut	What it does
Set First	`F`	Marks the active frame as the start of the selection range.
Set Last	`L`	Marks the active frame as the end of the range and selects everything between First and Last. `L` does double duty — from the Editor it switches to the Library; here in the Library it sets Last. Set Last frame is its own action, so you can give it a key of its own in Customize Keyboard Shortcuts — do that and `L` goes back to being just the Library switch.
Select All	`A`	Selects every visible frame in the strip. Once they’re all selected the button reads Deselect All, and `A` clears the selection instead. Drop one frame and it goes back to Select All.
Deselect	`D`	Drops the frame you’re previewing from the selection. Greyed out when that frame isn’t in the selection — pressing `D` then puts it back.
Compare	`C`	Opens A/B compare on two frames side by side.

You can also select with the mouse, using the same modifiers your operating system uses everywhere else:

Click a thumbnail to make it the active frame. A click never disturbs a selection of two or more frames, so you can click your way through the folder mid-cull without losing it — press Esc when you do want to start over.
⌘-click (macOS) / Ctrl-click (Windows, Linux) to add one frame to the selection — or take one back out, if it’s already in. This is how you drop a single bad frame out of a Select All.
Shift-click to select everything between the active frame and the one you click.
Scroll the wheel over the filmstrip to step through frames one at a time — quicker than clicking when you’re checking sharpness frame by frame.
Shift + scroll to do the same from anywhere in the Library — over the large preview, a compare panel, or the filmstrip itself — without moving the cursor down to the strip first. Plain scroll over the preview zooms, so Shift is what browses; it’s the same gesture the Retouch editor uses to step source frames, and it works over the Editor’s history strip too. Like arrowing, it only moves the active frame; it never changes the selection.

Frames outside the selection dim, so at a glance you can see exactly what will go into the stack.

The most common pattern: click into the folder, hit A to select all, hit S to stack. Done.

Culling from the keyboard

Selecting all and then throwing out the few duds is usually faster than picking the keepers one by one. You can do the whole pass without leaving the keyboard:

Press A to select every frame.
Use the arrow keys — or just click thumbnails — to step through the frames in the large preview. Browsing this way never changes the selection.
On a frame you don’t want, press D to drop it (or click Deselect). Press D again to put it back.
Press S to stack what’s left.

Shift+arrow works too, replacing the selection with the range you sweep out. Esc clears the selection entirely and starts over.

Right-clicking a thumbnail offers:

Edit single image — opens the right-clicked frame in the Editor. This one always acts on the frame you right-clicked, whatever else is selected.
Reveal in Finder (macOS) / Reveal in File Explorer (Windows) / Reveal in File Manager (Linux) — opens your OS file manager with that frame selected, so you can see exactly where it lives. On Linux it opens the containing folder, because there’s no single way to select a file across the different Linux file managers.
Copy file path — puts that frame’s full path on the clipboard, for pasting into another application or a terminal.
Rename file… — renames that frame on disk. The extension is kept, so you can’t accidentally turn a .ORF into something Macro Studio won’t open — the prompt names it, and you type only the part before it. The frame stays where it is in the filmstrip, and its star rating goes with the new name. A name that’s already taken is refused rather than overwritten.
Copy N images to folder… — copies the whole selection somewhere else, leaving the originals where they are. See below.
Move N images to folder… — moves the whole selection. See below.
Delete N images — deletes the whole selection.

The first four act on the one frame you right-clicked; the last three act on the whole selection.

Rename and Move are both refused while the frames are part of a stack that’s running right now — taking a photo away from a running stack, or renaming it underneath one, would break it. A banner tells you, nothing happens, and you can do it once the stack finishes. Copy is never refused: it only reads the files.

Splitting a folder into multiple stacks

Sometimes a single shoot folder holds two or more subjects you want to stack separately — bumping the tripod between subjects, or shooting two flowers in the same garden, or any case where one folder really contains two stacks.

The cleanest way to split: select the frames that belong to the first stack, right-click a thumbnail, and pick “Move N images to folder…” A small dialog appears with the destination pre-filled as:

{parent folder name} stack 1

Press Enter (or click Move) and Macro Studio creates that subfolder inside the parent and moves the selected files into it. Repeat with the remaining frames — the dialog will auto-name the next one stack 2, then stack 3, and so on, finding the smallest unused integer each time.

After moving, the new subfolders appear in the folder browser as siblings to your existing folders, each ready to load as its own stack.

You can also use the Browse… button in the Move dialog to drop the frames into an existing folder anywhere on disk.

Copy N images to folder… uses the same dialog and the same auto-naming — it just leaves the originals in place. Reach for it when you want a set of picks somewhere else without breaking up the shoot: a selects folder, a client hand-off, a copy onto a backup drive. If a file of the same name is already at the destination, the copy lands beside it as name 2.ext rather than overwriting anything.

The Stack/Edit button

The big button in the bottom-right of the Library view changes based on what’s loaded and selected:

No folder loaded — disabled, reading Stack selected →. There’s nothing to act on yet.
Fewer than two frames selected — blue, reading Edit single image [Enter] →. Pressing Return/Enter opens the active frame in the Editor, skipping the stack step entirely. Useful for re-editing a previously saved result or applying adjustments to a single image.
Two or more frames selected — green, reading Stack selected images [S] →. Pressing S runs the stack.

“Selected” here counts both the frames you’ve multi-selected and any First/Last range.

The colour is the fastest way to tell the two apart at a glance: green stacks, blue edits one image.

You may also see & Drop Oldest appended to the label. That means the history strip is full, so the result you’re about to make will push the oldest entry off the front — see Compare and history.

The footer status line just above this button tells you what’s currently selected (12 frames selected or Frame 3/30 — IMG_0003.cr3).

Editing a single image

Macro Studio is happy to skip the stacking step. Double-click any thumbnail in the filmstrip, or select a single frame and press Return/Enter, and you’ll jump to the Editor with that one image loaded — same masks, adjustments, crop, spot correct, and Save dialog as a stacked result.

This is handy for:

Quick edits on a single-frame macro that doesn’t need stacking.
Re-editing a previously stacked TIFF that you exported and want to revisit.
Trying out a watermark/social caption workflow without running a stack first.

Tips for best results

Shoot with a tripod when possible. Alignment works on handheld shots, but tripod shots produce cleaner edges and no rotation correction.
Use consistent exposure across frames — shoot in manual mode so the auto-exposure system doesn’t shift between frames.
Overlap focus zones — each frame should share some sharp area with the next. Big focus gaps produce visible seams.
More frames = smoother result. 10-30 frames is typical for most macro subjects; 50+ is fine for higher magnifications.