Saving

When you’re ready to commit a result to disk, click Save… in the top-right corner of the Editor (or press ⌘S / Ctrl+S). The Save Stacked Result dialog opens.

What the Save dialog does

One dialog, one pass, one or more formats. Pick which formats to write, optionally add a watermark, hit Save. Macro Studio writes all selected formats from the same edit state — TIFF + JPEG + DNG in one click, no need to save three times.

Destination and naming

At the top of the dialog:

Folder — where to write the files. The Browse… button opens a standard folder picker. By default the dialog opens at the folder your source frames came from; tick Remember this location for next time if you’d rather it stay where you put it.
Base name — the filename stem, filled in from your file-name pattern. Each format adds its own extension.
Configure… — under the Base name box, opens that pattern for editing without leaving the save. Change it and the Base name follows, unless you’ve already typed a name of your own — a name you wrote by hand is never overwritten. It’s the same setting as Preferences → General, so a change here sticks for every future save too.

The default name

For a stack, Macro Studio proposes a name built from the source folder, the stack’s creation time, an MS tag, and the Look the pixels carry:

beetles - 2026-07-19 14.32.07 MS Enh-60.tif

The Look token is Nat for Natural, or Enh-20 through Enh-100 for Enhanced at that strength — so the file itself records which look it was saved with. The creation time stays stable across re-saves, and the time is dotted rather than colon-separated because Windows forbids : in filenames.

That shape is a starting point, not a rule. The Configure… button under the Base name box — or Preferences → General → Saved file names — lets you build your own from the same live fields the watermark Info card uses — capture date and time, frame count, the first and last frame numbers, the species, your own text. Set it once and every stack you save is named that way. See Saved file names for the full field list.

Overwrite the base name with whatever you like for a one-off; the preview labels next to each format update as you type.

Very long names and deep folders

Every operating system caps how long a full path can be — roughly 260 characters on Windows, 1024 on macOS, 4096 on Linux. Macro Studio handles this in two ways:

The proposed default name is trimmed automatically to fit the folder you’re saving into. A deeply-nested folder gets a shorter suggested name.
A name you type that doesn’t fit is refused, with a dialog telling you how many characters over you are. Shorten the name, or pick a folder with a shorter path.

This most often bites inside deeply-nested cloud-sync folders on Windows.

Format choices

Check one or more formats. The Save button is disabled until at least one is checked.

TIFF 16-bit

Best for: Archival masters. Maximum tonal range, opens in anything (Photoshop, Affinity, GIMP, Capture One).

16-bit per channel, losslessly compressed (Deflate with horizontal prediction) — typically 13-20% smaller than an uncompressed TIFF, with no quality cost.
All adjustments baked into pixels: what you see is what the file contains.
Watermark optional.
Use this for your “keeper” copy that you’ll go back to later for prints or re-edits in other tools.

JPEG

Best for: Web, social media, quick sharing.

8-bit per channel.
Quality is high (no harsh compression) but it’s still a lossy format — keep a TIFF or DNG alongside for archival.
Watermark optional.
Smaller file size — typically 1-3 MB for a macro shot vs. 50-100 MB for a TIFF.

Developed DNG

Best for: Keeping your work editable. This is the format that carries everything — reopen it in Macro Studio and carry on exactly where you left off, Look and edit history included.

DNG works differently from TIFF and JPEG, and the difference matters:

The pixels are not baked. A Macro Studio DNG stores the stacked result before your adjustments, and records the adjustments alongside it. TIFF and JPEG do the opposite — they bake everything in.
Its tones open in Lightroom the way the Editor shows them. The stacked pixels are already toned, and the file now says so — so Camera Raw starts from those tones instead of adding a curve of its own on top. Before this, the same file opened noticeably lighter and flatter in Lightroom. (Tones only: the crop and any mask adjustments still don’t travel — see the two bullets below.)
Your Global slider adjustments (but not Retouch, Spot Correct, or Defringe) are written in the standard Adobe format, so Lightroom, Camera Raw and other DNG-aware tools open the file showing your edits, with the sliders still live and resettable. All twelve Global sliders carry over, including Texture, Clarity and Denoise — with two limits, both from Lightroom’s own ranges being narrower than ours: a negative Sharpness (soften) has no Lightroom equivalent and arrives as 0, and a strongly cool Temperature stops at Lightroom’s coolest setting rather than going further.
Adjustments you made on a mask can’t be written to DNG metadata at all. The Adobe format has no way to say “Clarity +90 on the Subject mask” — it only describes whole-image settings. So by default a mask adjustment lives in the edit state only: Macro Studio reopens it perfectly, and every other app shows the unadjusted stack. The Save dialog tells you when this applies to the file you’re about to write, and offers a checkbox — see Baking adjustments into a DNG below.
Your crop stays Macro Studio-only too. The DNG is deliberately saved uncropped so the crop remains editable when you reopen it, which means other apps show the full frame. The Save dialog says so when you have a crop.
Your full edit state travels with the file. Reopen a Macro Studio DNG and you get your masks, crop, Look, and edit history back — including the ability to undo work you did in a previous session. TIFF and JPEG carry none of this.
Its size depends on whether you have Adobe’s DNG Converter installed. On its own, Macro Studio writes DNG uncompressed, which makes it larger than the equivalent TIFF — 1.2× to 1.6× on the stacks we’ve measured. With the free converter installed it’s compressed instead, which lands it below the TIFF. See Compressed DNG files.
Watermark output is not supported on DNG — baking a watermark into the pixels would defeat the non-destructive round-trip. The Save dialog’s Apply to row lists only the formats that can carry one, so no DNG appears there.

A good default: save DNG + JPEG. The DNG is your editable master; the JPEG is what you actually share. Add TIFF when a downstream tool needs baked pixels in a widely-understood container.

Raw DNG (camera-raw mode)

With Stack RAW photos in camera-raw mode turned on, a stack made from RAW photos can also be saved as a Raw DNG — a genuinely raw file, like one straight from your camera.

It opens correctly in any raw editor — Lightroom, DxO PhotoLab, Capture One, ON1, and others. The file carries your camera’s real identity, Adobe’s own colour profile for that camera, and the white balance you shot with, so each app develops it exactly the way it develops your camera’s own files.
You develop it yourself. It contains unprocessed sensor colours: Macro Studio’s look, adjustments, and crop are not baked into the pixels. Your Retouch, Spot Correct, and Defringe work is — those repair the picture (a dust speck, a doubled hair, a colour fringe) rather than decide how it looks, so they’re re-applied to the raw data itself when the file is written. One exception: work cloned from another Editor image is left out. Those pixels came from a different finished picture, carrying its own Look — and possibly a different camera’s colour — so they can’t be expressed as your camera’s raw data. Everything you cloned from this stack’s own source frames still travels. (If one of the left-out strokes sits underneath a later repair, the Raw DNG leaves out every repair rather than heal from pixels that aren’t there.) Everything about how the picture looks stays yours to decide in your raw editor; that split is what makes it render correctly everywhere, and it’s the file to pick when the rest of your editing happens in another app. For a Lightroom-centered workflow where you want your Macro Studio adjustments to travel with the file, the Developed DNG above remains the right choice — its Global adjustments are written in Adobe’s own format, so Lightroom opens them live and resettable.
It saves as name-raw.dng, so you can tick it alongside the Developed DNG and save both in one pass without the files colliding.
It still reopens here as your stack. Macro Studio writes its own private record of your editing into the file: your crop, your adjustment sliders, and the frame data Retouch needs. Only Macro Studio reads it — every other raw editor ignores it, so the file develops in Lightroom or PhotoLab exactly as it would without it. Two things differ from the Developed DNG. It reopens with the Look set to Natural and the Look control unavailable: a raw file is written before the Look is applied, and nothing in the file could put one back. And your adjustment sliders come back on top of your raw editor’s rendering of the sensor data rather than Macro Studio’s, so the same slider values won’t give quite the same picture the Developed DNG does.
It saves from a freshly stacked result, or from a Raw DNG you already saved. The raw data behind a fresh stack stays with the result while you can see it in the Editor. It’s a big file, so only your several most recent camera-raw stacks keep theirs — the oldest let go first. After that the saved file takes over: a Raw DNG carries those same pixels, so reopening one gives Macro Studio everything it needs to write another. That’s what lets you reopen a Raw DNG, retouch it, and save it back as a Raw DNG rather than being pushed into a developed file. Saving one you haven’t touched rewrites its pixels exactly, byte for byte, so revisiting a file costs it no quality.
A fresh stack needs one of your original frames still on disk. Unlike every other format, a Raw DNG saved from a fresh stack isn’t written from the picture in the Editor alone: it reads your camera’s colour identity and profile from one of the stack’s source frames as it writes. (Re-saving a Raw DNG you reopened doesn’t — those details are already in the file, so it works even if you’ve moved the photos or your DNG Converter is gone. Retouch still needs the frames to clone from, as it always has.) If you’ve moved those photos since stacking — or the card they’re on has been ejected — Macro Studio asks you to point at the folder they’re in now, the same way Retouch does. It matches them by filename and wants to find all of them, which is how it knows you’ve picked the right folder rather than a different shoot that happens to reuse the same numbers. Locate them and the save carries on; cancel, and you can untick Raw DNG and save the other formats as normal.
Some stacks run normally even with the mode on. The camera-raw path needs every frame to be a RAW file, all from the same camera model. Files that already hold a developed picture can’t join — the DNGs Macro Studio saves, and finished exports from other programs. What matters is whether the file still carries the camera’s own unprocessed colour, not whether anything has touched it: a DNG straight from a camera qualifies, and so does one a denoiser like DxO PhotoLab has written, because that keeps the camera’s colour and leaves the developing to you. Fujifilm bodies aren’t supported yet, and neither is Apple ProRAW (those files don’t carry the colour information this mode needs). A stack that doesn’t qualify simply stacks the normal way, and the Save dialog doesn’t show the Raw DNG row for it. The Editor’s Info panel says why, on a Camera-raw mode row.
DxO’s DeepPRIME denoising can’t run on it — or on any stacked file, from any program. DeepPRIME works on the raw sensor mosaic, where each pixel records only one colour, and it does the demosaicing itself as part of denoising. Stacking has to demosaic first: frames can only be aligned and blended once every pixel has all three colours. By the time there is a stack to save, the mosaic is gone. So DxO PhotoLab opens the Raw DNG and develops it correctly, but offers only its Standard denoising — DeepPRIME stays greyed out. DxO PureRAW won’t open the file at all, since it accepts nothing but camera originals. Helicon Focus’s DNG hits the same wall for the same reason; it isn’t something a focus stacker can work around.
If you want DeepPRIME, run it before stacking, not after — and you lose nothing by doing so. Denoise the source RAW frames in PhotoLab, then stack the denoised DNGs it writes. PhotoLab’s denoised DNG still holds your camera’s own unprocessed colour rather than a finished picture, so camera-raw mode takes it like any other raw file and the stack still saves as a Raw DNG. This is the better order anyway: DeepPRIME gets real sensor data on every frame, and stacking starts from cleaner input, which helps alignment as well as noise.

Baking adjustments into a DNG

When your result has mask adjustments, the Formats section of the Save dialog shows a note and a checkbox: Bake adjustments into the DNG’s pixels (destructive).

The adjustments that go into the pixels are removed from the file’s edit state, because leaving them in would apply them a second time on reopen. So those sliders come back at zero and you can’t get their original values out of that file again — you’re editing on top of a finished image.

Everything else still travels: your crop, your Look, your Retouch work, any adjustment that wasn’t baked, and your edit history minus the steps for the baked sliders — those go for the same reason, since undoing one would walk a slider back over pixels that no longer move with it. A baked DNG still reopens here as a real Macro Studio document.

And your image in the Editor is untouched. It still has every slider where you left it, so you can always save again unbaked. It’s only the written file that’s fixed — which is what the line under the checkbox tells you.

Leave it off (the default) to keep the DNG editable. The pixels stay unadjusted, your full recipe is stored alongside them, and reopening in Macro Studio restores everything exactly. Other apps show the unadjusted stack.
Tick it when the DNG needs to look right somewhere else. Macro Studio writes the adjusted pixels, so Lightroom, Photoshop and everything else see the same image your TIFF and JPEG show.

Your choice is remembered for next time. Baking doesn’t change the framing — the DNG stays uncropped either way.

If you want both, save twice, or save a baked DNG alongside an unbaked one under a different name.

Compressed DNG files

A DNG holds 16 bits per colour per pixel, uncompressed, and that adds up: a 26-megapixel stack lands at about 155 MB. Macro Studio can’t compress it on its own — the compression the DNG format specifies for this kind of data is a codec we’d have to write and maintain ourselves.

Adobe’s DNG Converter already has it. If you install that free tool, Macro Studio hands each DNG it saves to the converter, which compresses it and hands it back. On a real 26 MP stack that took 155 MB down to 80 MB — a little under half — in about 0.7 seconds.

Nothing about the picture changes:

The pixels are bit-for-bit identical. This is lossless compression, the same kind a ZIP file uses — not the lossy kind a JPEG uses. We check every pixel of every file against the one we wrote before accepting the smaller version.
Your edits, crop, masks, Look, Retouch work and edit history all survive, byte for byte. A compressed DNG reopens in Macro Studio exactly like an uncompressed one — and that’s checked too, on every file, not just assumed. If the edit state didn’t come back intact, the smaller file is thrown away.
Your Global adjustments still reach Lightroom. The converter adds its own defaults alongside your values rather than replacing them, and a file that comes back with its metadata missing entirely is rejected like any other failure.
Other apps read it more easily, not less. Compressed DNG is the normal kind: it’s what every camera that shoots DNG writes, and what every DNG file Adobe has ever converted looks like. The uncompressed file we write without the converter is the unusual one.
Your file still says Macro Studio wrote it. The converter stamps its own name over ours; we put ours back, along with the capture date and the print resolution, before the file is saved.

It’s controlled by Compress saved DNG files in Preferences → Advanced, on by default. Turn it off if you’d rather not have another program touch your files, or to save the extra second per DNG.

If anything at all goes wrong — the converter isn’t installed, it fails, the result doesn’t verify, or it somehow comes out bigger — Macro Studio keeps its own uncompressed file and the save proceeds normally. You never lose a save over this, and nothing half-written can appear under your file’s name.

Where the converter does its work. Adobe’s converter names what it writes after the file it reads, so the file going in and the file coming out can’t sit in the same folder. Macro Studio gives it a small temporary folder right next to your save — the name starts with a dot and ends in .dngc — and removes it the moment the compression finishes. The folder is hidden: by the leading dot on macOS and Linux, and by the hidden-file attribute on Windows. Some file listings show hidden items anyway.

If something interrupts a save part-way through, one can be left behind. Three things clear it: closing Macro Studio, which takes any it still has open; the next save into that folder; and the next time Macro Studio starts, which re-checks the last few folders you saved into. Nothing else in your folder is touched.

Macro Studio never downloads, installs, or bundles the converter. It only ever runs a copy you installed yourself.

What travels with the file

	TIFF	JPEG	DNG
Adjustments baked into pixels	Yes	Yes	No by default — stored as editable settings, or bake them
Mask adjustments visible in other apps	Yes	Yes	Only if baked
Reopens in Macro Studio with your edits	No	No	Yes
Edit history and undo survive	No	No	Yes
Watermark supported	Yes	Yes	No
Relative file size	Medium	Small	Largest

Metadata

Macro Studio writes a genuine EXIF block into both DNG and TIFF, so the details your camera recorded survive the stack: ISO, capture date and time, exposure and metering settings, flash state, focal length (including the 35 mm equivalent), and GPS coordinates when your camera stored them. Lightroom’s Metadata panel and standard EXIF viewers read these normally.

The image resolution is tagged from the source frames rather than being left at a meaningless default, so print sizing behaves correctly downstream, and the colour space is tagged as sRGB.

It’s captured when the stack starts, not when you save. Macro Studio reads your camera’s details from the first frame the moment you kick the stack off, and keeps them with the result. So once the stack has finished you can move the photos, copy them to another drive, or eject the card, and the file you save still carries everything. (The stack itself still reads your photos while it runs, so wait for it to finish before moving them — and saving a Raw DNG from a fresh stack needs a source frame on disk even after that; re-saving one you reopened does not. See Raw DNG above.)

Two caveats worth knowing:

Metadata writing is best-effort. If it fails for an unusual source file, you still get the image — just without the EXIF block.
Very large stacks that exceed the classic TIFF size ceiling are written in an extended format that skips the EXIF splice.

Watermarks

Check Add watermark to bake a watermark into your TIFF and/or JPEG output. The watermark UI expands with:

Configure… — open the watermark editor, where you create and edit watermark presets. A preset’s Type can be plain text, an image overlay (such as a logo), or an Info card that auto-fills camera, exposure, stack, and species details from each image’s metadata — see Info card watermarks below.
Watermark dropdown — pick which preset to apply.
Apply to: — per-format checkboxes (TIFF, JPEG). Neither DNG is listed: Macro Studio doesn’t write watermarks into DNG output of any kind.
Size — per-save override of the preset’s default size. Useful when the same watermark needs to be slightly larger on a print-bound TIFF than on a social-bound JPEG without saving two presets.
H Offset / V Offset sliders — absolute horizontal and vertical position of the watermark on the image, each as a percentage from 0 to 100 (H = 50, V = 50 puts the watermark dead-centre; H = 95, V = 95 is bottom-right corner; H = 5, V = 5 is top-left).

All three overrides (Size, H Offset, V Offset) apply only to this particular save and leave the preset’s stored defaults alone — so a preset’s defaults remain a useful starting point for the next save.

The Save dialog includes a PREVIEW pane beside the form that shows the watermarked image at the current settings — you can zoom (scroll), pan (drag), and reset (double-click) to inspect placement before committing. It stays visible however short the window is; on a small screen the form column scrolls instead.

Building watermark presets

Click Configure… to open the watermark editor, where you build the presets the Save dialog’s dropdown picks from: text content, font, color, image overlay, opacity, default position, default size. Set those up once and reuse the preset across many saves.

In the Save dialog itself, the per-save Size / H Offset / V Offset overrides let you tweak placement and size for a single save without going back into the preset editor. Good for one-offs (e.g. a single hero image that needs the watermark a touch bigger and lower than your default).

Info card watermarks

An Info card is a watermark type that builds itself from each image’s metadata instead of carrying a fixed line of text. In the watermark editor (Configure…), set a preset’s Type to Info card and it renders a small panel — camera, lens, exposure, frame count, species — that auto-fills from the photo you’re saving. Use the same preset across a whole shoot and every card shows that image’s own details.

Template and fields. The card is driven by a template: type any text you like and drop in live fields wherever you want the metadata to appear. Click Insert field to pick from a grouped menu — each row shows the field (e.g. {camera}) next to its live value for the current image, so you never have to memorise names:

Camera — {camera}, {make}, {model}, {lens}
Exposure — {aperture}, {shutter}, {iso}, {focal}, and {exposure} (the whole f / shutter / ISO triangle on one line)
Stack — {frames} (“24 frames”), {frame_count} (“24”), {stack_line} (“24 images stacked and edited”)
Subject — {species}, {species_common}, {species_latin}, {species_emoji} — populated once you’ve run Species ID
Date — {date}
Other — {copyright}, {camera_line} (the full camera summary on one line), {app}, {url}
Logo — {logo} (see below); plus optional decorative Emoji icons

A field with no value for the current image simply renders as nothing — no blank line, no placeholder — so one template copes with shots that have a species ID and shots that don’t, RAW frames with full EXIF and processed inputs without. The starting template is {logo} / {camera} / {lens} / {exposure} / {frames}, which on a typical macro shot renders your logo above:

Olympus OM-1
M.Zuiko 60mm F2.8 Macro
f/8 | 1/200 | ISO 200
24 frames

Per-line formatting. Each line can carry its own size, bold, italic, alignment, and colour — click into a line and use the formatting bar (it applies to the line your cursor is in), or use Apply this style to all lines to make them uniform. Handy for a bold title line over smaller detail lines.

Logo. Pick a logo image with the Logo control, then place it by typing {logo} on its own line wherever you want it in the stack (top, middle, or bottom). The logo follows that line’s alignment.

Panel. By default the text sits on a rounded background panel so it stays legible over busy backgrounds. Turn Show background panel off for text-only, or tune its colour, opacity, corner radius, and padding.

Everything else behaves like any other watermark: the card has a default position and size, and the Save dialog’s per-save Size / H/V Offset still apply. The whole card — panel, logo, and text — fades together as one unit with the opacity setting.

What gets saved

The saved file reflects the current state of the active result in the Editor:

The stacked result (or the single image you opened).
All adjustments on all masks.
The Look and its strength.
Any crop applied.
Any Retouch, Spot Correct, and Defringe work applied.
The watermark, if you enabled it for the format.

Saving a DNG also saves your edit history. The record of how you got here — your parametric steps and your Retouch, Spot Correct and Defringe strokes — is written into the file, so reopening it restores a live edit timeline rather than a flat image. A file saved mid-undo reopens with its redo tail intact. TIFF and JPEG carry no edit state.

What does not get saved:

The session strip of stacked results — that’s per-session and in-memory. Each result you want to keep needs its own Save click. (Not to be confused with the edit history within a result, which a DNG does keep.)
Source images — they remain untouched on disk. Saving never modifies your originals.

While the save runs

Saving happens in the background. The Save button disables and reads Saving… while the composite is built, encoded and written, so a big multi-format save doesn’t freeze the interface — you can keep looking at the image while it finishes. Clicking Save again while one is in flight does nothing; wait for the button to come back.

Recommended save patterns

”I want a master plus a shareable”

Check TIFF + JPEG. Add watermark, apply to JPEG only. One click produces:

Archival TIFF (no watermark, 16-bit, lossless).
Shareable JPEG (watermarked, 8-bit).

This is the safest pattern for someone with mixed downstream uses.

”I only need the file for Instagram”

Check JPEG only. Add watermark. Save. Done.

”I’m a Lightroom shooter who prefers DNG”

Check DNG. Lightroom opens it with your Global adjustments already applied and still editable on its own sliders — and Macro Studio can reopen the same file later with your masks, Look and edit history intact.

If you worked with masks, tick Bake adjustments into the DNG’s pixels (destructive) in the Save dialog, or Lightroom will show the stack without your mask work — the Adobe format has nowhere to put it. Macro Studio warns you when this applies. See Baking adjustments into a DNG.

”I’m sending to a print lab”

Check TIFF only. No watermark. Save. Lab gets a maximum-quality, no-overlay file.

Tips

Confirm output dimensions. If you cropped to a small region, your saved file is at the cropped resolution, not the original. Check the preview to make sure.
JPEG quality is fixed — there’s no “quality 80 vs quality 95” slider. Macro Studio writes high-quality JPEG; if you need finer control, save TIFF and re-encode in another tool.
Watermark presets are reusable. Build a few in Configure (a subtle signature for archival prints, a bold watermark for social) and swap between them in the dropdown.
The Save dialog remembers your last folder and recent format choices, so the second save in a session is one click + Save.