Generative Delete was about a single moment in editing: removing the one thing that shouldn’t be in the frame. The work since then has been about everything around that moment — the part of photography that happens before you ever open an editing panel, when you’re staring at six hundred frames from a shoot and trying to find the ten that matter.
This update is the largest we’ve shipped. Most of it is aimed at one problem: living with a big library without drowning in it. There’s also a batch of new editing power at the end. Here’s the whole thing.
Finding Your Keepers
Cull first, edit later. That’s how most working photographers actually move through a shoot, and Chromaform now has a proper set of tools for the cull.
Final Cut. Mark a frame with the clapperboard and it becomes a Final Cut pick — your hero selects, the shots that are actually leaving the building. One tap on any card, and a Final Cut filter in the top bar collapses the whole library down to just those picks. It’s the shortlist you hand to a client, separated cleanly from everything you merely liked.
Reject. The opposite vote. Tap the thumbs-down to mark a frame as a throwaway — soft focus, blinked, a duplicate you don’t need. The reject filter works both ways: hide rejects so they’re out of your sight while you work, or show only rejects when you want to select them all and delete them in one pass.
Color labels. Ten color labels, each of which you can rename to mean whatever your workflow needs — “client A,” “needs retouch,” “portfolio,” “social.” Every label is an independent filter toggle, so you can show two colors and hide the rest, flip the whole set with an invert button, or clear it with one tap. Images start with no label, which is itself a filter, so you can find the frames you haven’t sorted yet.
Stars, still there. Classic one-to-five star ratings remain, with their own filter, and they compose with everything above.
Loupe mode. Culling on a grid of thumbnails only gets you so far — at some point you need to see the frame full-screen and check whether the eyes are actually sharp. The full-screen loupe does exactly that: swipe through your shoot one frame at a time, pinch to zoom all the way in to inspect focus and detail, and rate or color-label each shot without leaving the view. It turns the first pass of a big shoot into something you can do in a few minutes with your thumb.
Similarity Sort
The hardest part of a large shoot isn’t the frames that are obviously good or obviously bad — it’s the bursts. Twelve nearly identical frames of the same pose, and you have to find the one where the expression is right and nothing’s blinking.
Similarity Sort is built for that. Chromaform analyzes each image with Apple’s Vision framework to produce a feature print — a compact numerical fingerprint of what the photo actually looks like — and then chains the library into a nearest-neighbor order so that visually similar frames sit right next to each other. Near-duplicates from a burst land together. Variations on a setup cluster. Instead of hunting across a scattered grid, you scan a run of lookalikes side by side and keep the best one.
It runs entirely on your device. Your photos are never uploaded anywhere to be compared — the fingerprints are computed locally, the same as every other piece of intelligence in Chromaform.
If you’d rather sort by your own judgments, there are also Colors→Stars and Stars→Colors orderings that group the library by your labels and ratings, per tab, without disturbing your manual arrangement.
Before and After, at a Glance
Every library card now carries a compare slider. Drag across the thumbnail to wipe between the original and your edited version, right there in the grid, without opening the editor. It’s a fast way to remember what a frame looked like before you touched it — and to decide whether the edit earned its place.
Gradient and Radial Masks
On the editing side, the headline addition is graduated masking. Alongside the existing foreground/background separation, you can now apply a linear gradient, a radial (elliptical) mask, or a rectangular mask as its own editing region — and not just for tone. The same masks drive Color Grading, so you can warm a sky, darken a corner, or push contrast into the center of the frame and have it fall off smoothly.
The masks are interactive. Drag the handles directly on the canvas — center, radius, angle, feather — and the preview updates live as you shape the falloff. Because these adjustments live in the fast post-processing stage, on-canvas dragging stays responsive even on large RAW files.
See the Whole Pipeline
Chromaform’s rendering is a stack of stages — RAW decode, color, exposure, the film curve, local contrast, grading, grain, and the rest — and that stack is no longer hidden. The new pipeline panel shows the full processing chain as a list, including the Core Image post-processes and the Magic Eraser, and lets you toggle any stage on or off. It’s useful for understanding what a given look is actually made of, and for isolating a single stage when you want to see its contribution on its own. By default it shows only the stages you’ve actually engaged, so it stays readable.
Recolor Clothing
There’s also a new recolor tool aimed at garments. Chromaform detects clothing in a portrait automatically, you tap the piece you want to change, and a focus-color dropper lets you target a specific shade. The recolor works in perceptual color space so that folds, shadows, and fabric texture survive the change instead of flattening into a paint fill, and there are paint-in/out brushes to refine the selection by hand.
A Reorganized Editor
As the feature set grew, the editing panel got crowded, so we rebuilt its structure. The adjustments are now grouped into focused tools — Light, Color, Effects, Detail, and a Tone Lab for the curve work — laid out in the order you’d actually use them, from crop and optics through to finishing. Auto Adjust moved up to the top bar, one tap away. Nothing was removed; everything just has a clearer home.
And the Rest
A few smaller things that landed along the way: you can now bring images and recipes into Chromaform straight from the Files app and the share sheet; library thumbnails render through the real Vulkan pipeline so the previews match what you’ll see in the editor; and the full-screen preview supports pinch-zoom and pan.
To the beta testers who pushed all of this and told us where it broke: thank you. The public beta has now closed — if you were part of it, write to us and we’ll send you a free perpetual license.
Chromaform is on the App Store now. There’s more coming.