Editing

Editing in Frameleaf never changes your original file. Every edit is saved as a new version, and you can go back to the original at any time. Downloads give you the edited version by default, with the original one option away.

Open the editor

• Open a photo or video and choose Edit in the viewer.
• Or select some photos and choose Quick edit in the selection bar.

Your unsaved edits are kept if you leave the editor and come back. If the item was changed in the meantime, they aren’t reapplied, and the editor tells you why.

Photo tools

The web editor has four tools down its side:

Tool	What it does
Adjust	Sliders in four groups. Light: Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks. Color: Temperature, Tint, Vibrance, Saturation. Effects: Clarity, Dehaze, Vignette, Grain. Detail: Sharpen, Noise reduction
Crop	Crop and straighten, rotate left or right, and choose an aspect: Free, Original, Square or a social format
Enhance	Restore and upscale an old or damaged photo
Presets	Looks such as Natural, Vivid, Warm, Cool, B&W, Mono, Noir, Silvertone and Fade, each with a strength, plus presets you save yourself

Masks opens from Adjust. Add a radial or linear mask to apply light and colour changes to part of the photo, or outside it when inverted, with feather and amount. Versions lists every saved version of the photo; see Versions.

A few helpers make editing quicker:

• Hold to show the original, or press \ or Y, to compare. Split view shows before and after side by side with a divider you can drag.
• Double-click a slider to reset it, or reset a whole group.
• Copy adjustments and Paste adjustments to carry your edit to other photos.
• A histogram shows the current preview, and warns when highlights or shadows are clipping.
• Social formats set the crop for a Feed, Portrait 4:5, Landscape, Vertical, Shorts 9:16 or Wide 16:9 post. Fine-tune the framing in Crop.

When you’re done, choose Save version. Your edit is saved as a new version and rendered from the original; the original is kept.

The iPhone and iPad and Android apps have their own editors, with Adjust, Looks, Crop, Clean Up and Masks. Edits made on any device are saved the same way, so they’re shared between them.

Presets

A preset keeps your light, colour, effects, detail, look and masks. Applying one never changes the crop.

• Save as preset from your current settings, and give it a name.
• Replace a preset with your current settings, or delete it. Versions you already saved with it keep their settings.
• Presets you make on one device are available on the others. A setting one device has no control for, such as Brilliance from the phone apps, still goes into the photo when you apply the preset there.

Versions

Every saved edit is kept as a version, with its edit recipe and its rendered files.

• Make current shows an older version again. Nothing is deleted.
• Revert makes the original current again.
• All versions and renders lists each version and whether it’s rendered, rendering, queued or failed.

Rendering happens on your server after you save. If a render fails, it’s retried automatically.

If an edit was saved by a newer app than your server understands, it’s kept as it is. You see “This recipe requires a newer renderer” and the current preview doesn’t change until the server is updated.

Edit in another app

You can develop a photo, such as a RAW file, in an app like darktable or Lightroom and bring the result back as a new version:

1. In the editor, open Edit in another app and choose Export original.
2. Develop it in your other app.
3. Choose Bring back as a version and pick the finished file: JPEG, TIFF, PNG, WebP or HEIF. You can note which app you used.

Frameleaf checks that the original hasn’t changed since you exported it, and shows the two side by side before you confirm. The original is never replaced, and the new version becomes current once its preview is ready.

Video tools

Open a video and choose Edit. The video editor opens on Trim.

Tool	What it does
Trim	Set the start and end. Press I or O to mark the playhead. A fast trim cuts at the video’s keyframes in seconds without re-encoding; if your other edits re-encode the clip anyway, the cut is frame-accurate
Enhance	Auto-enhance lifts contrast, colour and midtones a little across the whole clip. Stabilize smooths handheld shake, cropping the edges slightly to hide the correction
Speed	Change the playback rate, or slow down or speed up parts of the clip with speed ranges. Audio pitch is kept up to 2×
Text	Titles and captions over the video between a start and end time, with position, size, colour and shadow
Audio	Mute the clip or change its gain. Gain above 100% is limited to avoid clipping

Crop, rotate, straighten, mirror, colour and light adjustments and presets work on videos too. Export frame saves the frame at the playhead as a new photo.

The original sound channels are kept: stereo stays stereo and surround stays surround.

Choose Open in Studio to carry on in the full video editor, keeping your edit and undo history. See Studio.

Videos that can’t be edited

Some videos are refused before editing starts, and the original is kept as it is:

• Dolby Vision profile 5, profile 7, and profiles 3, 4, 9 and 10
• Dolby Vision profile 8 videos that don’t say what their base picture is
• videos with more than 12 bits per colour, or a picture format the server can’t read

Dolby Vision profile 8.1 and 8.4 videos can be edited: the edit keeps the HDR10 or HLG picture and drops the Dolby metadata.

How edits are stored

• The original is never written to. Every render reads from it.
• The edited master is always made fresh from the original and your edit recipe, so editing again never builds up quality loss. It’s the best-quality version of your edit, and it’s what downloads and exports give you. Download original gets the untouched file.
• Previews, thumbnails and streaming versions are smaller copies made from the master. They can be made again at any time.
• A small record next to each edited master names the original it came from, the original’s checksum, the exact edit and the version of the renderer. That’s how the server spots a master that’s out of date and makes it again.

Edited versions follow the privacy of their original straight away: if the original is Locked or has hidden people or tags, so does the edit.

Back up the thumbs folder

Edited versions, masks and Clean Up fills are stored in your server’s thumbs folder, and masks and fills made on a phone can’t be made again. Include it in your backups.

What an edited video keeps

The server’s video playback settings only apply to streaming copies. An edited video master isn’t limited by them:

• Resolution. It keeps the original’s resolution and uses a higher quality setting than playback copies.
• Timing. Frame timing is passed through, so a variable-frame-rate recording keeps its cadence.
• Audio. Channel layout is kept. An audio track the edit doesn’t touch is copied through unchanged.
• Colour. A 10-bit video stays 10-bit, and colour information is written explicitly.
• HDR. HDR is never silently converted. Editing an HDR video makes a standard-range version and keeps the HDR original as the reference.

A quarter or half turn doesn’t re-encode at all where the file allows it, so every frame and sound sample is kept exactly. If a video can’t be kept faithfully, the edit is refused before anything is written, and the original and any earlier edit are left untouched.

Video edits use your server’s hardware acceleration when it’s safe to, and fall back to the processor for edits that need it.

Restore and upscale

Restoration makes a separate, improved version of an old or damaged photo or video and never replaces the original. You see a 5-second preview first. It runs on a GPU computer at home, or on Cloud GPU if you choose it. Restoration is still in testing.

Studio

Studio in the web app is a multitrack video editor: build a film from your library, grade it, add titles, music and captions, and render it from the originals on your own server. See Studio.