Compose

Compose (E) is albedo’s layered editor, for the work that comes after Develop: retouching, compositing, exposure blending and type. It runs on the GPU and keeps every layer at 8, 16 or 32 bits per channel. Nothing leaves your machine, and nothing is metered.

Starting a document

• From Develop, ⌘⇧E (or Edit in Compose under Export) opens the photo as a smart object carrying its edit.
  • The RAW stays inside, so you can change its development at any time.
  • It opens instantly: Compose uses the image Develop already has on the GPU.
• From the Library, the start screen offers to open the selected photo as a smart object.
• A new document takes a size, a depth (8, 16 or 32-bit) and a background.
• Opening a file works for JPEG, PNG and TIFF (including Photoshop’s layered TIFF and multi-page TIFF), PSD and .albedo files. You can also drop one onto Compose.
• Dropping an image onto an open document places it as a new layer.

Documents save themselves into the browser’s storage as you work (⌘S saves at once). The start screen lists them.

Image › Mode changes a document’s depth at any time: 8 bits, 16 bits (half float) or 32 bits (float, in linear light, like Photoshop’s 32-bit mode).

Layers

The Layers panel shows the stack, top first.

• Blend mode sits above the stack. All of Photoshop’s 27 modes are there, and groups add Pass Through.
• Opacity and Fill. Drag the label to scrub, or type a value. Number keys set opacity: 1 is 10% and 0 is 100%.
• Reorder by dragging a row. Drop onto the middle of a group to move a layer into it.
• Clip a layer to the one below with ⌥-click between them, or ⌥⌘G.
• Hide with the eye; double-click a name to rename it.
• The buttons along the bottom add a style, a mask, an adjustment, a group or a layer, and delete.

Masks. Every layer and group can have a mask: white shows the layer, black hides it. Add one with the mask button; ⌥-click it to start from Hide All. With a selection active, the new mask starts from that selection. Paint on the mask with the brush by switching the brush to Mask, or press \. The Mask section of Properties sets density and inverts. Refine edge fits the mask’s edge to the image, and Select loads the mask as a selection.

Blend If. Properties holds Photoshop’s Blend If for any layer. Fade a layer by its own brightness, or by the brightness of what is below. This is a luminosity mask that never goes stale: it follows the layers under it as they change.

Layer styles (the fx button) add a drop shadow, a stroke (outside, centre or inside) and an outer glow.

Smart objects and Develop

Select a smart object and choose Edit in Develop in Properties.

• Develop opens the photo with that layer’s edit and shows a Back to Compose bar.
• Every change re-develops the layer in the document.
• Nothing is exported or saved in between.
• The catalog’s own edit of the photo is left alone. The smart object keeps its own copy, so the same photo can sit in a document twice with two different developments.

A Develop adjustment layer shows Develop’s own panels in Properties: Tone, WB, Curve, Color, B&W, Mixer, Grading, Effects, Detail. They apply to everything below the layer, through its mask and blend mode, and can be changed at any time. Use it to grade a whole composite, or to clip a white balance correction to one layer.

Selections

How a selection combines with the existing one:

• ⇧ adds to the selection;
• ⌥ subtracts from it;
• ⇧⌥ intersects with it;
• the mode buttons in the options bar do the same.

The Select menu holds All (⌘A), Deselect (⌘D), Reselect, Inverse (⇧⌘I), Color Range, and the modifiers: expand, contract, feather, smooth, border.

Refine edge fits a selection’s edge to the image with a guided filter. It is made for hair and fur: the soft band along the edge follows the strands, and the rest stays crisp. AI select refines its result this way by default.

Retouching

Clone and heal sample the current layer, the current layer and those below it, or all layers. Use Current & below on an empty layer to keep your retouching apart from the photo. Aligned keeps the offset from one stroke to the next.

Content-aware fill (Edit menu) fills the selection from its surroundings, on a new layer. It uses MI-GAN, a 28 MB model that runs on your GPU in a fraction of a second. There are no credits and no content filter. It continues what is around the hole and does not invent new things; Resource limits explains why there is no prompted generative fill.

Frequency separation (Filter menu) splits the active layer into a Low frequency layer (colour and tone) and a High frequency layer (texture, in Linear Light), grouped. Together they recombine to the original exactly in 16 and 32-bit documents. Retouch tone on Low with a soft brush or the healing brush, and texture on High with the clone stamp.

Painting

The brush (B) and eraser (E) have:

• size [ ], hardness ⇧[ ⇧], opacity (the number keys) and flow;
• spacing and smoothing;
• pen pressure, which can control size, opacity or flow.

Opacity caps a stroke and flow builds up within it, as in Photoshop. A stroke stays inside the active selection.

Gradient (G) drags out a gradient fill layer from the foreground colour to transparent. On a gradient fill layer, the drag moves its gradient instead.

X swaps the foreground and background colours, D resets them to white and black, and the eyedropper (I) picks a colour from the image.

Transform and liquify

Free transform (⌘T) has three modes:

• Free. Drag inside to move, outside to rotate, and a handle to scale. It keeps the proportions unless you hold ⇧.
• Distort. Drag the four corners, for perspective.
• Warp. Drag the points of a 4×4 grid.

⏎ applies and Esc cancels. Transforms never resample the layer: scale it down and back up and it is as sharp as before. The pixels are re-rendered only when you paint on a transformed layer.

Liquify (Q) pushes, bloats, puckers, twirls, smooths and reconstructs the active layer. It works on pixel layers, smart objects and type. It stays editable: Reconstruct paints the original back, and Restore all removes the liquify entirely.

Crop (C) drags a new frame; ⏎ applies it. Layers keep the pixels outside the frame.

Type

Click with the type tool (T) to type, or drag a box for text that wraps. Click a type layer to edit it.

• Shaping. Type is shaped by HarfBuzz, the engine browsers and Photoshop use. Arabic and other complex scripts join correctly with no setting to change. Lines that mix right-to-left and left-to-right text follow the Unicode bidirectional rules.
• Fonts. IBM Plex Sans and IBM Plex Sans Arabic are built in. Add any TTF, OTF or WOFF file, or, in Chrome and Edge, use your installed fonts. A run that the chosen font cannot show falls back to a font that can.
• Settings in Properties: size, weight, tracking, leading, box width, colour, alignment, direction, and the font’s own kerning and ligatures.

Shapes (U) draw rectangles (with rounded corners), ellipses, polygons and stars, and lines. Each has a fill and a stroke, and stays editable.

Export

Export (in the status bar, or the Image menu):

When albedo opens a PSD, it reads its pixel layers, groups, masks, modes, clipping, Blend If and the common adjustment layers. Anything it cannot keep live arrives as the pixels Photoshop saved.

Speed

Compose draws at the resolution of your screen, not the document’s: on the reference machine a 50-layer, 24 MP document redraws in about 7 ms. While you paint or drag a slider, everything below that layer is drawn once and reused. Panning and zooming show the last drawing again, moved or scaled, and draw afresh once you stop. Measured times are in Benchmarks.