Undo changes and save edits

DarkRay saves your edits for you and never touches the original file. You can step back through the changes you made as far as 100 steps.

Undo and redo

Choose Image › Undo (Ctrl+Z by default) to take back the last change. Image › Redo (Ctrl+Y or Ctrl+Shift+Z) brings it back.

One gesture is one step. A whole slider drag, a typed value, a picked profile or look, a white balance pick, a preset and a section Reset each take one undo.

If you press Undo while you are in the middle of dragging a crop, a vignette center, a handle or a white balance rectangle, it cancels that drag first.

Copy, paste or reset all edits

Image › Copy Edits (Ctrl+Shift+C), Paste Edits (Ctrl+Shift+V) and Reset Edits (Ctrl+Shift+R) work on the whole photo. Paste keeps the target photo’s as-shot white balance. They are covered with the other effects and presets.

Know when edits are saved

Edits are saved in your catalog half a second after your last change. They are also saved when you switch photos or catalogs and when you quit. If a save fails, DarkRay logs it in the Console and tries again.

A photo counts as Edited once it has saved edits. A photo you opened and left as it came, including one that only started with its camera’s default profile (see Choose a profile), is not marked Edited. Filter by it with the Edited chip in Rate and label photos.

The thumbnail in the grid is refreshed once the picture has settled after your last change.

Technical details: what is stored

The catalog keeps a recipe for each edited photo: the values of every control, your layers and masks, and the document version. It is a list of settings, not pixels, so it is small and the photo is re-rendered from the original each time you open it.

A recipe written by a newer DarkRay than the one you are running opens as an unedited, read-only photo, and DarkRay never writes over it.