The controls

Develop’s sidebar groups adjustments by purpose and shows only controls supported by the current photograph.

Group	Controls
White balance	Temperature and tint; Kelvin and tint for RAW, relative ±1 for other files
Tone	Exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites and blacks
Colour	Vibrance and saturation
Presence	Clarity, texture and dehaze
Effects	Vignette, halation and grain
Lens	Profile amount, manual distortion and chromatic aberration
Detail, RAW only	Supported sharpness, detail, noise reduction, moiré, lens correction, highlight recovery, local tone mapping and HDR controls

Detail’s Lens correction and Highlight recovery are switches. Detail’s lens correction uses correction data supported by the decoder; the separate Lens group uses Frames’ profiles.

Auto tone. Click the wand in Tone’s header to apply the last option chosen from its dropdown; Balanced tone is the initial default. The choice is remembered across photographs and app launches, with a checkmark beside it in the dropdown. The wand’s dropdown offers Normal exposure (brightness correction with the other Tone sliders reset to zero), Balanced tone (full tonal range), and Editing base (headroom for curve work). Every option keeps the current curves. ⌥-click produces a flatter result for curve editing, with less movement of the overall brightness and no added contrast. This shortcut leaves the remembered dropdown choice unchanged.

Auto tone measures the cropped photograph without Background’s Tone and curve, then sets exposure, blacks, shadows, whites, highlights and contrast. It accounts for the existing curve without changing it. If a subject is detected, subject brightness guides the exposure while the whole photograph guides the endpoints. Night scenes and bright scenes retain much of their original placement.

All six values change in one undo step. Auto tone is available for Background after measurement finishes, with no other canvas tool active. It is unavailable on layers. The looks sidebar’s Auto tone first switch runs Balanced tone ahead of a look click, independently of the wand’s remembered choice.

Fold and resize. Click a group title to fold it. RESET and bypass remain accessible. REPAIRS and LAYERS fold too, retaining counts and header controls. Activating repairs, find-dust or a mask tool, or adding a layer, opens the relevant section. Folding it again keeps it closed even while the tool remains active. Group state and sidebar width persist across photographs and sessions.

HDR. RAW files with an HDR gain map have a Detail slider from 0 to 1, applying headroom between 1 and 4. It defaults to 0.00 and makes no change until adjusted. Some Apple DNGs support it; Leica DNGs, Canon CR2s and files without a gain map do not. HEIC and JPEG have no Detail group. HDR cannot be masked. Use J to check highlight clipping as you adjust it.

Rendering. RAW white balance and Detail changes require a new RAW decode. The decoder stays open during dragging and keeps full-quality output. Other adjustments use the cached decode. Supported Detail controls are checked for the file and selected decoder version; RAW 9 provides fewer controls.

See Presence and effects, Lens corrections, How a RAW file becomes a picture.