Basic

Basic is the first section of the Adjustments panel and the one you will use on almost every photo. It sets the overall brightness and contrast, and recovers detail in bright and dark areas.

Open the Adjustments panel with D.

The Adjustments panel header

The header of the panel has three buttons:

Button	What it does
Auto Adjust Image (magic wand)	Sets Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks, Vibrance, Clarity, Dehaze, Centré and Vignette for a balanced starting point. Right-click to choose Subtle, Normal or Strong. White balance and curves stay as they are.
Toggle Analytics Display (chart)	Shows the histogram, waveform or vectorscope above the sliders. See Editor View → Image analytics.
Reset Adjustments	Resets every adjustment on this photo.

Auto Adjust in the header works on the open photo. To auto-adjust many photos at once, select them in the library, right-click and choose Productivity → Auto Adjust.

Working with sliders

These work on every slider in RapidRAW:

Click the number to type an exact value.
Double-click the slider track, or click the slider's name, to reset it.
Hold Shift or Alt while dragging for fine control (5x slower).
Hold Shift and use the mouse wheel over a slider to step it.

Each section header also has an eye icon that turns the whole section off, which is handy to see what a section is doing. Right-click a section header for Copy, Paste and Reset of just that section, and Customize Panels to hide or reorder tools.

Tone Mapper and Exposure

Control	What it does
Tone Mapper	Decides how the very wide brightness range of a RAW file is squeezed into what your screen can show. Basic or AgX. Click the "Tone Mapper" label to reset both the tone mapper and Exposure.
Exposure	Makes the whole image brighter or darker in linear light, like changing exposure on the camera. Range −5 to +5. Each +1.00 is a bit more than one stop (about 1.25 EV).

Basic (the default) is a neutral curve. It gives you a look close to what most cameras and editors produce, but very bright areas clip to white quite abruptly.

AgX handles around 20 stops of dynamic range and rolls bright areas off smoothly into white, the way film does. Skies near the sun, stage lights and neon keep their color instead of turning into flat white or yellow. AgX images look a little flatter at first, so you will often add some Contrast.

When to pick which:

Basic: normal daylight scenes, when you want to match other software, product photos.
AgX: sunsets, night scenes, concerts, backlit portraits, any scene with very bright light sources.

If you always want the same tone mapper, set it once in Settings → Global Tonemapper Override. The switch then disappears from this panel.

New to this? What's a "stop"?

A stop doubles or halves the light. +1 stop is twice as bright, −1 stop half as bright. It is the same unit your camera uses for exposure compensation. Exposure in RapidRAW is a little stronger than one stop per 1.00, so use small steps (0.1 to 0.3) for fine-tuning.

Tonal sliders

All of these go from −100 to +100.

Slider	What it does
Contrast	Makes darks darker and lights lighter around the middle grey (positive), or flattens the image (negative).
Highlights	Works on the bright parts. Negative pulls bright areas down and brings back texture in skies and skin. In blown-out areas it also removes color casts so they fade to clean white. Positive brightens the bright parts.
Shadows	Works on the dark parts. Positive opens up shadows to show detail, negative deepens them.
Whites	Moves the top end of the tonal range. Positive makes the brightest tones brighter and adds sparkle. Negative compresses them, which helps with nearly clipped areas.
Blacks	Moves the very bottom of the tonal range. Negative gives deep, rich blacks. Positive lifts crushed blacks.
Brightness	Brightens or darkens the midtones after the tone mapper, while keeping pure black and pure white in place. Range −5 to +5.

Highlights, Shadows, Whites and Blacks are edge-aware: they look at the surrounding area, so they recover local detail without the grey halos you get from simple tone curves.

Which tones each slider changes

Each slider works on its own part of the histogram. Read the chart below from left (black) to right (white): where a curve is high, that slider has its strongest effect.

Chart of where Blacks, Shadows, Brightness, Highlights and Whites act across the histogram, when raising and when lowering each slider. Blacks peaks near black, Shadows around a quarter, Brightness in the middle, Highlights around three quarters and Whites near white — Blacks works closest to black, then Shadows, Brightness in the middle, Highlights, and Whites closest to white. The numbers at the bottom show how far the slider can move a tone at most (in 8-bit levels, 0 to 255).

A few things the chart shows:

Blacks and Whites are the gentlest sliders and work closest to the ends of the histogram. On a photo without very dark or very bright areas, even a large value can look like it does little. Use Shadows and Highlights to change larger areas.
Lowering Highlights is stronger than raising it, and has its biggest effect on the very brightest tones. That's what pulls bright skies back.
Brightness moves the whole middle of the histogram but never moves pure black or pure white.

Exposure and Contrast work on every tone at once, so they're not in the chart above. Here are all seven sliders as tone curves, like in the Curves panel:

Seven small tone curves, one per Basic slider, each at −100, −50, +50 and +100: Exposure scales everything, Contrast is an S-curve, Highlights bends the upper half, Shadows and Blacks the lower part, Whites the top end and Brightness bows the middle while keeping black and white fixed — Each slider at four settings (Exposure and Brightness at −1.0, −0.5, +0.5 and +1.0). Across is the tone before, up is the tone after. Where a curve leaves the dashed line, that slider changes those tones. Contrast is the only one that darkens and brightens at the same time.

These charts are for a RAW file with the Basic tone mapper, on an even area without texture. The technical reference has the exact formulas.

Exposure vs. Brightness

Exposure works on the raw light data before the tone mapper. It is the right tool to fix an under- or overexposed shot, and the only one that can really pull detail back from very bright areas in a RAW file.
Brightness works after the tone mapper. It makes the image look lighter or darker without pushing anything into clipping. Use it for the final "feel".

Example: a photo of a dark forest is underexposed by about one stop. Raise Exposure to +0.8 so the data is in the right place, then use Brightness −0.2 if the result feels too airy.

Highlights and Shadows vs. Whites and Blacks

Highlights and Shadows work on broad areas of the image. Whites and Blacks work on the extremes. A good habit:

Set Exposure so the midtones (skin, grass, walls) look right.
Use Highlights and Shadows to recover detail at the bright and dark ends.
Use Whites and Blacks to set the final end points. Turn on the clipping warnings in the analytics display and stop just before red or blue patches appear.
Add Contrast back if the image now looks flat.
Fine-tune the feel with Brightness.

Example values

Situation	Values to start from
Normal RAW, a bit flat	Contrast +15, Highlights −20, Shadows +20, Whites +10, Blacks −10
Bright sky, dark ground	Exposure +0.3, Highlights −60, Shadows +45, Whites −15, Blacks +5
Moody, low-key	Exposure −0.3, Shadows −20, Blacks −25, Contrast +20
Bright and airy	Exposure +0.4, Highlights −30, Shadows +30, Blacks +15, Contrast −10

Highlight recovery happens automatically

When a RAW file has clipped color channels (for example a bright sky where the blue channel is clipped but red and green are not), RapidRAW reconstructs the missing information while decoding the file. You don't need a slider for this. Pulling Exposure or Highlights down then reveals the recovered detail.

If an area is clipped in all channels, there is no information left. RapidRAW can make it grey instead of white, but cannot invent texture.

In masks

Inside a mask, Basic has Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks and Brightness. The tone mapper is always global.