Crop & Geometry

The Crop panel handles every geometry-related edit: cropping, rotation, straightening, flipping, perspective correction, and lens-distortion fixes.

Open it with R. The current crop overlay appears on the canvas with the active aspect ratio.

Aspect ratio presets

Preset	Aspect ratio	Typical use
Free	any	No constraint — drag the crop handles freely.
Original	image's native ratio	Keep the original camera aspect ratio.
1:1	1.000	Square — Instagram, profile pictures.
5:4	1.250	Instagram landscape, 8×10 prints.
4:3	1.333	Traditional monitors, tablets, micro-four-thirds cameras.
3:2	1.500	35mm film, most DSLRs and mirrorless.
16:9	1.778	Widescreen, desktop wallpapers, YouTube thumbnails.
21:9	2.333	Ultrawide monitors, cinematic.
65:24	2.708	Panoramic 35mm wide format.

Click a preset to lock the crop to that ratio. Click again to swap the orientation between landscape and portrait. Click Free to release the lock.

You can also enter custom dimensions in the W and H boxes for a one-off ratio.

Rotation and straightening

Control	What it does
Rotation slider	Continuous freeform rotation, in degrees. Reset by double-clicking.
Straighten tool (`S`)	Click and drag a line along something that should be horizontal or vertical (e.g. the horizon, a building edge). RapidRAW rotates the image so that line becomes straight.
Rotate −90° (`[`)	Snaps the image counter-clockwise by 90°.
Rotate +90° (`]`)	Snaps the image clockwise by 90°.
Flip Horizontal	Mirrors left/right.
Flip Vertical	Mirrors top/bottom.

90° rotations are stored as a separate "orientation steps" counter (so they're lossless), independent of the freeform rotation slider.

Composition overlays

Visual guides drawn over the crop area to help you compose. They don't affect the image, they're purely visual aids.

None
Thirds, Rule of Thirds 3×3 grid.
Diagonal Lines
Triangle, Golden Triangle.
Spiral, Golden Spiral (Fibonacci).
Phi Grid, Golden ratio grid.
Armature, Classical harmonic division.

Action	Shortcut
Cycle through overlays	`O`
Rotate the overlay 90°	`Shift+O`

The overlay rotation is most useful for the Golden Spiral, which has a direction.

Perspective transform

Click the Transform button to open the Transform panel. Eight sliders give you full control over the image geometry:

Slider	Range	What it does
Distortion	−100 to +100	Barrel (negative) or pincushion (positive) distortion.
Vertical	−100 to +100	Tilt the image forward or backward — corrects converging verticals (e.g. tall buildings).
Horizontal	−100 to +100	Tilt left or right — corrects horizontal perspective.
Rotate	−100 to +100	Additional rotation on top of the main rotation slider.
Aspect	−100 to +100	Stretch the aspect ratio (positive = wider, negative = taller).
Scale	−100 to +100	Scale the image up or down within the frame.
X Offset	−100 to +100	Shift horizontally inside the crop.
Y Offset	−100 to +100	Shift vertically inside the crop.

For architecture and interiors, Vertical is the slider you'll reach for most often, pull it negative to fix the "falling backward" look of a building photographed from below.

Lens correction

Click the Lens Correction button. RapidRAW reads the EXIF data of your file to find your lens automatically and applies the matching correction profile from the embedded Lensfun database (open-source, community-maintained).

Toggle	What it corrects
Distortion	Removes barrel/pincushion warp baked into the lens.
Vignette	Removes optical vignetting (corner darkening).
TCA	Transverse Chromatic Aberration — color fringing toward the edges.

You can also override the auto-detected lens by typing the maker and model. Each correction has an Amount slider so you can dial it back if the full correction is too strong.

If your lens is not in the Lensfun database, the toggles do nothing. Use the manual sliders in Detail → Chromatic Aberration instead.

New to this? Why not just shoot it level?