monokr

Folders

Project

No folder is open

Filters

Order

Open a folder to see your photos.

Open a DNG file to develop it.

Histogram

Presets A preset is a set of settings that you saved and gave a name. There is no profile or baseline curve below a preset. A photo opens with the values from the sensor. monokr does nothing to the photo that the controls below do not show. The menu shows Custom when the photo is not exactly one preset. Set as default applies a preset to every photo you have not edited, in every folder you open. It is still not a baseline: the settings are written into the photo, the controls below show them, and undo takes them back.

Exposure This control multiplies the light before all the other steps. The result is the same as more light or less light on the sensor. The unit is stops, because the camera meters the light in stops.

Highlight recovery Above the threshold, the signal bends towards white. It does not go to white. Blown highlights keep their separation. At 100, no part of the photo is pure white.

Tone curve The zone sliders and the spline make one curve together. One does not replace the other. On the Curve tab, click to add a point. Drag a point to move it. Double click a point to remove it.

Local contrast This control divides the photo into three scales: texture, shapes, and the large tonal masses. You can lift or flatten each scale. Each scale holds different detail, so a change to one scale does not move the others. A negative value flattens the scale. Use a negative value on a subject that has too much contrast. Coarse shows halos first, because it changes whole areas. Look at the whole photo, not at 1:1.

Local adaptation This control lifts the dark areas and pulls the bright areas down. It uses the brightness around a pixel, not the pixel itself. A face in shadow becomes brighter, but a dark line on a bright wall stays dark. The Shadows and Highlights on the tone curve are different. They move every pixel of a tone, wherever it is. This control keeps the texture in an area while the area moves.

Dodge & burn A layer applies exposure to a band of zones. The region shape is the one that is not a figure: click a tone in the photo and it takes the connected part of the picture around your click that is close to that tone. Tolerance says how close, in zones. Use it to take one sky, or one face, without taking every tone like it in the frame. A positive value makes the band brighter. A negative value makes it darker. The zones are the ones in the readout when you point at the photo. Turn on the zone view in the toolbar to see where they are. Feather makes the outer edges of the band soft. The zones that you selected stay fully selected. A shape makes the band smaller, but it does not replace the band. You get the area where the two agree. Thus you can paint on a face and let the zones keep the burn off the catchlights. Flow is a maximum, not a build-up. If you paint on the same place again, it does not become darker.

Nothing dodged or burned. Add a layer to work on one band of tones at a time.

Vignetting This gain increases from the middle of the frame to the corners. Every lens makes the corners darker, and this control corrects it. A positive value makes the corners brighter. A negative value makes them darker, which is a look. The midpoint is where the gain starts, as a fraction of the distance to the corner. A high midpoint touches only the corners. A low midpoint reaches most of the frame.

Lens distortion This control straightens the lines that a lens has bent. A positive value pulls the corners in and corrects barrel distortion. A negative value pushes them out and corrects pincushion distortion. Use small values. A 28 mm lens needs a few percent at most. monokr makes the photo a little larger to keep the corners full. This is the cost of the correction.

Straighten This control turns the photo in the frame, for a horizon that is not level. monokr makes the photo just large enough to keep the corners full. Thus there are no empty corners to crop. Every rotation has this cost.

Crop While you crop, monokr shows the whole frame. Thus you can see what you remove. Drag inside the box to move it. Drag a handle to change its size. Drag outside the box to start again.

Denoise This blur averages only the neighbours that are near a pixel in tone. Flat areas become smooth and edges stay sharp. Detail sets how different a neighbour can be and still count as noise. A low value smooths hard and makes edges soft. A high value removes only the finest speckle. There is no colour noise here, because a mono sensor makes none.

Sharpening This control puts back the sharpness that the sensor and the lens removed. The radius is in full-size pixels, so monokr scales what you see to match the export. A small radius shows less at fit than in the file. Look at it at 1:1. There is one sharpening here, not two: a resized export is softer than the full-size one, and that is left as it is rather than answered with a second control. A small radius lifts the finest detail. A large one is a wider halo and reads as local contrast, which is a different thing from the Local contrast module below: that one works at 60 pixels and up, and this reaches 10.

Spot removal This control covers dust and marks. It copies from another part of the frame. Click Place, then click a spot. Drag instead of click to select where the patch comes from. If you click, monokr selects a neighbour for you. Drag a spot to move it. Drag its dashed twin to move where the patch comes from. Click a spot to work on it, and it becomes brighter. Then click Remove, or push Delete. Right click a spot to remove it where it is. Clear removes all the spots. Size, softness and heal set the next spot, and change the last spot that you touched. Heal matches the patch to the brightness around it, so the patch disappears into an uneven background. Clone copies the light exactly, which is better across a hard edge. monokr takes the patch before all the other steps, so it develops with the rest of the photo.

Grain This is the silver in the emulsion. It is in the negative, so monokr makes it larger and smaller with the photo. One setting gives you the same grain at every export size. Density sets how many grains there are in each pixel of the full-size photo. At 65 there is one, which is the camera. Below that the grains separate and you start to see them one by one, like a fast film. Above it they get smaller and there are more of them, like a slow one, and at 100 there are five to a pixel. Roughness sets how sharp the grain is. At 0 it is soft. At 100 it is crisp, and the grains are separate and easy to see. Roughness and Density do not change the strength. Response sets how closely the grain follows the tones. At 100 it follows the camera, which puts less grain in the deep shadows and in the bright highlights. At 0 the grain is the same everywhere. A small export shows finer grain, like a small print, so lower the Density if you export small and want to see it. Density 65, Roughness 50 and Response 100 give the grain of a GR IV, and Amount 100 gives its strength.

Halation This is light that went through the emulsion, reflected off the back of the film, and came up again a short distance away. A bright edge gets a soft glow of its own light. Threshold sets how bright a tone must be before it scatters. Radius sets how far the light travels, as a percentage of the long edge. Strength sets how much light comes back. monokr adds it as light, not as density, so it can push a highlight past white.

Toning Select a hue for the shadows and a hue for the highlights. Each hue has its own strength. The balance sets where the two meet. The tint has no brightness of its own, so nothing above it moves. The histogram and the zone readout describe the same photo. This is the only colour that goes into an exported file.

Frame This is a border around the photo, like the paper of a darkroom print. The margin is a percentage of the long edge of the photo, so the same value looks the same at every export size. The file becomes larger by the margin. The photo does not become smaller, and Size still sets the photo. A shape makes the file that shape by adding more border on two sides. It never crops or moves the photo. The margin stays the smallest border on any side, and Across and Down place the photo in what is left. The colour is exact, because nothing above it applies to it. White stays white whatever the grain and the toning do to the photo. A colour that is not a grey makes the exported file a colour file, like toning does.

Export

Info