Understanding non-destructive editing
Before diving deeper into how to use the software, we should stop here to explain its general paradigm : non-destructive editing.
Once you imported images to Ansel, what you really did is only to create an entry for them into the library database. The modifications you make on these images are never written to the original images, which are actually never changed. This is a strong design requirement aiming at protecting your input RAW images from any kind of corruption.1 Ansel will not even let users change the EXIF date and time in the original files.
Instead, Ansel writes your image-processing and metadata changes to its library database, and possibly duplicates them to sidecar XMP files. These changes are stored as a list of the modules used and the parameters defined for each module. Said otherwise, a non-destructive editing is stored only as an history stack of changes, which represents the recipe for building the final image.
Note
For some non-destructive RAW editors, an editing is only a snapshot of the parameters set in all the image-processing filters ( modules) used, so you have one entry per filter/module. Ansel keeps the whole history as long as you don’t compress it (using global menu → Edit → Compress history), so you can have many entries per filter/module, one entry per user change.To actually build the final image, you will need to export it to a target file on a target filesystem : this will apply the history stack to the original, input RAW, to create a final file that can be opened in any image viewer.
There are many benefits to working in a non-destructive fashion :
- the input image stays as safe as possible,
- you can apply the same history stack to many images (through copy-pasting or creating styles), therefore editing in batch,
- you can go back at any point in your history and revert selective changes (same as Ctrl+Z, but persisting between reboots), even in some years,
- you can start from an existing history, duplicate it, and work on a variant while keeping the original untouched,
- you can share your histories (as XMP files or as styles) with other users.
Because we keep all those history steps, they are automatically saved once applied. You will find no “save” button in Ansel. Here is the summary of the workflow in Ansel:
| Step | Action from user perspective | Action from software perspective |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Import images | Select input images from the filesystem | Create virgin entries for images in the database |
| 2. Edit images | Apply corrections to an image | Add editing history entries for this image into the database |
| 3. Export images | Build a final JPG/TIFF/etc. image | Run a pixel pipeline applying the history onto the input image |
Editing, retouching, correcting your image
After import, the series of images you imported will be opened in the lighttable view, as a grid of thumbnails. You only have to double-click on any image you want to edit, which will then open the darkroom. This view will provide you with image processing modules allowing to apply changes and correction to the appearance of your image.
Except the natural aging of your storage media that may lead to randomly-corrupted bits in the future. ↩︎