Skip to main content
Vixlo 0.1

Before/after, and the whole screen

Two ways of looking at a take that do not change it: a split against the original, and the photograph alone on the whole screen.

Before and after​

Press \, or Before / after at the right of the top panel. The photograph splits along a hairline: the untouched original on one side, your edit on the other. Drag the divider to compare any part of the frame live. While the split is on, the button reads Editing; press it again, or \, to go back.

The canvas split by the before/after divider, with the untouched original on the left

"Before" is the photograph with no develop settings at all, not merely the base film simulation stripped off. For a JPEG, HEIC or TIFF file it is drawn the same way as "after", so the split compares your edits and nothing else.

A RAW file is different. Its "before" is the camera's own JPEG, the picture on the back of the camera, while its "after", as soon as the take carries any setting, is Vixlo's own decode of the sensor data with your edits on top. On a RAW take the two halves therefore differ by the decode as well as by your edits (The RAW stage says why).

Whatever the file, the focus mask and the clipping warnings are drawn over the edited half only.

tip

The Versions section (in the Changes tab) has its own Compare, which sets a saved version beside the frame as it is now. That answers a different question: not what did I do to this photograph but which of my two treatments do I prefer.

The take on the whole screen​

Press Space, or choose View ▸ Full Screen. The take on the canvas fills the screen, with no menu bar and no window edge, opening on the photograph you were editing. Two small lines are all that is drawn over it. At the bottom-right is where you are among your takes, such as 12 / 143. At the bottom-left are the file name, the take's state and the way back, for example DSCF7601.JPG · take · Space or Escape returns. That line shows when you move the pointer and fades a few seconds after you stop, and the pointer goes with it, so at rest the screen is the photograph.

A take filling the whole screen, opened from the edit page

Inside it:

  • ← and → step through your takes.
  • T, H, R and U decide. A decision made here is the cull's own and is about the one photograph on the screen, even when the cull was last left on Compare: it puts the cull's cursor on that frame and, with auto-advance on, moves it to the next one, and it is taken back there, where ⌘Z undoes the most recent decision. A frame you mark Hold, Reject or Undecided is no longer a take, so it is gone from the strip when you come back.
  • ⌘-scroll and a pinch zoom the picture about the pointer, and a drag moves it once it is larger than the screen. A double-click zooms in on the spot you clicked; another double-click goes back to the whole photograph.
  • Space or Esc leaves, and so does a single click anywhere on the screen.

You land back on the edit page on the frame you left the full screen on, not the one you opened it from.

The full screen opens over your takes, not over the whole pass; the cull page's Space is the same window over the pass (Full screen).