Where the tools are
The top panel, the develop panel's six tabs, and what every section header can do before you touch a slider.
Asking for an adjustment
The field under the panel's header on the Tone tab — type a sentence, read the proposed slider moves on a card, and apply or discard them.
Tone: histogram, exposure and clarity
The Tone tab's first four sections — reading the histogram, then Exposure, High dynamic range and Clarity.
The tone curve and Levels
The Tone tab's last section — a four-channel curve you drag by hand, or the same response as three Levels numbers.
Colour: white balance, saturation and the colour editor
The Colour tab's first three sections — the eyedropper and presets, Saturation and Vibrance, and the eight colour bands with sampled colours.
Colour grading, black and white and the Look
The Colour tab's last three sections — the four colour wheels, the black-and-white mix with its tint, and saving or matching a look.
Detail: sharpening, noise reduction and film grain
The Detail tab's three sections — sharpening and noise reduction, which want a close look, and the grain that is added last so it survives them.
Lens: corrections, vignetting and perspective
The Lens tab's three sections — undoing what the glass did, a creative vignette after the crop, and squaring converging lines by sliders or guides.
Local: masks
The Local tab — five kinds of mask to start from, what each drag does on the canvas, and the eight sliders and range that belong to the mask you select.
Adjusting inside a mask
The rest of the Local tab — the list of masks on the frame, the eight sliders that belong to the one you select, narrowing a mask by tone or colour, and scoping the global sliders to the subject.
Changes, Versions and History
The sixth tab, where the work is read back — every adjustment as one removable line, named snapshots to return to, and a timeline of what you did.
Crop, straighten, rotate and flip
The top panel's first five tools — framing the photograph, levelling it, turning it a quarter at a time and mirroring it.
Spot clean, Find distractions and the AI lasso
Taking things out of the frame — a rectangle or ellipse filled from its surroundings or cloned from a source, up to four proposed spots at once, and a freehand loop that can follow the subject's edge.
Zoom rungs and viewing aids
The top panel's middle group — the whole frame, 100% and 200%, and the three overlays that help you judge a frame without changing a pixel of it.
The RAW stage
What is different about developing a RAW file — three sliders go to the decoder, the camera JPEG stands in until you develop, and what happens when your Mac cannot decode the file.