Asking for an adjustment
Under the develop panel's header, on the Tone tab, sits a field that reads Ask for an adjustment…. Type a sentence — reflect more light, warmer, less contrast, on her — and Vixlo proposes a set of slider moves on a card. Nothing is applied until you press Apply. The proposal is a description, not a change.
Asking
- Type the sentence and press
↩, or the Ask button at the field's end; both do the same thing. - A card appears naming every slider it would move, in the panel's own grammar — Exposure +0.40 EV · Shadows +18 · on the subject — with one line of explanation under it.
- Press Apply to write exactly that, as a single adjustment: one write, one
⌘Zto take the whole card back out. Press Discard and the card goes away having touched nothing.
What it can and cannot do
It has one tool, and that tool moves the eight tonal sliders — Exposure through Vibrance. It cannot take, hold or reject a photograph; it cannot crop, straighten, rotate or spot-clean; it cannot change the film simulation or the look; it cannot export or open anything. A sentence asking for any of those comes back as That is not an adjustment.
Every number on the card is a change to what the frame already carries, not a new value: ask for +18 shadows on a frame already at +10 and you get +28. A move past where a slider ends is held at the slider's own stop, and the card shows the held number; it never promises a position a slider cannot take. If that leaves nothing to move, because every slider it named is already at its stop, there is no Apply: the card's heading is the same That is not an adjustment, and the line under it says why, Nothing it asked for would move a slider. Dismiss puts it away.
A move far past a slider's end is refused, not held. Ask for more than 100 on any slider but Exposure, or for more than 4 stops of Exposure, and the card's heading reads, for example, Out of range: shadows +150, with the line This can only move a slider as far as a slider goes. under it. There is no Apply; Dismiss puts it away, and you can ask again with a smaller move.
Ask for the subject and Apply also scopes the sliders to the detected subject, the same state the top panel's Subject mask button sets. Ask for the background and they apply to everything except the subject instead. The card's line ends with which one it is, on the subject or on the background, and Global on the scope card at the top of the panel takes either back to the whole frame. See Adjusting inside a mask.
A card's Temperature move goes the opposite way to its wording. Ask for warmer and Apply makes the frame bluer; ask for cooler and it goes more amber. The way around is to look at the picture after you apply, and press ⌘Z or ask for the opposite if it went the wrong way. Colour has the same fault described on the slider.
On a RAW file, a card's Exposure, Temperature and Tint reach the whole frame, whatever the card says it is on. The RAW decoder applies those three everywhere. Only the card's Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Saturation and Vibrance stay on the subject or the background. To move the subject's exposure or white balance alone on a RAW file, add a Subject mask from the Local tab and use its own sliders; Adjusting inside a mask has the detail.
After you apply a card that names the background, the scope card at the top of the panel still reads Subject only and the Subject mask button still shows as on. The sliders do apply to everything except the subject.
Where the sentence goes
The field needs a model to answer it, and the header beside the field names which one before you type: a local Ollama model on your Mac in quiet grey, or Anthropic in warning ink, because that one leaves your Mac. Whichever it names is the one your sentence goes to. Ollama is used whenever it is running with a model that can call tools; a stored Anthropic key is used only when Ollama is not answering, and never while Local only is on in Settings.
When the field cannot be used it is disabled and says why, with a Settings link on anything you can act on: Needs an API key. when nothing is set up; Ollama is running but has no models installed. Pull one, then try again.; Ollama has no model that can use tools. Pull one that has them — llama3.1, qwen2.5 and mistral-nemo all do — then choose it in Settings.; or that Local only is on and Ollama is not answering. Which Ollama model runs your sentence is your choice, on the Ollama model row of the Settings window.
The field is a faster way to move the sliders you can already reach by hand. Everything it writes is visible in the Changes tab and the History, and comes off the frame with one ⌘Z, exactly as if you had dragged the sliders yourself.