Terms used throughout Aphera and this manual.
Audition — temporarily viewing the original, unedited photo, by holding \. See Browsing.
Broad-to-narrow — Aphera’s ordering principle: make the broadest adjustments first and the finest last. A fine control fighting a broad one is hard to predict and easy to overdo. The Balance controls, the Grading layer’s groups, and the effect layers are all ordered this way. See Balance and Color Effects.
Culling — selecting the best images from a shoot: rating photos with stars and rejecting the rest. See Browsing.
Display-referred / Closed Domain — image data reduced to the known, bounded range of a screen. This is what an image formation produces. See Formation.
Export Preset — a saved export configuration: destination folder, naming pattern, and format options. Exports always run through a preset. See Exporting.
Group — a named collection of photos within a project, shown in the sidebar. Each import creates a group automatically; you can also create your own. See Browsing.
Image formation — the transformation that turns a camera’s scene-referred signal into a finished, display-referred image. See Formation.
JPG — our casual term for non-RAW images (JPEG, HEIC, TIFF, PNG). These files are already display-referred, so they render without the RAW image formation pipeline. See Importing.
Look — a per-project preset bundling an image formation and effect layers. See Looks.
Naming Token — a placeholder like {date} or {filename} used in a naming pattern, resolved when a project is created or a photo is exported. See Naming Tokens.
Photometric — operating on the scene’s light values, in real units: exposure in stops, temperature in Kelvin. A photometric adjustment behaves like a change at capture, not an edit to the finished image. See Balance.
RAW — a camera’s native capture file, holding scene-referred data. RAW files benefit from the full image formation pipeline. See Importing and Formation.
Rejected — a rating state that hides a photo from every view except Rejected: a soft delete that removes nothing from the project or disk. See Browsing.
Scene-referred / Open Domain — the camera’s relative technical signal, whose range limits are not assumed in advance. RAW files hold scene-referred data. See Formation.