Chinagraph: Photo Workflow

Everything around the edit, in one window: off the card, through the cull, merged, and out the door with the right name, place and caption.

Chinagraph is the companion to whichever editor you already use. It never changes a photograph's exposure, colour or tone. Everything it writes — XMP sidecars, IPTC, file names, TIFFs — is something Lightroom, Capture One and Bridge already read.

INGEST — off the card, and nothing lost doing it • Copies to two destinations from one read of the card: the working drive and a backup • Every copy is read back from its own disk and compared with the card by SHA-256 before it is given its name • Renames on the way in from a template: date, time, camera, sequence, job, original name. A RAW and its JPEG keep one name • Writes your creator, copyright and contact details as files land: into a sidecar beside a RAW, into the file for a JPEG or HEIC • A card already partly copied copies only what is new • Tells you when a card is done, and ejects it once every copy checks out, if you ask • Never deletes from a card and never formats one

CULL — at the speed of the keys • Shows the full-size preview the camera put inside every RAW, and reads the next frames before you reach them • 1–5 for stars, X to reject, 6–9 for colour labels, P to pick, Z to decode the RAW itself and look at every pixel • C puts two frames side by side to choose between, and ⌘Z takes back any choice • Moves the rejects into their own folder or the Trash, and copies the picks out, each RAW with its sidecar • Choices go into XMP sidecars beside the files, keeping what is already in them. There is no catalogue: the folder is the library • Groups bursts and marks the sharpest frame of each. Flags frames that look out of focus or catch someone blinking. A flag is shown, never acted on

MERGE — many frames into one picture • Focus: each part from the frame that has it sharpest, aligned for focus breathing, with a map of which frame each part came from • Noise: every frame averaged, and the noise falls with the square root of their number • Crowd: at each pixel, the frames that agree. Whoever walked through is gone • Trails: the brightest frame at each pixel, or the darkest • Night sky: the sky turned back into place on its stars, corners included, while the ground is kept where it stands • Finds the sets in a folder shot one after another. Hundreds of RAWs wait on the scratch disk, not in memory

DELIVER — right before it leaves • Geotag from GPX track logs, matched by time • Fix a camera's clock from one photograph of a clock, then apply the offset to the whole shoot • Captions, headlines, keywords, credit and location, across a selection • Export presets: size, JPEG, HEIC, 16-bit TIFF or PNG, sharpening for the screen, sRGB or Display P3, a watermark and a file name template • Leave behind the GPS position, serial numbers and the owner's name, or all camera data • Contact sheets as PDF: the grid, the file names, the stars

FREE, AND THEN ONE PAYMENT Every part and tool is in the free version, at full quality and speed, with nothing watermarked. Free: one ingest destination, 200 frames a folder in Cull, 12 frames a merge, 50 files at a time in Deliver, and JPEG export at full resolution.

The Chinagraph unlock ($39.99, once, shared with your family) lifts every limit: a second, verified ingest destination, whole folders, stacks of any size, a batch of every set in a folder, a watched folder, a retouch brush, and HEIC, 16-bit TIFF and PNG export. It adds Live Photos to Merge (the movie behind one merged as noise, crowd or trails, keeping the still's date, camera and place) and a border to Deliver's exports, with the camera and settings underneath. No subscription, no account, no trial countdown.

NOTHING LEAVES THE MAC No analytics, no tracking, no server, no account. Your photographs are read and written where they are.

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