Adjust Brightness, Contrast and Colour

The adjust panel is a stack of twelve controls - exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows and the rest through to vignette - and the order they apply in is fixed. No matter which slider you move first, the pipeline always computes exposure first and vignette last. That sounds like a technical footnote, but it is what makes edits reproducible: two people who end up with the same slider values get pixel-identical results, and returning to a photo later never produces a subtly different render because you happened to touch the sliders in another sequence.

The curves panel deserves a special mention for what it refuses to do. Curves here use monotone-cubic interpolation between your control points, which mathematically cannot overshoot. In editors that use ordinary splines, placing two points close together can make the curve loop above or below them, producing inverted tones or neon color spikes you never asked for. Monotone interpolation guarantees the curve passes smoothly through your points and never doubles back, so an S-curve stays an S-curve.

A practical workflow: correct the biggest problem first. If the shot is underexposed, fix exposure before judging color - a dark image always looks more saturated than it is. Then set white balance (temperature and tint), then contrast, and only at the end apply taste adjustments like vignette. Because the pipeline order is fixed, you can revisit any slider at any time without redoing the others.

All adjustments are non-destructive while you work: the sliders describe a recipe, and pixels are only committed when you export. That means you can zero any slider to undo just that one decision, even twenty edits later, and the exported file is rendered in a single pass at your photo's full resolution rather than accumulating rounding errors from repeated saves.