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Workspace and panels

The workspace has four parts: the tools on the left, the picture in the middle, the panels on the right, and a bar at the bottom with the zoom controls and a short status.

The panels

  • Info (a tab beside Histogram) lists the tone sampler's readings: the pointer's and the numbered points'. See Tone Sampler and Info.
  • Histogram shows the tones of the active layer after its adjustments.
  • Adjustments adds an adjustment layer: Levels, Curves, Exposure, Brightness/Contrast, Zones, Paper Grade, Grad D&B, Toning, Sharpen or Vignette.
  • Properties shows the settings of the selected adjustment layer, or of the active tool. It also has the Before button: hold it to see the original.
  • Layers lists the layers, groups and masks. See Layers.

Choosing a tool shows that tool's settings in Properties. Selecting a layer or its mask brings back the layer's settings.

Move and group panels

  • Drag a panel by its title to reorder it or to move it into the left, right or bottom dock.
  • A group of tabs, such as Histogram and Info, moves as one: drag the empty part of its tab row (or the dots at its left) to move the whole group. Dragging a tab itself pulls out just that panel.
  • Drop it on another panel's title to join that panel as a tab. Drag a tab out to separate it again.
  • Click a panel's title to collapse or expand it.
  • Drag the inner edge of a dock to make it wider or taller.

The panels sit around the picture and never cover it.

Move the tools

Drag the grip at the top of the tools column to put it at the far left, beside the picture on either side, or at the far right.

Reset the workspace

Click the panels icon in the top bar to put the panels and tools back in their default places. Your arrangement is remembered between launches. Resetting it does not change your photograph or its edits.

The status bar

The bar at the bottom shows messages such as "Opening…". The Details button opens a card with the picture's size, load times and memory use, and lets you choose what the status bar shows.

The card has four parts:

  • Document: the file name, the picture's size in pixels, and its colour profile (for example Gray Gamma 2.2) with the size of that profile.
  • Load time: First preview is how long it took until you could see the picture, a rough version that sharpens as the rest loads. Ready to edit is how long until the whole picture was loaded. The small lines underneath show where that time went (reading the file, decoding it, building the zoomed-out overview). They are there for diagnosing a slow file and you can ignore them otherwise.
  • Tile memory: the picture is held in small pieces called tiles. Budget is the most memory DBW Monochrome will use for them (a share of your computer's memory). Resident is what they use now, Peak the most they have used since the file opened, and Spilled to disk how much was moved to a temporary file because the budget was full. "None" is the normal, fast case; a large amount means your computer is short of memory for this picture and editing may feel slower.
  • Show in the status bar: choose one item from Document Profile, Document Dimensions, Load Time or Tile Memory to keep it visible in the status bar, or Nothing to show only messages.

Text size

Settings → Interface text size makes the whole interface larger. See Settings.