Image Workstation Features: Layers, RAW and AI Without the Upload

Open a photo and you get a canvas, a tool row beside it, a Layers and History dock, and a Control Panel with Layer, Adjust and Presets tabs. If you've used Photoshop or GIMP, you'll find your way around in a few minutes.

A layer can be a photo, text, a shape, an adjustment or a group. Each has its own opacity and one of 16 blend modes, and you can clip a layer to the one below, mask it, or give it a drop shadow, outer glow, colour overlay or stroke. Free transform scales, rotates, skews and distorts in perspective, which is exactly what you need to put a screenshot onto a laptop screen in a mockup.

Text and shape layers stay editable until you rasterize, rotate or flip them, so you can still fix a typo in a poster an hour later.

This is the part we're proudest of. Open a RAW file from a Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Olympus, Panasonic, Pentax, Samsung or DNG camera and the camera's own preview shows up straight away, so you're not watching a spinner. Behind it, the file is developed from its full 16-bit data.

Why that matters: a JPEG throws away the brightest detail. A RAW file keeps a couple of stops more, and because the workstation works from that data, pulling Highlights down on an overexposed sky actually brings the clouds back instead of turning them flat grey.

The Adjust tab has the sliders you'd expect from Lightroom: white balance, exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites and blacks, texture, clarity and dehaze, a tone curve per channel, an eight-colour mixer, colour grading, sharpening, noise reduction, vignette and grain. Press the backslash key at any point to flip between before and after.

Global sliders only get you so far. Usually you want the sky a bit darker and the face a bit brighter, not the whole frame. The Masking panel in the Adjust tab does that. Brush an adjustment in, drag a linear or radial gradient, or build a mask from a brightness range, a colour range, the subject, the sky, the background or an object you click.

You can then limit a mask to a range, invert it, and switch on a red overlay to see exactly what it covers before you move a slider.

The spot healing brush removes dust and blemishes in one stroke. The healing brush and clone stamp copy from a spot you Alt-click. The patch tool replaces an area you've selected. Dodge and burn are there, and so are blur and sharpen brushes, grouped the way Photoshop groups them: click a tool again, or right-click it, to get the rest of its family.

For bigger jobs there's Remove. Paint over a tourist, a bin or a power line, let go, and the area is filled from its surroundings. It's very good on small and medium areas and softer on very large ones, so take big removals in a few passes.

Select subject, Select sky, the Object selection tool, Remove, Lens blur, AI denoise, Remove background and Upscale 2× all use AI models. The difference from most online editors is where they run. Each model downloads once from ToolBuddy, only after you agree, and then runs on your own device. Your photo isn't sent off to a server to be processed.

Refine edge, which tidies hair and fur around a selection, doesn't need a model at all. AI denoise is the heaviest of the group: it's quick in browsers with WebGPU and noticeably slower without it. If any AI task is taking longer than you'd like, closing its window cancels it.

None of these will make a photo look better on their own, but they're the ones you'll be glad of on a busy day.

Here's the short version.

We'd rather you know this before you start than halfway through a job.

If you shoot RAW but don't want a subscription, if you need to cut someone out of a photo for a slide and would rather not upload it to a site you've never heard of, or if you just want layers without installing anything, give it a go. It's free, there's no account, and exports carry no watermark.

For a quick crop or filter, the simpler Image Editor is faster, and for shrinking a pile of images the Image Compressor is the better fit. For most things in between, open the Image Workstation.