Fine Tune and Custom: Building a Look From Scratch
4 August 2026·7 min read
The presets cover most people most of the time. But if you want a finish nobody else has, there are two boxes underneath them — and knowing which one does what is the whole trick.
Two boxes, two different questions
They are separated on purpose, because they answer different things:
- Fine Tune is *exposure* — is this too dark, too flat, too colourful, too warm? Brightness, Contrast, Colour Strength, Warmth, and an Overall Strength that mixes the whole treatment back.
- Custom is *colour style* — what does this picture look like? Photo Filter, Colour Balance, Shift Every Colour, the Tone Curve and Black & White.
Nothing appears in both. A slider in two places is two places for them to disagree, so each one lives where it belongs.
A working order that saves time
- 1Pick a preset as a starting point, even if you plan to change all of it. Starting from a look beats starting from nothing.
- 2Fix exposure first, in Fine Tune. Get the brightness and contrast right while the colour is still honest — judging a cast on a picture that is too dark wastes both adjustments.
- 3Then the style, in Custom. Filter for the overall cast, Colour Balance for the fine correction, the Tone Curve for the finish.
- 4Mix it back with Overall Strength. If it is nearly right but too much, do not undo four sliders — pull the strength to 70–80% and the whole thing softens together.
- 5Look at it full size before you order.
What each Custom control actually does
The examples below are all one piece — Vibrant Resonance of Krishna, from the user creations shelf — so every difference you can see is the control and nothing else.
Photo Filter is a coloured gel over the whole picture. Eighteen of them, warm through cool. Use it for the overall mood — and keep it under about 40%.
Colour Balance pushes along three axes — Cyan↔Red, Magenta↔Green, Yellow↔Blue. This is the corrective one: use it when something is *slightly* off rather than when you want a mood.
Shift Every Colour rotates the whole colour wheel. It is the most dramatic control here and the easiest to overdo — a small shift can make a blue robe teal; a large one makes it a different painting.
The tone curve, in plain English
Three sliders — Shadows, Midtones, Highlights — that decide how bright each part of the picture is. It is the one adjustment that behaves differently in the dark parts than the light parts, which is why it can do things no filter can:
Switch the channel from All to R, G or B and the same three sliders act on one colour only. That is how you get split toning — warm highlights with cool shadows — which no single filter can produce:
Tip: A dot appears on any channel you have bent, so you can always see that R or B is doing something even while you are looking at the All tab.
Undo without starting over
There are three sizes of undo, and using the right one saves a lot of re-work. Each slider resets from its own value; each group resets from its heading; Reset All puts the whole picture back to the original. Closing a box with the X leaves whatever you had when you opened it exactly as it was.
When to stop
The honest answer: sooner than you think. Every one of these controls is easy to push past the point where it flatters the artwork, and a print is far less forgiving than a screen. If you are no longer sure whether the last change helped, it probably did not — pull the Overall Strength back a little and order it.
Every example on this page is a user creation — a piece somebody designed themselves and had made. You can browse the whole shelf, or start your own.