From the disk image to your first tethered frame.

Install and first launch

RawStage is signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so macOS opens it without an argument and without a trip to System Settings.

1. Open RawStage-beta.dmg and drag RawStage into your Applications folder.
2. Eject the disk image, then launch RawStage from Applications.
3. The first launch shows the standard macOS confirmation that the app was downloaded from the internet. Click Open. It never asks again.

The folder is the session

There is no catalog and no import. A session is a folder on your disk, and RawStage writes what you do into small JSON sidecar files next to your RAWs. Move the folder, archive it, open it in ten years — everything travels with the photographs.

• ⌘O Open Session… — point it at a folder that already has photographs in it. That is the whole import step.
• ⌘N New Session… — creates an empty folder ready to receive frames. You choose a name, a location and a capture naming pattern here.
• ⇧⌘N Start Tether Session… — the same thing, but it opens straight into the Tether room waiting for the camera. See section 07.
• File → Open Recent keeps the last sessions. A folder that moved or was deleted shows dimmed rather than disappearing.
• You can also drag a folder onto the window at any moment. That opens it as a session.

Once a session is open, the window has three rooms and you move between them with ⌘1 ⌘2 ⌘3 — or simply G, D, T for Grid, Develop and Tether. File → Reveal Session in Finder takes you to the folder itself whenever you want to see what is actually on disk.

Culling with one hand

The grid is built to be driven from the keyboard while the other hand holds a coffee or a camera. Every key below works in the grid and in Develop.

• ← → move through the session.
• 1–5 set a star rating, 0 clears it.
• P picks, X rejects. ⇧P switches the grid to picks only.
• ⌥1–⌥5 filter by rating (≥ that many stars); View → Filter by Rating → Off clears it.
• Photo → Color Tag adds a colour label when stars and picks are not enough.
• ⌘+ and ⌘− grow and shrink the thumbnails.
• ⌘A selects everything visible, ⇧⌘A deselects.

The develop panel

Press D (or ⌘2) on any photograph. The panel on the right is the classic darkroom set, top to bottom, in the order you actually work: Histogram, White Balance, Exposure, Color, Color Grading, Palette, Clarity, Curve, Levels, Detail and Geometry.

Four habits are worth building on day one:

• Hold \ to see the file underneath. Press and hold anywhere in the viewer and the photograph reverts to the RAW as shot; release and your edit comes back. View → Show Original does the same as a toggle.
• Every module has an eye. The small eye beside a section title bypasses that section alone, so you can ask "is my Clarity actually helping?" without undoing anything.
• J shows clipping. Hold it and blown highlights and crushed shadows are marked on the photograph.
• R resets the edit on the current photograph, and the reset beside each section title resets just that section.

To carry an edit across the session: ⇧⌘C copies the settings, select the photographs you want and ⇧⌘V pastes them. ⌘Z undoes the paste if it went somewhere you did not mean. Geometry — crop, rotation, straightening — is never included: framing is per photograph.

Two more keys that earn their place: C opens the crop with ratio presets and corner rotation, and ⇥ hides all the chrome so the photograph is alone on the screen. Z toggles zoom, and View → Zoom 100% and Zoom to Fit are there when you want to be precise about it.

The two studio windows

Both live in the Window menu, both are free, and both are real windows — drag them to a second screen and leave them there.

Viewer — ⌥⌘V

A window with nothing in it but the photograph: no panel, no filmstrip, no title. It is what you turn towards the client or the art director. Window → Viewer Source decides what it shows:

• Current Selection — it follows you as you navigate. Use this when you are reviewing together.
• Last Capture — it always shows the newest frame off the camera. Use this while you are shooting, so the client sees the shot you just took while you are still working on an earlier one.

Focus Check — ⌥⌘F

The instrument that answers the one question you cannot fix later: was it the eye, or the eyelash?

• It opens at 100% and steps through 50% · 100% · 200% · 400%. With the Focus Check window in front, ⌘+ and ⌘− step the zoom instead of the thumbnails.
• Drag inside it to pan. The window is resizable — make it as big as the screen you put it on.
• The Peaking switch in the floating control paints magenta over the detail that is genuinely sharp, and the slider beside it sets how fussy that judgement is.

MOOD — a look in one gesture

The Palette section has two modes, and they answer two different questions. Image adjusts the colours the photograph already has. MOOD imposes colours on it, one per tonal band. Grading wheels push tones around; MOOD decides what colour the shadows, the midtones and the highlights are.

To turn it on: in the develop panel, find PALETTE and click the Mood tab. That is the whole activation — there is no separate module to enable.

What you then have, top to bottom:

• Color · Soft Light · Screen — how the imposed colour composites onto the photograph. Color is a veil: hue and chroma only, tone untouched. Soft Light and Screen move the tone along with the colour, the way a gel or a lifted black would.
• Shadows, Midtones, Highlights, General Tone — four rows. Click the colour well on the right of a row and the hue disc opens: drag the puck to choose the colour, further from the centre for more chroma. The Strength slider under it (0–100) says how much of that colour lands. General Tone acts everywhere and its slider is called Amount.
• Tone (−100 to +100) is the mood's own contrast. It lives inside the module — the section's reset and its bypass eye cover it, and it never writes into your Curve.
• From Image… reads another photograph's palette and plants it in the four targets. You can also drop an image file straight onto the button. It is a seed, not a link: the image is read once, its colours are planted, and nothing about it is kept.
• Show Mask paints the pixels the active band is holding, so you can see what you are colouring before you commit to it.

A tethered session with a Fujifilm camera

Fujifilm X and GFX bodies talk to RawStage directly — no X Acquire, no Capture One, nothing else running. Frames land in the session in roughly a third of a second.

On the camera

1. Set the USB mode to USB TETHER SHOOTING AUTO. On most X and GFX bodies that is SET UP → CONNECTION SETTING → USB MODE (some bodies call it PC CONNECTION MODE). This is the one camera setting that matters.
2. Use a cable that carries data. A charging-only USB-C cable will power the camera and never appear on the Mac — it is the single most common reason a tether "doesn't work".
3. Plug the camera into the Mac directly if you can. Hubs work, but they are the first thing to remove when something is flaky.

In RawStage

1. Press ⇧⌘N — Start Tether Session…. Name the session, choose where it lives, and set a capture naming pattern if you want one (a prefix and a counter, for example MARG-0001).
2. If the camera is already connected, Start tethered capture is on by default and the panel tells you which body it found.
3. You land in the Tether room. The pill at the top right is the HUD: the camera's name, the number of captures, and the milliseconds from the last shutter click to the picture appearing.
4. Shoot. Each frame arrives, develops with the session's settings, and is ready to judge. ← → review, P and X pick and reject, Z zooms, ⇥ clears the chrome.

Session settings — the part that makes tethering worth it

At the bottom of the develop panel is a button with three states. Press it to move through them:

• Set as session settings — off. New captures inherit nothing.
• Session settings: following — what is on screen is what the next capture will inherit, and every adjustment you make updates it. Light the first frame, get it right, and the rest of the session arrives already looking like that.
• Session settings: frozen — the current settings keep being inherited but stop following your adjustments. Reopening a session always returns it frozen, so nothing changes behind your back.

Only adjustments move the settings. Walking through the session with follow on changes nothing — that was a deliberate fix, because otherwise a pass through the culling would contaminate the whole shoot. And geometry is never inherited: crop and rotation are composition, per frame.

Unplug the camera, let it sleep, pull the cable by accident — the session does not care. Reconnect and captures resume where they left off.

Any other camera brand

Native tethering is Fujifilm-first today. Every other brand gets there through a hot folder, and the experience inside RawStage is identical once the file lands.

1. Start your camera maker's own tether utility and point its download folder at the session folder.
2. Start a tether session in RawStage on that same folder.
3. Shoot. Files appear in the session as they arrive — RawStage waits until a file has finished copying before it touches it, and reads the camera's name out of the file's own EXIF, so the HUD says something like Sony α7R III · hot folder rather than a generic label.

Export

⌘E opens the export panel over whatever you have selected.

• Source — Selected, Picks, Filtered or All, each with its count beside it. If you are in picks-only view, Picks is already chosen.
• Format — JPEG and PNG are free. TIFF (8 and 16-bit) and HEIC are Pro, and open during the 60 days.
• Size — Original, long edge in pixels, exact width × height, or print in centimetres at a DPI, with the resulting pixels calculated in front of you.
• Color space — sRGB by default; Display P3 and Adobe RGB are Pro.
• Destination — an Export subfolder inside the session by default, so the output travels with the session, or any folder you choose.
• Presets — Instagram post, square and story, Facebook, web, full-resolution JPEG, print at 300 DPI, and a Photoshop-ready 16-bit TIFF.

Exports run in the background with a progress pill in the chrome, and you can carry on working — or cancel.

The 60 days, and what happens after

This build has everything unlocked for 60 days. It matters more what happens at the end than what happens now, so here it is plainly.

What keeps working, free, forever: culling, tethered capture, both studio windows, the whole classic develop panel — white balance, exposure, curves, levels, clarity, vignette, sharpening, noise reduction, crop and geometry — copy and paste settings, and export to JPEG and PNG.

What locks: the colour grading wheels, the Palette editor and MOOD, LUTs and saved presets, and the professional export formats — 16-bit TIFF, HEIC, print sizing, Display P3 and Adobe RGB.

When something goes wrong

This is a beta and you are one of the people it is for. Two items in the Help menu are the whole reporting workflow:

• Help → Send Feedback… opens a message with the build number already filled in. Tell us what you were doing and what happened.
• Help → Export Logs… writes the technical story to a single file. Attaching it turns "the tether stopped" into something we can actually fix.

The single most useful report you can send: plug in your camera, tell us the model name, and say whether tethering worked. Then run one real session end to end — shoot, cull, develop, export — and tell us what stuttered or surprised you.