Rotate a photo in quarter turns

Use this for a portrait shot that opened on its side. For a few degrees of tilt, use Crop and straighten.

Rotate photos

Choose Image › Rotate Left or Image › Rotate Right. By default these are Ctrl+[ and Ctrl+]. You can also right-click a photo in the grid, or in the viewer in Loupe and Edit, and choose them there.

The command turns the photos selected in the grid or Survey. With nothing selected there, it turns the photo on screen.

What to expect

• In Edit and Loupe the photo turns at once. In Edit, the turn is one undo step.
• Photos you turn from the grid are saved straight away and their thumbnails turn at once. There is no undo for these: rotate the other way to take it back.
• A turned photo counts as edited, even if you changed nothing else.
• Image › Reset Edits turns the photo upright again.
• Paste Edits keeps the turn of the photo you paste onto, so a portrait pasted onto a landscape stays upright.
• Exports are written upright, with their orientation tag set to normal.
• There is no flip.

Note

If a photo’s edits were saved by a newer version of DarkRay, it is left as it is. The status bar tells you how many were skipped.

Technical details: how the turn is stored

The turn is saved as a number of quarter turns, applied to the finished picture after every other step. Nothing before it changes, so your crop, masks, gradients and vignette keep their positions. The viewer turns the picture as it paints, and the tools keep working as you see the photo.