This article shows you how to use the Image Adjustments sliders to correct a photo's brightness, contrast, and color directly inside the editor — no external photo editor needed. Changes appear as a live preview and match the final render exactly.
Where to find Image Adjustments
Select any photo layer on the canvas. In the properties panel on the right, scroll to the Image Adjustments section. You'll see a row of sliders: Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, Shadows, Mids, and Color.
What each slider does
| Slider | What it controls | Neutral value |
|---|---|---|
| Brightness | Makes the whole photo lighter or darker uniformly. | 0% |
| Contrast | Spreads highlights and shadows further apart (positive) or compresses them toward grey (negative). | 0% |
| Saturation | Intensifies colors (positive) or drains them toward grey (negative). | 0% |
| Shadows | Lifts the darkest areas of the photo without affecting midtones or highlights. Useful for recovering detail in underexposed subjects. | 0% |
| Mids | Adjusts midtone brightness (gamma). Values above 1.00 brighten midtones; values below 1.00 darken them. Highlights and deep shadows are affected less than with Brightness alone. | 1.00 |
| Color | Shifts the color temperature toward warm (positive) or cool (negative). | 0 (neutral) |
Sharpness: check it before you print
Above Brightness, still inside Image Adjustments, is a Sharpness row. It isn't a slider — it's a button showing the current level, and clicking it opens a full-screen close-up view of the photo. That's deliberate: sharpening is applied at the size the photo actually prints at, and at the editor's fit-to-screen zoom the difference between settings is invisible. Judging it on the canvas would mean judging it on a preview that is softer than the print.
There are three levels:
- Off — no sharpening at all, and the softest of the three. Use it when the photo is already crisp or was sharpened earlier in your workflow.
- Standard — the default, and the sharpening every render has always applied. Leave it here unless you have a reason not to.
- High — stronger edge detail. Check faces and hairlines for halos before you commit to it.
Because Standard is what renders have always done, it counts as the neutral setting: the Reset button returns Sharpness to Standard, not to Off.
Inside the close-up view the photo is shown at actual print pixels — the size and detail the render will actually keep, not the size of the original file. Click the level buttons to compare; the image updates in place so you can flip between them. If a face has been detected on the photo, the view opens centred on the subject.
Use the − and + buttons to magnify up to 8×. Above 1× you can drag the image to pan around it. This is what makes the view usable on a small photo inset: a small slot renders at only a few hundred pixels no matter how large the source file is, so magnifying the output pixels themselves is the only way to see what sharpening did to it.
The view is an emulation of the render, not a render — it's an extremely close match, but treat the final output as the last word. The header tells you what proportion of the source photo's detail this layer keeps.
On a layer using a perspective mockup, Sharpness is unavailable and reads Not applied. Perspective mockups aren't sharpened, so the setting would have no effect on the render.
Inspect the photo at full resolution
Sharpness tells you what the render will do to the photo. If you want to check the photo itself — is it in focus, is the subject soft, did the camera miss — use the photo inspector instead.
Hover the placeholder thumbnail at the top of the photo layer's properties panel and click the magnifier button. Its tooltip reads "Inspect the full-resolution photo — check sharpness before printing (z)". With a single photo layer selected you can also just press z.
The inspector opens the original photo at its true resolution and tells you its pixel dimensions. Scroll to zoom, drag to pan, and use the Fit and 1:1 buttons to jump between the whole frame and one image pixel per screen pixel — 1:1 is the honest test for sharpness. Pressing z again while the inspector is open jumps straight to 1:1.
The inspector only needs a photo. It works no matter which fit mode the layer uses and whether or not face placement is turned on.
Adjust a photo
- Select the photo layer on the canvas or in the layer list.
- In the properties panel, scroll to Image Adjustments.
- Drag any slider to the right to increase its effect, or to the left to decrease it. The canvas updates as you drag.
- When the photo looks right, click anywhere outside the slider — the setting is saved automatically.
The value shown to the right of each slider reflects the current setting. Brightness, Contrast, and Saturation display a percentage (e.g. +30%). Mids shows a decimal (e.g. 1.25). Color shows warm or cool when away from neutral, and 0 when neutral.
Reset a slider to neutral
Double-click any slider to snap it back to its neutral value instantly. To reset every adjustment at once, click the Reset button that appears at the top of the Image Adjustments section whenever any slider is off neutral.
Vignette: darken the edges
Below the Image Adjustments sliders, in its own section, is the Vignette slider. Unlike the tonal and color sliders, which change every pixel by the same rule, a vignette is a spatial effect: it gradually darkens the corners and edges of the photo while leaving the center bright, which draws the eye toward your subject.
The value is a percentage from 0% to 100%. At 0% the vignette is off. Higher values deepen the darkening at the corners. Drag the slider to taste, or double-click it to snap back to 0%.
Beside the slider are three preset buttons — Min, Mid and Max — which set the vignette to 30%, 60% and 100% in one click. The button for the current strength stays highlighted, so you can see at a glance whether a photo is on a preset or on a hand-dragged value.
The darkening follows the part of the photo that's actually shown on the layer. If you've cropped the photo or the layer uses a fit mode that only shows part of the image, the dark edges hug the visible area — not the hidden edges of the original photo — so the effect always frames what your viewers see.
Live preview matches the render
The canvas preview is updated in real time as you move a slider. The adjustment you see in the editor is the same one applied when Templified renders the final image — there is no separate "apply" step and no discrepancy between preview and output.
Push adjustments to every design using the same photo
A single player's photo rarely lives in one place. The same frame might sit on the team poster, on an individual print, and in a magazine layout. When you fix that photo's exposure, you want the fix everywhere — not repeated three times by hand.
In Studio, once you've changed an adjustment on a photo that's used elsewhere, a row appears at the bottom of the Image Adjustments section reading Photo appears in N other designs, with a Sync adjustments button beside it.
- Adjust the photo until it looks right.
- Click Sync adjustments. A small panel lists the designs that use this photo.
- Click Apply to N designs. Every adjustment value on this photo — brightness, contrast, saturation, mids, color, shadows, vignette and the filter preset — is copied onto the matching photo layers in those designs, and onto any other layer in the current design using the same photo.
The button then reads Synced. If you keep adjusting afterwards, it flips back to Sync adjustments so you can push the newer values too.
Two things worth knowing. First, this is opt-in per adjustment pass — nothing is copied until you click, so you can correct one design in isolation without touching the others. Second, it's a one-time copy, not a permanent link: later edits to this photo in one design stay in that design until you sync again.
The row only appears when the photo is genuinely shared. If it's used in exactly one design, there's nothing to sync and no row.
Apply adjustments to multiple photos at once
You can adjust several photo layers in a single operation by selecting them all before opening the properties panel.
- Click the first photo layer, then Shift-click (or Cmd-click on Mac, Ctrl-click on Windows) each additional photo layer to add it to the selection.
- The properties panel switches to bulk mode and shows the Image Adjustments section for all selected layers.
- Drag a slider to apply that value to every selected layer at once.
The Min / Mid / Max vignette presets work in bulk too — one click sets the same vignette strength on every selected photo.
Sync a whole selection to the designs those photos appear in
The sync affordance described above works on a multi-photo selection too, so you can correct a whole team in one pass and push every photo's fix everywhere it's used.
Once you've adjusted the selected photos, a row appears at the bottom of the panel reading These photos appear in N other designs, with a Sync adjustments button beside it.
- Select the photo layers and adjust them until they look right.
- Click Sync adjustments. A small panel opens explaining "Copy each photo's adjustment values to every design using that photo:" and lists the designs that will be updated, collapsing to +N more past the first few.
- Click Apply to N designs.
Be clear about what this does, because the obvious reading is the wrong one. It does not flatten one photo's settings onto the rest of the selection. Each selected photo keeps its own values and pushes those values to the other designs that use that same photo. So a bulk pass unifies only the sliders you actually dragged — per-player differences in everything else survive the sync.
The button then reads Synced, and flips back to Sync adjustments if you keep adjusting, so you can push the newer values too.
The design you currently have open is updated on the canvas in front of you rather than written behind your back: any other layer in this design using one of those photos takes the new values immediately, as a single undoable step.
As with a single photo, the row only appears when at least one of the selected photos is genuinely shared. If every selected photo is used in exactly one design, there's nothing to sync and no row.
Rotate several photos at once
The bulk photo panel also has a Rotation field, with the same signed value (−180° to 180°) and the same −5° / +5° stepper buttons as the single-photo panel. The two behave differently on purpose:
- Typing a number sets every selected photo to that exact angle.
- Clicking a stepper nudges each photo relative to its own current angle. A selection where the photos sit at different angles stays that way — the field keeps reading Mixed, and the relative tilt between photos is preserved.
Either way, each photo turns about its own centre, not the centre of the selection. Nothing swings around a shared pivot, so a scattered layout of tilted photos keeps its positions and just changes angle.
Mixed states in bulk editing
When the selected layers have different values for the same slider, the value readout shows Mixed instead of a number. The slider itself starts at the neutral position as a placeholder.
Moving the slider overrides all selected layers with that new value — the Mixed label disappears and every selected layer takes on the value you set. If you want to preserve a layer's existing setting, deselect it before adjusting.
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