The habit
You finish one frame. Exposure sits on the linear file. White balance comes off the card, or off a wall you trust. The tone curve puts the shoulder where the print needs it. Color grading takes the shadow one way and the highlight another. Then you look at the rest of the table, the rest of the room, the rest of the hour, and your hand goes looking for Sync.
In Lightroom that sync is a stack of checkboxes. Crop lives in the stack. Leave the box warm and every vertical inherits the horizontal crop from the hero. In Photoshop you open the next RAW through Camera Raw and paste the recipe. The paste is the whole recipe. Framing comes with it unless you cleared the crop before you copied. Affinity Photo's develop persona trains the same reach: one good grade, then the roll should match the frame you already decided.
The job is the roll. A product set on one sweep of light. Three heights of the same room. A contact sheet you will still crop one frame at a time because the subject moved. The hand wants one copy and one paste. The hand also wants the frame you already drew on each photo to stay there.
The constraint
Omadesign is one binary. Photo is a persona in that binary, beside Design, Layout, Pixel, and Motion. There is no second app to launch for the grade, and no Creative Cloud hop between the slider and the file.
The camera file stays the camera file. Development is a small .omaphoto sidecar beside the original. table.RAF stays table.RAF. The sidecar holds adjustments. It does not hold the image. A paste that "applies the look" by rewriting the RAW is the wrong shape. The paste has to move development values onto other photos, and the pixels on disk have to stay the pixels the camera wrote.
Undo is one step. Pasting a look onto a selection cannot leave one history entry per frame, or you will spend the afternoon walking backwards through a wedding. Photo's keys stay in Photo. Copying a grade must not reach into a Design tab and restyle artwork you cannot see. The system clipboard has to survive as well. A logo you copied an hour ago is still a logo. An empty system clipboard must not block the grade copy. The adjustment snapshot is Photo's, and the chord has to fire on the key press you actually made.
What landed
Develop the source photo. Copy adjustments, or Ctrl+Shift+C, takes the settings as they stand at that moment. Edit the hero afterward and the snapshot stays where you left it. The copy is a frozen look, taken when you pressed the chord. It is not a live link back to the sliders.
In the Library, choose who receives it. Ctrl-click toggles one photo. Shift-click selects a range. Ctrl+A selects every photo loaded in the library. The active photo remains the one in the viewer. The selection count tells you how many photos will receive the look. Those are different marks on purpose. Grading the frame in front of you and choosing the batch are different jobs. You can keep the hero on screen while the selection runs down the filmstrip.
Ctrl+Shift+V opens Paste…. The boxes are Light / tone, Tone curve, Color, Effects, Color mixer, Color grading, Crop, and Rotation. Effects is the detail group from the Develop panel. Those boxes can travel on their own. Send Light / tone and leave the mixer. Send the grade and leave Effects, because the clarity, grain, or vignette that flattered the hero is wrong on the wide frame. Light, Color, and Detail are the groups you live in while grading. Tone curve, color mixer, and color grading are the sections you expand when the group sliders are not enough. The paste list uses those names, with Detail labeled Effects.
Crop and Rotation start off. The status after the copy says so: crop and rotation are excluded. Each photo keeps its framing until you tick those two boxes. A look is tone and color. A frame is the picture. They stay apart until you say they travel together.
The chord is a Photo command. It fires when you press it. It does not need the system clipboard to be holding anything, and it leaves that clipboard alone. Design artwork on another tab stays out of the operation. Photo selection, Delete, ordinary copy and paste, and stacking shortcuts stay inside Photo while you are grading. Typing into a field still uses the normal clipboard. The grade chords are for the pictures.
Samples and images you pasted into the persona can wear the adjustments. They need an original on disk before a settings file can be saved. The paste puts the values on the loaded photos. It does not write the sidecars. That write is Ctrl+S, and it belongs to the save that follows.
Apply the same values again and Photo adds no extra undo entry. History records a change. A second paste of an identical snapshot is the same grade sitting where it already sat.
In the hand
Open the folder, or drop the files. Imports run in the background, so you can start on the frame you trust while the rest land. Grade it. Press Before if you need the default development in front of you, then come back to the sliders. Auto light is there when exposure and contrast only need a first balance. RAW exposure and white balance are working on the 16-bit linear source. When the frame sits, copy it.
Ctrl+Shift+C
The copied look is the settings at that press. Nudge the hero again if you want a different direction for yourself. The frames you are about to choose will get the copy, not the nudge, until you copy again.
Click the first target in the Library. Shift-click the last photo in the run, or Ctrl-click the frames that share the light and skip the one you already finished by hand. Read the selection count before you paste. Leave the viewer on the hero if that is the reference you still want to see.
Ctrl+Shift+V
The category list is the decision. Leave Crop and Rotation off. Leave Effects off when the noise floors do not match. Leave Color mixer off when only one frame needed a pulled green. Light / tone, Color, Tone curve, and Color grading can stay on. Apply.
The selected photos take those categories. Their crops stay. Their rotations stay. One undo puts the whole paste back. You do not reverse the roll one frame at a time.
When the photos already have originals on disk, Ctrl+S writes each selected .omaphoto beside its file. The pair is named together: photo.png and photo.png.omaphoto. The camera file's bytes do not move.
The edge
The paste refuses to treat framing as part of the look. Crop and rotation stay off until you turn them on in the category list. It also refuses to write the camera file, and it refuses to save itself. A loaded selection holds the new values in Photo's own history until you save settings. A sample with no original on disk can wear the look for the session and still cannot grow a sidecar. There is no file to stand beside.
The snapshot stays frozen at the moment of Ctrl+Shift+C. Later moves on the hero do not push themselves onto the frames you already chose.
Select the roll, press Ctrl+Shift+V, and leave crop off so each photo keeps the frame you gave it.
The thread
Part 73 of 144 in the Omadesign 0.5.8 feature thread.