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Apple high-end photo editing app?

cyanide

cyanide

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jan 6, 2005
234
0
Chicago
I got to thinking today at work, as i often do, and my trail of thought was something like the following: hmm, I can't wait for Tiger. Core* is going to be great. FC and everything else are going to fly. Completely spank Adobe..After Effects will survive though, its more mature than motion. I wonder if Adobe will utilize Core*.. hmm.. probably not. That wouldn't be cost effective I guess. But they do support Altivec, or am i wrong? Photoshop would be hella quick with Core support. You know what would be awesome? What if Apple decided to enter the high-end photo editing field? They have it right with Tiger, and they make the best software for all other forms of media out there.. why not photos? Yeh.. Apple should release its own Core-powered photo app for the professional..damn.. I am hungry.. is it lunch yet?

Okay now that i am finished retelling my arbeit-aside, I gotta say.. I hope this is a possibility. I know they would be behind in users, and familiarity, but we all know they could do it.. and do it better. Apple is, and will continue to be, a software company. Someone please agree with me...and think of a name for this behemoth. All i could think of so far was Capture, Shutter, Focus, and Darkroom. someone give something better. please.
 
i dont think apple wants to step on Adobe's toes with something like that, so i really can't see it happening to be honest, it might be nice, but there would be issues at first, and Adobe would be pissed off thats for sure, so unless Adobe does something first to cause apple to come out with a high-end photo editing app i wont bet on seeing it
 
Yeah, I think it's a nice idea, but graphic designers are not as flexible as it may seem, Photoshop has been around for a while (15 years now!), and has proven the world that it's the best pro photo editing app out there, so, if Apple entered the pro photo business, they would never have a Photoshop killer. Ever. Not even in 10 more years. See, it may have been easy to make a killer app in the video field, I mean, Steve Jobs is also the Pixar CEO, so he must have pushed real hard to make them develop a real good app, it was also easy in the music field, buying emagic and their technologies etc, was an eventual success for Apple, but in the picture field, it's not gonna be that easy. What Apple could do and could be successful, is an intermediate photo editing app, for the people that want more than iPhoto, but less than Photoshop, just like Final Cut Express with video. That would be a really nice idea, I would support them blindly.

So, for the name, Capture and Shutter sound like apps that will take a screenshot of your Mac, Focus just does not click and doesn't tell me that the app will be used for photo editing. Darkroom's a cool name, but it sounds more like a beta code-name for some app of this kind, and, following the latest Apple app names (i.e., "Pages") I wouldn't be surprised if they called it "Pictures", but that's not the idea. It shouldn't be an iApp, since we don't see pro (or pre-pro) apps called something like iMotion, so, my suggestion is something like Canvas. i think it gives the impression of some painting app, so I think it may suit the project well.
 
PlaceofDis said:
i dont think apple wants to step on Adobe's toes with something like that, so i really can't see it happening to be honest, it might be nice, but there would be issues at first, and Adobe would be pissed off thats for sure, so unless Adobe does something first to cause apple to come out with a high-end photo editing app i wont bet on seeing it
Click to expand...
Apple has already stepped on Adobe's toes, by making them drop Mac support for Premiere, since Final Cut has been a real killer to it, and Encore DVD doesn't seem to even have the intention of going Mac, since it knows it can't compete with DVD Studio Pro.
omg, i just personificated an app, i must be really bored.
 
hackand said:
Apple has already stepped on Adobe's toes, by making them drop Mac support for Premiere, since Final Cut has been a real killer to it, and Encore DVD doesn't seem to even have the intention of going Mac, since it knows it can't compete with DVD Studio Pro.
omg, i just personificated an app, i must be really bored.
Click to expand...
Apple didn't make Adobe do anything. Adobe has historically refused Apple requests and taken action that are against Apple's wishes. In the case of Premiere, Adobe voluntarily dropped its Mac port of the app because it felt that it could not compete with Apple's offering.
 
Who cares if Adobe's feelings are hurt? Competition can only lead to better products. If Apple can make a better product that Adobe, I'll buy Apple's. If Adobe can make a better product than Apple, I'll buy Adobe's. It's that simple to me. I guess if Adobe drops support for the Mac, it'll be because Apple made a better product and they don't feel like they want to compete.
 
hackand So said:
Canvas[/B]. i think it gives the impression of some painting app, so I think it may suit the project well.
Click to expand...

Isn't Canvas already an illustrator-type program??
 
Pure conjecture, but.....

There used to be a small software house called Caffeine Software. They developed a high-end photo editing application for NeXTSTEP back in the early days. The application was called TIFFany and won a number of prestigious awards.

Roll on several years and TIFFany is ported to OS X (which is, as we know a development of NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP). It continues to win awards, but fails to secure much of a market niche in a Mac world dominated by Photoshop - despite the fact that TIFFany offers wildly faster performance than Photoshop. It has to be said that part of the reason for this is that the interface remained largely unchanged since the NeXTSTEP days, and it had always been more than a little unconventional.

Caffeine sadly close up shop in March 2003. Those of us who have been using the app for years start wailing uncontrollably until we find out what has happened to the developers - they're now working for Apple. Subsequently it turns out that they've been working on Core Image.

This makes sense as one of TIFFany's real strengths (and one of the many reasons why I still use it) was its exceptionally fast handling of large images. It could, for instance, rotate a 600dpi A3 image IN REAL TIME while the Photoshop user would still be waiting for the progress bar to appear...

I find myself wondering whether Apple have had it in mind to build the core foundation for a killer graphics app of their own. TIFFany's underpinnings coupled with Apple's understanding of what makes a good GUI could be interesting...
 
tersono said:
There used to be a small software house called Caffeine Software. They developed a high-end photo editing application for NeXTSTEP back in the early days. The application was called TIFFany and won a number of prestigious awards.
Click to expand...

Wait, first let me ask the gullible question...since you had pure conjecture as your subject. Is this real software? How usable is it, as of when they stopped developing it? What happened to it? Did it get OSS'd when the company shut down? Just curious.... were it around, I'd like to check it out.
 
mkrishnan said:
Wait, first let me ask the gullible question...since you had pure conjecture as your subject. Is this real software? How usable is it, as of when they stopped developing it? What happened to it? Did it get OSS'd when the company shut down? Just curious.... were it around, I'd like to check it out.
Click to expand...

The conjecture was about where Apple are going with this :p

Yes, TIFFANY is real software *grin*. I've used it for years on both OS X and its predecessors - they'll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands ;). Photoshop has more features, but once you've gotten used to TIFFany's rather eccentric GUI (and I'll warn ya - it takes a while), it's hard to go back - everything else feels positively glacial by comparison.

http://www.caffeinesoft.com/

Caffeine's software (TIFFany, PixelNHance and Curator) is available for download, but it's not been OSS'd or made available as freeware, unfortunately. I believe Stone Design still have distribution rights for it, but given that we can never know when an OS update is gonna break it, it's a risky proposition at best. :(
 
Yeah, TIFFany (and all the other Caffeine Software apps), can be downloaded from the Caffeine Software Website. I guess they are all free, since there's nothing on the website about paying, but you're kinda forced to download them all at once, they're four, the ones tersono said plus one called Cycles, 56MB download.

jmsait19 said:
Isn't Canvas already an illustrator-type program??
Click to expand...
Yes, I swear I didn't know, but after a little Googling I found ACD Canvas. It's like the intermediate photo editing app we were talking about, so if someone would like to give it a try, there's a free trial on the page, just scroll down. It has a really good name, though :p

[edit: TIFFany is owned by Stone Design Studio, like tersono said, it can be bought here, it keeps the same price it had before the company closed, $444 (read a review from 2002 that said the app costed $444 in that time)]
 
If Adobe chooses not to use core image technology in future generations of Photoshop, I would honestly not be surprised if Apple developed their own competitor in house; and I would welcome it. As it has been said before, competition yields greater products for consumers, so even if Adobe DOES use the new technology, I wouldn't mind seeing competition to Photoshop.
 
I don't think it's a good idea for Apple to kill of all it's software producers. They need to make good software, of course - but give others a chance. Competition is only good as long as it is not turning into a monopoly.
 
hackand said:
[edit: TIFFany is owned by Stone Design Studio, like tersono said, it can be bought here, it keeps the same price it had before the company closed, $444 (read a review from 2002 that said the app costed $444 in that time)]
Click to expand...

That's so strange...even on the page from which you can purchase it, you can also download it. But I guess you won't really have a license. I wonder if it needs a key? Well, oh, well, I'm just curious. I'm downloading it anyway. :D
 
Lets see, what I can confirm...

(1) That Caffeine Software's primary developer is at Apple. What he is working on I am not open to discuss (and neither is he).
(2) TIFFany and the rest of the Caffeine Software apps are not owned by Stone Design. Andrew is a friend of Stan and has made space available for selling TIFFany3 on the Stone Store site.
(3) TIFFany and the other Caffeine Software apps are unsupported. Still, they were updated for the Mac OS X v10.3 release. While I'm not saying that I was told that there will be another update for 10.4, if problems pop up that don't require too much work, I would guess that another silent update will be made.
(4) That having been said, if you are running 10.3.x and are using a version of TIFFany3 from before October 2003, you should replace it with the one on the Caffeine Software web page.
(5) I don't know if or how many people tried to download the Caffeine Software bundle a month and a half ago, but the link was broken. Andrew has been kind enough to host the actual disk image, but with some problems with mirrors (mainly Peanuts actually) he was force to move his software elsewhere. I let Stan know of the problem when I found out about it and it was fixed the same day.​
I think that covers the basic stuff.

:rolleyes:

Oh, anyone still using NEXTSTEP who would like to use TIFFany2 (version 2.404 actually) for free can contact me for a license string and a link for downloading the software. I have been given permission by Caffeine Software to make this version available, though I highly suggest (and recommend) TIFFany3 for OPENSTEP, Rhapsody and Mac OS X users.
 
sebisworld said:
I don't think it's a good idea for Apple to kill of all it's software producers. They need to make good software, of course - but give others a chance. Competition is only good as long as it is not turning into a monopoly.
Click to expand...
The point of Core Image is that it will allow anyone to develop a kick-@$$ image editor. Adobe is free to adopt Core Image if it so chooses. I would love for Lemkesoft to port GraphicConverter to Core Image.
 
MisterMe said:
The point of Core Image is that it will allow anyone to develop a kick-@$$ image editor. Adobe is free to adopt Core Image if it so chooses. I would love for Lemkesoft to port GraphicConverter to Core Image.
Click to expand...
Well, from what I've seen and heard so far (which isn't much), CoreImage will allow anyone to develop kick-@$$ image editor in Cocoa.

GraphicConverter is a Carbon app.

The most likely candidate for using CoreImage at this point would be ToyViewer.
 
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