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I really wish the Pixelmator guys will do a product in this category. They've already got the core engine, and they have a perfect 100% intersection with the Ap

I really wish the Pixelmator guys will do a product in this category. They've already got the core engine, and they have a perfect 100% intersection with the Aperture userbase (Mac-only). I for one would like to see a OSX-only photo editing suite. If it's anything like Pixelmator (no UI/UX compromises for the sake of cross-platform, insanely fast hardware-accelerated-everything) it'd be a real treat.

oddevan 12y ago
I'll second that with some hope: if this is a standard system library like it is on iOS, then they should be able to at least have an "edit in Pixelmator" extension for the system photo library.
macwarlock 12y ago
Agreed, building on Pixelmator seems like a great fit. If nothing else, another great product from the team that's already creating some Photoshop converts would hopefully be a shot across Adobe's bow to keep them active in development of Lightroom.
hcarvalhoalves 12y ago
Photo editing (non-destructive) is nothing like bitmap editing, I don't see how they are well positioned for coming up with a product.
- potatolicious 12y ago
  The same way Adobe was well positioned to coming up with a product in the same category. Photo editing is bitmap editing, and Pixelmator is well positioned to implement the non-destructive property. By virtue of being OSX-only, they can abstract out the trickiness of RAW conversion (something Adobe must heavily invest in by virtue of being cross-platform), and rely on Apple's very good implementations instead. (side note: Apple is sometimes faster to implement RAW demosaicing support than Adobe itself). This simplifies the problem to purely that of bitmap editing. It's important to note that unlike Lightroom, Pixelmator is already hardware accelerated from top to bottom, this allows real-time rendering of the entire edit stack on top of the unaltered original data, potentially giving us much more responsive feedback as users (sliding a slider and having it respond with much less lag than Lightroom, for example).
georgemcbay 12y ago
The amount of work required for software of this type that can reasonably compete with Lightroom is really massive. Beyond the obvious editing features you've got colorspace handling issues that most image editors don't bother with (Pixelmator actually handles this fairly well already), the need for a very robust plugin system, non-destructive editing, cataloging features (including image stacks), and a huge amount of largely unnoticed work that goes into simply keeping up with RAW formats for new cameras as well as profiles (for automatic CA/distortion fixing) for new camera/lens combinations.
- Osmium 12y ago
  > a huge amount of largely unnoticed work that goes into simply keeping up with RAW formats for new cameras Could this be largely mitigated by only working with DNG files and letting Adobe handle the conversion? Their RAW->DNG converter is free after all.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - berkut 12y ago
    At a speed cost penalty of converting to an intermediate format first - yes.
  - georgemcbay 12y ago
    You could go that way but it introduces an extra step and overall extra complexity in file handling and a big part of the value proposition of something like Lightroom is making the photo editing workflow as painless as possible. It is hard to describe how valuable that workflow simplicity is but it is a real thing; if I had to RAW process and edit all my photos using DPP (Canon's RAW editor, for my 70D), or Sony's RAW editor (for my A7) or even RawTherapee (an open source RAW processor that actually does a good job of supporting lots of RAW formats), I could do so, but yet I pay Adobe $10 a month to give me a really nice workflow for all of this. It certainly wouldn't be impossible for a Pixelmator-like competitor to emerge for Lightroom, it'd just be a lot of work for a small team; perhaps more work than it would seem at first blush since there's a lot of complexity hiding behind a relatively simple UI there.

oddevan 12y ago

I'll second that with some hope: if this is a standard system library like it is on iOS, then they should be able to at least have an "edit in Pixelmator" extension for the system photo library.

macwarlock 12y ago

Agreed, building on Pixelmator seems like a great fit. If nothing else, another great product from the team that's already creating some Photoshop converts would hopefully be a shot across Adobe's bow to keep them active in development of Lightroom.

hcarvalhoalves 12y ago

Photo editing (non-destructive) is nothing like bitmap editing, I don't see how they are well positioned for coming up with a product.

potatolicious 12y ago
The same way Adobe was well positioned to coming up with a product in the same category. Photo editing is bitmap editing, and Pixelmator is well positioned to implement the non-destructive property. By virtue of being OSX-only, they can abstract out the trickiness of RAW conversion (something Adobe must heavily invest in by virtue of being cross-platform), and rely on Apple's very good implementations instead. (side note: Apple is sometimes faster to implement RAW demosaicing support than Adobe itself). This simplifies the problem to purely that of bitmap editing. It's important to note that unlike Lightroom, Pixelmator is already hardware accelerated from top to bottom, this allows real-time rendering of the entire edit stack on top of the unaltered original data, potentially giving us much more responsive feedback as users (sliding a slider and having it respond with much less lag than Lightroom, for example).

georgemcbay 12y ago

The amount of work required for software of this type that can reasonably compete with Lightroom is really massive. Beyond the obvious editing features you've got colorspace handling issues that most image editors don't bother with (Pixelmator actually handles this fairly well already), the need for a very robust plugin system, non-destructive editing, cataloging features (including image stacks), and a huge amount of largely unnoticed work that goes into simply keeping up with RAW formats for new cameras as well as profiles (for automatic CA/distortion fixing) for new camera/lens combinations.

Osmium 12y ago
> a huge amount of largely unnoticed work that goes into simply keeping up with RAW formats for new cameras Could this be largely mitigated by only working with DNG files and letting Adobe handle the conversion? Their RAW->DNG converter is free after all.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- berkut 12y ago
  At a speed cost penalty of converting to an intermediate format first - yes.
- georgemcbay 12y ago
  You could go that way but it introduces an extra step and overall extra complexity in file handling and a big part of the value proposition of something like Lightroom is making the photo editing workflow as painless as possible. It is hard to describe how valuable that workflow simplicity is but it is a real thing; if I had to RAW process and edit all my photos using DPP (Canon's RAW editor, for my 70D), or Sony's RAW editor (for my A7) or even RawTherapee (an open source RAW processor that actually does a good job of supporting lots of RAW formats), I could do so, but yet I pay Adobe $10 a month to give me a really nice workflow for all of this. It certainly wouldn't be impossible for a Pixelmator-like competitor to emerge for Lightroom, it'd just be a lot of work for a small team; perhaps more work than it would seem at first blush since there's a lot of complexity hiding behind a relatively simple UI there.