Nik Bhatt (Raw Power dev) on the Apple Photos app

[peterwgallagher]

I missed this article from June 2019: https://tidbits.com/2019/06/14/the-ins-and-outs-of-non-destructive-editing-in-photos-for-mac-and-ios/

It's a thorough -- and not very complimentary -- discussion of the behaviour of Apple Photos (which I've previously written about here https://forum.luminous-landscape.com/index.php?topic=127928.0).

Nik Bhatt — formerly on Apple’s Aperture team — details the way in which Photos on both Mac OS and iOS interacts with apps that extend its functionality via a ‘plug-in’ architecture, including Raw Power, DXO, Affinity and Luminar. You might find it an interesting story if, like me, you're sort of attracted by Apple Photos because it handles RAW ‘natively’ and has very well-tuned ‘auto’ development functionality (and it’s ‘free’ and integrated into the Apple-verse).

There is no doubt that the current version of Photos needs extensions to extend its capabilities for serious use. It lacks lens corrections, dehaze, a good vignetting tool, sophisticated sharpening, detailed local repairs etc. But Bhatt explains why — in the interests of ‘re-entry’ to the editing process — the Photos app cripples its own interaction with extension programs that would like to provide these added bits and pieces.

Even if you don’t use Photos — I don’t, at present, for raw processing — this is a fascinating “developer’s” insight into the challenges of working in the (obscure, often arbitrary, “we’re a services/hardware company”) world of Apple software.

Nik is an Apple alumnus, so, I’m glad to see, isn’t planning to give up. In fact, if you read the comments on the article (recommended) you’ll see that there are rumours the next version of Mac OS (“Catalina”) will address some of the problems of extending Photos and may, finally, make it possible to combine Photos processing with an external DAM. Perhaps Nik is writing one for Raw Power.

For interest. Good wishes, Peter.

[Ray Harrison]

Thanks for posting this. I've been keeping an eye on RAW Power for a while and like Nik's work. I filed similar bugs/suggestions with Apple when Photos first came out - one to be able to track previous edits with other extensions/Photos and one to have the option to send TIFFs to extensions (instead of JPEGs). The former request was closed with "we can't do that, it works as designed", the latter remains open.

I actually like the "idea" of Photos, that companies that are really good at certain things (e.g. handling noise or lens corrections) could add extensions that allow one to use the best tool to accomplish certain tasks. Unfortunately, the idea has fallen flat with the inability to work in a higher quality image format. We'll see what Catalina brings. There are no specific outward changes to Photos that I've noticed in the betas, so hopefully some stuff under the covers. Even at the developer's conference in June, there wasn't a lot of attention paid to things like Core Image and other Photos centric frameworks (as opposed to previous years).