When Apple retired Aperture, it created space in the market for other photo editing applications to fill. At Macworld today, I review Picktorial 3.0, which focuses only on edits that photographers would make (i.e., it’s not an all-purpose image editor the way Photoshop or Pixelmator are).
It also has a novel way of storing its edits: Unlike Lightroom or Photos for Mac, there’s no central database that keeps track of where images are stored on disk and which edits have been applied. Instead, edits are written to the .xmp metadata file (for raw images) or directly to the image file itself (for JPEGs). It’s still completely non-destructive, but you can share the images in any manner—like Dropbox or iCloud—and when you open them in Picktorial on another Mac, all your edits are there and configurable.
That’s a boon even if you use Photos to manage your library. The Picktorial editing extension lets you edit using Picktorial’s tools directly within Photos, but unlike every other editor I can think of, you can go back later and adjust the edits you made; normally, when you edit a photo using an extension, that edited version is baked-in, and the only option is to revert to the original photo if you don’t like how it turned out.
One more thing that’s impressive about Picktorial, which didn’t make it into the review, was my interaction with the company. I found a few ugly bugs when I first started to play with version 3.0 (a masking issue and the way the application was rendering FujiFilm raw files) and contacted them through their general support address. They fixed those issues promptly, often with one-day turnarounds. Although they recognized my name from my Web site, they didn’t know I was writing a review of the software, so I’m inclined to think they would be as attentive to any customer.
The review is here: Picktorial 3.0 review: A fresh approach to photo editing and management.
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Jeff Carlson | Never Enough Coffee Creations 