New photo app for Mac and Windows!

[thegman]

Hi all,
Just an intro thread for a new photo application for Windows and Mac, which you may have seen advertised among the homepage banners of RFF.

As you can see from my post count, I've been on RFF a while, and so has my brother Moray (mugent). As well as both being photographers/camera fondlers, we're also software developers and after quite a while of thinking about it, we finally decided to go ahead an write a photo manager/manipulation package.

It's called Emulsion on the Mac, and Halide on Windows.

Essentially Halide and Emulsion are photo managers along the lines of Lightroom. We've got some great editing tools and filters built in, running very fast on the GPU of your PC or Mac.

We've got some great RAW support, and the Mac version can even uses some Aperture plugins. The Windows version hooks straight into the RAW codec system on Windows, so if you're using the FastPictureViewer CODEC Pack, that'll work right away on Windows to open up a load of different RAW formats.

Moray and I are both film and digital users, and although digital users are well served with this type of application, we want to hear from both parties on what features are priority.

We're working on new features right now, but what we really need is for RFF members to tell us what they want!

Please go ahead and get our 30 day trials for Windows:

Halide

and for the Mac:

Emulsion

And we'd love to hear what you think.

We'd also like to offer all RFF members 20% off the intro price of $49.99, so if you decide to buy, please use the discount code 'RFF' on our checkout.

The Mac version is on the App Store, just search for 'Emulsion', but we can't make the discount work there I'm afraid.

Please let us know what you think!

Thanks

Garry

 

[thegman]

Shame, it unfortunately rather tricky as a Mac developer to keep supporting the older version while still use the features of the new versions...

 

[jmilkins]

Congratulations Garry and moray - a fine achievement and I wish you every success.

Getting off the Linux bus now and booting up the Alienware to go have a look at Hallide. I enjoyed reading your blog on other topics too. Might have to get a Surface tab to go portable - thanks for the review.

 

[thegman]

Thanks John, funny you should mention Alienware, I was looking at one just today in JB Hifi (an Australia electronics shop), I like the Surface, but the Alienware just looks like a monster (in a good way).

 

[x-ray]

Without support for older OS (Mac) I won't be using it. I have no plans to update from Lion due to too many issues with newer OS. I went to Mountain Lion and my Mac Pro will no longer maintain my monitor profile and I constantly get messages popping up. I wound up putting a new SSD in it and going back to Lion.

No Yosimete for me because my Wacom tablet will not work on it.

Simply too many issues with each updated OS from Mac and no interest in spending a few thousand dollars for new hardware every time Apple thinks they have a better idea.

Thanks for the thought anyway.

 

[thegman]

Without support for older OS (Mac) I won't be using it. I have no plans to update from Lion due to too many issues with newer OS. I went to Mountain Lion and my Mac Pro will no longer maintain my monitor profile and I constantly get messages popping up. I wound up putting a new SSD in it and going back to Lion.

No Yosimete for me because my Wacom tablet will not work on it.

Simply too many issues with each updated OS from Mac and no interest in spending a few thousand dollars for new hardware every time Apple thinks they have a better idea.

Thanks for the thought anyway.

I felt the same way when Oracle dropped support for Solaris on anything older than a T-series SPARC, it was just to sell more hardware, the older kit was way powerful enough...

 

[x-ray]

Not to hijack the thread but I feel Mac has complety forgotten the pro user. I don't care about IPhoto, sending and sharing little JPGs and music with the kids or any of the fluff Apple is building in. I want an OS that just runs my computer, nothing more. No built in apps other than a web browser so I can activate software when I load it. I work on my Mac Pro and that's it. It's a tool and nothing more. I wish they would creat an OS and leave it alone for 5 years. Leave things alone!!!

 

[CameraQuest]

Hi all,
Just an intro thread for a new photo application for Windows and Mac, which you may have seen advertised among the homepage banners of RFF.

As you can see from my post count, I've been on RFF a while, and so has my brother Moray (mugent). As well as both being photographers/camera fondlers, we're also software developers and after quite a while of thinking about it, we finally decided to go ahead an write a photo manager/manipulation package.

It's called Emulsion on the Mac, and Halide on Windows.

Essentially Halide and Emulsion are photo managers along the lines of Lightroom. We've got some great editing tools and filters built in, running very fast on the GPU of your PC or Mac.

We've got some great RAW support, and the Mac version can even uses some Aperture plugins. The Windows version hooks straight into the RAW codec system on Windows, so if you're using the FastPictureViewer CODEC Pack, that'll work right away on Windows to open up a load of different RAW formats.

Moray and I are both film and digital users, and although digital users are well served with this type of application, we want to hear from both parties on what features are priority.

We're working on new features right now, but what we really need is for RFF members to tell us what they want!

Please go ahead and get our 30 day trials for Windows:

Halide

and for the Mac:

Emulsion

And we'd love to hear what you think.

We'd also like to offer all RFF members 20% off the intro price of $49.99, so if you decide to buy, please use the discount code 'RFF' on our checkout.

The Mac version is on the App Store, just search for 'Emulsion', but we can't make the discount work there I'm afraid.

Please let us know what you think!

Thanks

Garry

What are the advantages / disadvantages of your sofware compared to Lightroom ?

Stephen

 

[Godfrey]

Hi Garry,

Congratulations on building and shipping a new software product!

I've been using Lightroom since about beta 2, but I'm always interested to see what else comes available. Since I keep OS X and my Apple hardware up to date, it will be easy to test Emulsion and see what it's all about.

Thanks for the RFF discount too.

G

 

[thegman]

Hi Garry,

Congratulations on building and shipping a new software product!

I've been using Lightroom since about beta 2, but I'm always interested to see what else comes available. Since I keep OS X and my Apple hardware up to date, it will be easy to test Emulsion and see what it's all about.

Thanks for the RFF discount too.

G

Thanks Godfrey, I used to use Lightroom too (but on Windows, Moray is the Mac guy), and I liked it in general, but I guess with a lot of Adobe stuff, it does tend to just get bigger, and bigger, and bigger.

Cheers!

Garry

 

[thegman]

What are the advantages / disadvantages of your sofware compared to Lightroom ?

Stephen

Hi Stephen,
Well, I think the big advantage is the same as the disadvantage, we're a really small business vs. a very big business. The good thing about that is that we can respond to users' requests really quick, we had a user just a week or so ago, report an issue with a RAF RAW file, and we can get that tested and fixed with an update out the door in a day or two.

Of course though, although we can be more responsive than a big company like Adobe, we don't have the resources either, so they can more easily integrate with Photoshop etc. while we need to "take the long way round" as it were.

On a technical level, our file format is an open, textual, JSON format, it basically means no lock-in, you can open up our file format and read it easily.

Another thing we've got going for us is that Halide and Emulsion are completely separate applications, not a word of code in common. It's not a slighty dodgy port from Windows to Mac, or the other way round. On the Mac, we use all the Mac technologies like Core Image to make a 100% native Mac experience, and on Windows, we're using .NET, HLSL, and all the multi-processing capability we can get. I think with cross-platform applications, you often end up with a 'lowest common denominator' approach, whereas with us, you've got a pure Mac app, and a pure Windows app.

But I think for me, the big thing is that we're a two man band, if you want to us to put in a feature, we probably can, and we can do it fast. You don't have to wait until next year for the next iteration.

Cheers

Garry

 

[Rob-F]

Another Luddite here, still running Snow Leopard. I've thought of getting a more recent version that will still run on my OS X 10.6.8. Would that be good enough to run Emulsion? Which version would that be?

 

[thegman]

Another Luddite here, still running Snow Leopard. I've thought of getting a more recent version that will still run on my OS X 10.6.8. Would that be good enough to run Emulsion? Which version would that be?

Emulsion needs Mac OS X 'Yosemite', which is version 10.10, so unfortunately not. Not sure what hardware you're running, but my Mac Mini is kind of old and can still run Yosemite, although if you need compatibility with some other software or hardware, have to be careful about upgrading.

 

[BillBingham2]

The other frugal Mac user here have taken their swings so I'll avoid being too you-should-have.......

First off CONTRATS on shipping! Way cool. You have enough older windows support (win 7) that I'll give it a swing in a week or two (coming week and a half are crazy full). I'm wondering what the 32 vs 64 bit speed will be. I've got an older PC with just 4 GB of main memory for another week. Upgrading to a book-sized PC with more memory, USB 3 and a bit faster processor (quadcore).

For the weird folk like me I wish there was a way to pay for one license (perhaps at $55 or so) that would give me the ability to run a copy of each on my systems.

Again, congrats and best wishing to you and the team. I will purchase a copy in a couple of months as cash flow gets better. Love to support small companies.

B2 (;->

 

[v3cron]

Just dowloaded the demo, and I'm not seeing an easy way to sequence images - just sorting. I'm all about finding a Lightroom-killer (now that Affinity is killing PS), but I definitely need to be able to put images in order and play around with portfolio edits, etc. It's 50% of what I use LR for.

Nice effort, though. Keep it up!

 

[thegman]

The other frugal Mac user here have taken their swings so I'll avoid being too you-should-have.......

First off CONTRATS on shipping! Way cool. You have enough older windows support (win 7) that I'll give it a swing in a week or two (coming week and a half are crazy full). I'm wondering what the 32 vs 64 bit speed will be. I've got an older PC with just 4 GB of main memory for another week. Upgrading to a book-sized PC with more memory, USB 3 and a bit faster processor (quadcore).

For the weird folk like me I wish there was a way to pay for one license (perhaps at $55 or so) that would give me the ability to run a copy of each on my systems.

Again, congrats and best wishing to you and the team. I will purchase a copy in a couple of months as cash flow gets better. Love to support small companies.

B2 (;->

Hi Bill,
The license is per-user, so we're totally cool with you running on more than one computer.

Cheers

Garry

 

[thegman]

Just dowloaded the demo, and I'm not seeing an easy way to sequence images - just sorting. I'm all about finding a Lightroom-killer (now that Affinity is killing PS), but I definitely need to be able to put images in order and play around with portfolio edits, etc. It's 50% of what I use LR for.

Nice effort, though. Keep it up!

Hi there,
Can you let me know if you're using Mac or PC, and also explain what you mean by 'sequence', email me at gt@theescapers.com and I'll see what I can do.

Cheers

Garry

 

[thegman]

In the library module, LR allows the user to create a Quick Collection of images with a custom sequence. In Survey View with all Quick Collection files selected, the user can alter the order of images by dragging them around the workspace. If a user then exports the collection via the file menu or a template in the print module, they will be printed in the order defined.

The ability to play around with the order of images comes in handy when trying to visualize how a series of images work together.

Right I see, shouldn't be too big of a deal to implement something like that, I'll take a look.

 

[anerjee]

Do you provide tools to do negative inversions in your software?

I would switch from Lightroom in a heartbeat if I can do inversions in a natural way from RAW tiffs in a Lightroom equivalent (i.e. not have to go to Photoshop etc.).

Anyways, will try this over the weekend. Congrats on shipping the software!

Hi all,
Just an intro thread for a new photo application for Windows and Mac, which you may have seen advertised among the homepage banners of RFF.

As you can see from my post count, I've been on RFF a while, and so has my brother Moray (mugent). As well as both being photographers/camera fondlers, we're also software developers and after quite a while of thinking about it, we finally decided to go ahead an write a photo manager/manipulation package.

It's called Emulsion on the Mac, and Halide on Windows.

Essentially Halide and Emulsion are photo managers along the lines of Lightroom. We've got some great editing tools and filters built in, running very fast on the GPU of your PC or Mac.

We've got some great RAW support, and the Mac version can even uses some Aperture plugins. The Windows version hooks straight into the RAW codec system on Windows, so if you're using the FastPictureViewer CODEC Pack, that'll work right away on Windows to open up a load of different RAW formats.

Moray and I are both film and digital users, and although digital users are well served with this type of application, we want to hear from both parties on what features are priority.

We're working on new features right now, but what we really need is for RFF members to tell us what they want!

Please go ahead and get our 30 day trials for Windows:

Halide

and for the Mac:

Emulsion

And we'd love to hear what you think.

We'd also like to offer all RFF members 20% off the intro price of $49.99, so if you decide to buy, please use the discount code 'RFF' on our checkout.

The Mac version is on the App Store, just search for 'Emulsion', but we can't make the discount work there I'm afraid.

Please let us know what you think!

Thanks

Garry

 

[thegman]

Do you provide tools to do negative inversions in your software?

I would switch from Lightroom in a heartbeat if I can do inversions in a natural way from RAW tiffs in a Lightroom equivalent (i.e. not have to go to Photoshop etc.).

Anyways, will try this over the weekend. Congrats on shipping the software!

If you mean simply to invert the colours, yes, it's a filter same as everything else in Halide/Emulsion:

https://halideapp.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/image4.png

Then you can either save a version or export the image.

Cheers

Garry