Latent Co.’s New Aphera RAW Editor

credits: Latent Co.

Aphera is a new RAW photo editor built for macOS, with a focus on speed, colour, and a simpler editing workflow. It comes from Latent Co., a small team made up of photographers Ryan Carver and Naz Hamid and colour engineer/software developer Juan Pablo Zambrano. Carver and Hamid have both previously worked with VSCO, and the team says Aphera partly came from their frustration with how complicated and preset-heavy RAW editing software has become. The app has its own imaging pipeline and is designed to handle up to 100MP RAW files in real time.

The editing tools are mostly based around film-inspired colour and manual control. Aphera combines its own colour science with handcrafted Looks and a colour-grading system influenced by analog photography and cinema. Editing is completely non-destructive, with culling tools, bulk editing, keyboard controls, project organisation, and the ability to create and save your own Looks. There are profiles for hundreds of camera and lens combinations, along with support for multiple export formats. Lightroom is an obvious comparison given the combination of RAW processing and organisation, but the developers say that they are not trying to match Adobe feature for feature. The focus is more on keeping the workflow relatively lean while still providing proper colour and RAW controls.

Now, let us talk about pricing, which is a little strange and judging by comments on the internet, most photographers are not really liking it. A lifetime license costs $99. That purchase lets you keep using the software permanently and includes one year of updates. After that year, you can continue using your existing version without paying anything. If you later want the newest updates, another year costs $99. So, for example, you could skip two years of updates, keep using Aphera in the meantime, and then pay $99 again when you decide the newer features are worth upgrading for.