Apple has purchased the company, Patchflyer, behind the popular color.io website – unfortunately the website was shutdown at the end of 2025. It was described as “the easiest and the most intuitive color grading software to learn about color grading” by Reddit user GranitePixelStudios.
Historical photos of the color.io website show features like “Copy. Paste. Color.” – this kind of feature has been part of Adobe Photoshop for a while now (Match Color), and can now be found as ‘Color Transfer’ in the AI based Neural filters – the idea being that you can recreate a colour palette or look from one image, and apply it to others. Colour grading is an essential feature for giving images or video a certain look, so the style matches throughout your project or film.
So, it will be interesting to see what Apple does with this technology – perhaps it will end up in Apple’s iPhones as a new colour grading tool for photos and video, or perhaps become part of the editing process, letting you change your photos after you’ve taken them. The other place this technology could end up is in Apple’s own photo and video editing software.
The Mac Observer say that the tool, color.io, was used by 200,000 creators, and 9to5Mac suggest this is a new direction for Apple, putting a stronger focus on creators, and further strengthening the Creator Studio package, which competes directly with Adobe’s Creative Cloud package. Only time will tell, when Apple make an official announcement about this sometime in the future.
Related reading:
- How to do colour grading: get cinematic shots
- These are the best photo editing apps to use
- The 10 best AI photo editing tools
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