Picktorial: A New Jerusalem Startup Reimagines Photo Editing
For a long time, desktop photo editing has been the province of Adobe Photoshop — software so popular that its very name has become synonymous with retouching. Into that field steps Picktorial, a three-year old startup from Jerusalem, which aims to grab market share from Photoshop — and Photoshop’s companion app, Lightroom — through a mix of innovative features, an easier user interface, and a more accessible price point.
Founders (and brothers) Yoav and Tomer HaCohen are proud Jerusalemites. Although they grew up right outside the city, they now both live and work in Jerusalem. Yoav, Picktorial’s CEO, was always enthusiastic about the science of photography. Since the start of his academic career at Hebrew University, he has long been passionate about advancing the science behind image processing, and eventually completed his PhD in the field of computational photography and image enhancement. His papers were published in four prestigious peer-reviewed venues. In 2013, Yoav teamed up with his brother Tomer (B.Sc. computer science), a budding photographer and an IDF technology unit alumnus, as well as their father, Yigal (M.Sc., computer science) an experienced manager and former VP at NDS (a software firm now owned by Cisco), to found Picktorial.
I asked about the name Picktorial, and its noticeable misspelling of the word “pictorial.” Tomer explained that Yoav’s wife, Ilana, came up with the name 3 years ago, when Picktorial was in its infancy. Moreover, he explained, Pictorialism was actually an artistic movement of the 19th and 20th centuries that involved photographers editing their images in more innovative ways that stretched the boundaries of both art and technology. The founders see Picktorial as the 21st century equivalent — using technology and computer science to stretch the boundaries of artistic possibility. Tomer added, “And just as the popularity of [photo sharing service] Flickr taught Google to stop asking ‘Did you mean flicker?’ we hope that Google will soon start asking if you meant Pictorial with a ‘k?’”
Picktorial’s simple, stated goal is to “make a professional-grade photo editor accessible to, and enjoyable for, both the general public and experienced photo editors.” Yoav expands, “We’ve worked hard to strike this balance — between power and simplicity — and it means that we’ve chosen to write robust code that offers that aforementioned power, while constantly iterating on a user interface that’s simple, smooth, and effective. This means that we aim to provide a lot of powerful editing features (the ability to edit RAW photos, to undo edits out-of-order, to retouch images, and so on), but in a very consumer-friendly way.”
This focus on the end user drives the Picktorial team. Photo editing can be a tough skill to master, and it’s become the core of the team’s goal to “bring that ability to mainstream users.” Yoav clarifies that “Picktorial is built for those who care about their photos but also care about their time, and appreciate high image-quality and a well-designed user experience. Professionals tell us that Picktorial reduces their editing time by 60% (for portrait images), and everyday enthusiasts tell us that it’s much easier to use than other professional-grade tools.”
For the founders, the creation of Picktorial was both enjoyable and challenging. “It’s tough to bootstrap a startup for three years” Yoav observes, “but we believed strongly in our mission, and we were really committed to bringing that goal to fruition.” But for the founders, both of whom are passionate about photography, the high points of the creation process are working with photographers to refine Picktorial’s feature set and interface. “It was exciting to see people actually work with our product” said Tomer, “and to see it grow to fit their needs. We took photographers’ feedback and improved Picktorial to match their use cases and made many changes so as to craft an intuitive UX. It was even more exciting to see people do better work, thanks to the features we’d implemented in Picktorial.”
Yoav and Tomer have fully embraced the Jerusalem tech scene, and the benefits it offers. The founders work out of Hebrew University’s Kfar Hi-Tech campus in Givat Ram, and they recently joined Siftech’s fifth startup accelerator round. “We deeply love this city,” says Tomer, “and we’re really happy to have the opportunity to be a part of the growing high tech community.”
Picktorial is available for download on the Mac App Store for an introductory price of $19.99 (regularly $39.99). A Windows version is in the works.
