PhotoFlash is Apple's own photo-enhancement and -cataloging program. While it doesn’t offer the image-editing power of Adobe Photoshop, it does provide the basic tools you need to enhance, resize, and retouch images acquired from a scanner or digital camera and then organize those images for placement in desktop publishing programs. With the release of version 2.0, Apple has vastly improved the program’s cataloging features, added support for the Apple QuickTake 100 digital camera, and cut the price in half.
PhotoFlash handles images saved in PICT, TIFF, JPEG, Photo CD, EPS, and DCS file formats. (It can also read native Photoshop files but can’t save files in that format.) You can easily convert files from one type to another, employing any of several file-compression options.
The program’s image-enhancement tools cover the basics: brightness, contrast, overall exposure, and color balance. But PhotoFlash doesn’t include tools for editing individual color channels, creating masks, or applying sophisticated special effects. (The program does support many of Photoshop’s plug-in filters, but it’s not compatible with some of the more powerful distortion filters.)
The 14 tools on PhotoFlash’s tool palette include a variety of standard selection tools, as well as tools for cropping, resizing, rotating, blurring, and sharpening. Two unique tools are DeDust, which automatically removes specks in otherwise solid fields of color, and DeScratch, which removes thin scratches that might mar a scanned image. Predictably, it’s sometimes difficult for PhotoFlash to distinguish between genuine hairline scratches and normal portions of a complex image, so these tools must be used with caution. Fortunately, you can finetune their sensitivity using the Enhance dialog box.
PhotoFlash includes cataloging features that let you quickly organize groups of images in searchable catalogs. Images are displayed as thumbnails and can be sorted by fde name or date. You can add an image to a catalog simply by dragging the image’s icon onto an open catalog window. PhotoFlash can catalog the contents of an entire disk by scanning the disk for images and adding to the catalog each one that it finds.
You can search catalogs by file name or by a specific string of caption text, and PhotoFlash will create a new catalog containing images that meet the search criteria. Version 2.0 also allows you to search by sketch — you draw a crude thumbnail using a few basic painting tools, and PhotoFlash will find images that roughly match your sketch. In addition, you can search for an image by similarity; choose an image, and PhotoFlash will automatically select any other images that match it in basic color and composition. I found that PhotoFlash had more misses than hits at finding images based on sketch or similarity, but the feature can be useful as a last resort.
One of PhotoFlash’s real strengths is its extensive support of AppleScript. PhotoFlash comes with several useful scripts that automate the program’s functions and integrate it with other applications. Scripts can place an image in QuarkXPress, PageMaker 5.0, Persuasion 3.0, Word 6.0, and FileMaker Pro 2.1 layouts. To record a new script, you simply click on the Record button located on the floating script palette, perform a series of actions, and then save the script.
The Last Word
PhotoFlash doesn’t have the image processing capabilities of Photoshop — but it also costs about $800 less. It handles all the basic image-enhancement tasks a casual desktop publisher is likely to need and provides a simple, uncluttered interface for organizing images, improving their general appearance, and placing them in other programs.
Schorr, Joseph. (July 1995). PhotoFlash 2.0. Macworld. (pgs. 67, 69).
Apple Computer, Inc.
Applications
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Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
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