Apple working on a Photoshop rival?

Along with the revelation of some details on some upcoming features of Adobe Creative Suite 3, ThinkSecret hints at the possibility that Apple will launch their own professional photo editing application, potentially competing with Adobe Photoshop.

Adobe recently asked for feedback from its customers through a survey, one page of this survey compared Photoshop to a program called "Apple Photo Pro". But it’s not clear if it’s a fictitious program that Adobe imagined or if the company knows a bit more about Apple’s future software releases.

According to ThinkSecret's sources who had already mentioned a such development in Apple labs, Photo Pro will be a sort of "iPhoto in steroids" that will not really compete with Photoshop. The site also reveals some features that were listed in the survey’s Photo Pro description.

Since the early days of the two companies, Apple and Adobe have always been in a very close partnership. First releases of Photoshop were only available for Mac. Adobe then ported its profesionnal photo editing software to Windows and became one of the leading software players of the industry. However, the company started generating more revenues from its Windows software than its Mac software.

Things have evolved downward during the last five years, as Apple released Mac OS X and more importantly Final Cut Pro. Now the companies are in a paradoxal situation of "compete-partnership", as Apple's Final Cut Pro has became a big rival of Adobe Premiere which has since been discontinued on the Mac. Apple recently made another move that could hurt Adobe in the near future. The company released a set of API's (CoreImage and CoreVideo) that will help developers to easily create applications that can compete with Adobe's products.