The latest merger and acquisition disclosure documents released by the European Union recently show that Apple acquired a small independent company called Patchflyer in January this year. Patchflyer is wholly owned by independent developer Jonathan Ochmann, the creator of the popular web-based color correction tool Color.io. This online color grading service for photographers and film and television creators is very popular in the imaging community because of its easy-to-use yet powerful functions.
According to disclosed information, Apple has not only completed the acquisition of Color.io, but also officially hired Ochmann to join the company. As early as November last year, Ochmann announced that Color.io would shut down at the end of 2025 and said that he would join a company that would allow him to display his capabilities on a larger scale. He wrote in a statement at the time that after more than ten years of taking over product development and operations by one person, he had reached a stage where he needed to achieve self-growth as a non-"individual developer".
Color.io is known for being "easy to use but highly professional" and focuses on adding film-like color and texture effects to photos. This service is based on a self-developed color engine and custom color model, with rich built-in color processing tools suitable for different types of image post-production needs. Prior to founding Color.io, Ochmann designed the popular VisionColor LUT presets to power professional film and television post-production and color correction workflows.
According to the previous shutdown plan, Color.io was officially offline on December 31, 2025, and the service provided more than 200,000 users with a buffer and notification period of approximately five weeks before termination. As Ochmann joins Apple, his years of accumulation in color engines and color correction tools are expected to continue to unlock value through Apple's software products. The industry generally believes that Color.io’s related capabilities may be integrated into professional video editing tools such as Final Cut Pro in the future, or benefit applications such as Pixelmator Pro through cooperation.
EU documents also show that Apple completed its acquisition of PromptAI during the same time period, but the deal was previously unknown to the outside world. PromptAI is a start-up company specializing in computer vision technology. Its application Seemour mainly provides enhanced functions for home security cameras to identify people, pets, animals and other objects in the picture. Through the continuous acquisition of vertical technology teams such as Color.io and PromptAI, Apple is further enriching its technical reserves in the fields of image processing and computer vision, laying the foundation for the subsequent expansion of software and hardware integration capabilities.