We photograph with intention. Our tools should be extensions of that. Existing editors are dense, slow, and soulless. Relics that predate how photographers work today. Aphera brings back the flow. A native Mac RAW editor built around speed, craft, and images that feel alive.
The team
Ryan Carver
Ryan Carver has been making photographs and software since an early age. It came naturally, growing up in a household of Hasselblads, Mamiyas, and a Mac 128k. From those beginnings he's practiced creative outlets of many kinds, but his most natural medium is a text editor. After the wild creativity of Flash and HTML in the early 2000s, plus a stint at Google, he co-founded the webfont service Typekit, soon acquired by Adobe. There he brought Adobe Fonts to Creative Cloud, putting Typekit's library on every designer's desktop. In 2015 he began making his way back to photography by joining VSCO as head of product, guiding the release of their successful subscription service. But he missed building, so returned to code with Series, a photo layout app for iOS loved by photographers, and an excuse to work at the intersection of imaging and interaction design. That project turned out to be a rehearsal for Aphera.
Naz Hamid
Naz Hamid is a designer, photographer, and writer. Driven by the early web, he explored blogs, dove deep in design portals and forums, and practiced it all with a triplet of sites: a blog, a photo blog, and a design portfolio. Design took hold and in 2000 he founded Weightshift, an acclaimed studio whose work shaped the visual language of a generation of digital products. From 2016–2018 he joined VSCO to redesign the iOS app, launch memberships, and lead design on creator-driven features — developing a deep fluency in how photographers think, share, and see. He has since worked as a Creative Director and founding designer for a range of companies, always drawn back to the intersection of craft and tools. Aphera is the tool he always wanted to make.
Juan Pablo Zambrano
Juan Pablo Zambrano is a Color Engineer by practice, a Chemical Engineer by education, and a Software Developer by chance. Growing up in a household of programmers, he was encouraged to chase every interest, from the arts to the sciences, while successfully avoiding a terminal for most of his life. That changed with image editing, which combined both sides. After learning the fundamentals from film industry experts, Juan Pablo realized the existing tools couldn't quite keep up with his vision. He began building his own, starting with 2499-DRT. What began as a personal solution soon powered hundreds of global projects — from Oscar-nominated shorts and television series to commercial campaigns for the world's biggest brands — and contributes to one of the industry's leading film emulation plugins. That lifelong pursuit of the "perfect" tool eventually led him to build Aphera.