Today, we are witnessing what can be considered a creator economy boom—a phenomenon marked by the exponential increase in the number of people making a living as digital content creators. This growth is certainly fueled by the rising demand for such creators. Digital content creators typically work in areas like shooting, video production, editing, and further enhancing content to improve the quality of photos and videos or tailor them to client or market demands. Last year alone, the digital creation industry reached a staggering $104 billion. This figure reflects all the supporting sectors, especially mobile editing apps.
When we talk about mobile editing apps, we're referring to the constant development of technology. In this field, nothing stays the same for long—what remains constant is change and innovation. In 2024, the number of mobile app downloads has reached an impressive 255 billion, and global users are spending over 1 trillion hours engaging with apps and games. Apart from gaming, photo and video editing apps are among the most widely used categories. Given that most internet users access such content daily, the role of photo and video editing apps has become more critical than ever.
Over the years, the range of editing features has expanded, and it's clear that simplicity is no longer the goal. To keep up with these demands, editing technology must continue to evolve. As a result, experts in photo and video editing software have concluded that GPU-accelerated editing technology will be a key player in the coming years. It was the technology that captured Bogdan Redkin's heart and motivated him to write a book that we will discuss below.
What Is a GPU, and Why Is It Important for the Future of Photo and Video Editing?
GPU stands for Graphics Processing Unit—a computer chip specifically designed to handle graphics workloads on computing devices. Since the future of photo and video editing is driven by computing capabilities, the importance of GPUs cannot be overstated.
What Bogdan Redkin Aims to Convey in His Book Master Photo and Video Editing with Metal
Bogdan Redkin is a computer science writer and practitioner in the mobile app industry with extensive experience. He is also the co-founder of Fancy Tech, a company that provides photo and video editing solutions. For information, Fancy Tech's technological stack contains many high-performance components, including computer vision, AI-driven image generation, and GPU-accelerated photo editing. Bogdan's GPU-accelerated technology is developed within the framework of Metal, an Apple's shader API designed to handle graphics computing on low-level hardware. First introduced in iOS 8, Metal has proven to be highly effective.
The API provides low-overhead access to the GPU, allowing for efficient rendering, parallel processing, and optimized use of the GPU's power. It is particularly suited for 3D graphics, data-parallel computation, gaming, video processing, machine learning, and image/video rendering applications. The Metal ecosystem allows app developers to create Metal resources—such as textures and buffers—which can then be allocated to the CPU or GPU and updated as needed. What's particularly advantageous is that Metal allows developers to select which GPU to use and how it will be executed.
For Bogdan, the combination of GPUs and Metal will enable developers to create better mobile editing apps, ultimately providing consumers with more convenience. In Master Photo and Video Editing with Metal, Redkin provides a step-by-step guide to GPU-accelerated media processing. The focus is on using mobile editing apps that work within the Metal ecosystem. This guide is comprehensive in that it is intended for practical, real-world use. Readers will be introduced to the tools needed to run today's most popular GPU-accelerated editors. They will also explore the basic aspects of photo and video editing within the Metal framework, including image transformation, rendering, and more.
Here's a breakdown of what readers will learn:
- Metal fundamentals, core components, shader functions, coordinate space, and so on. They will also learn how to load custom images and convert them into Metal structures, followed by other basic techniques such as rotating, moving images, etc.
- Implementation of effects, including color adjustment, image distortion, blur application, and so on.
- How to apply editing effects to layers and arrange the layers based on various blend modes.
- How to work with static images and edit videos within the Metal framework by processing each frame customized with previously learned effects and transformations.
This book is mainly aimed at aspiring developers and anyone already involved in Swift development. However, it also serves as a "practical computing science"that is valuable for anyone looking to understand the relationship between GPUs and graphics computing.
Who Is Bogdan Redkin?
As mentioned, Bogdan Redkin is a practitioner in the mobile app editing industry, and his extensive experience has helped him become an expert in the field. As an active entrepreneur in the field of mobile photo editing applications, Bogdan Redkin has long recognized that GPU-accelerated technology is what will drive the development of mobile editing apps in the future. It is the key to succeeding in the ever-expanding, multi-billion-dollar market.
Bogdan Redkin's work, dedication, and vision have contributed significantly to the advancement of graphics computing technology for photo and video editing. His reputation is recognized by many developer communities, and one of his major achievements includes winning the Telegram Contest in 2022. Through Fancy Tech, he has developed two popular applications—WOW Body and Tori—that have been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times and continue to grow.
Fancy Tech, founded by Bogdan Redkin and his wife, Victoria Redkin, six years ago, was created to empower digital content creators. To date, Fancy Tech has achieved great success with WOW Body, a photo editing app focused on creating ideal body shapes. The app is so sophisticated that it can generate photos that are nearly impossible to distinguish from real ones. Following WOW Body's success, Tori was launched—a photo editing app offering a variety of aesthetic filters to match any mood. Both apps leverage GPU-accelerated technology and function within the Metal framework.
Conclusion
The digital creator economy has reached hundreds of billions of dollars and continues to grow year after year. This presents numerous opportunities for anyone looking to carve out their own share of the market. As a practitioner in GPU-accelerated computing, Bogdan Redkin has recognized the importance and potential of Metal-driven applications and provided valuable insights in his book for aspiring developers, researchers, and anyone interested in the development of digital creation software. His work and the success of Fancy Tech show his expertise and capacity to drive innovation in mobile editing.
