xRes was an image editing application by

Fauve Software Fauve Software was founded in 1992 by brothers Fred and Richard Krueger. It developed Matisse, a natural medium paint program, and XRes, a high-end image-manipulation program that was the basis for Macromedia Fireworks. It was acquired by Macro ...

, later acquired by

Macromedia Macromedia, Inc., was an American graphics, multimedia, and web development software company (1992–2005) headquartered in San Francisco, California, that made products such as Flash and Dreamweaver. It was purchased by its rival Adobe Systems ...

. It allowed for a real time preview of work. An early version also introduced the concept of

layers Layer or layered may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media * ''Layers'' (Kungs album) * ''Layers'' (Les McCann album) * ''Layers'' (Royce da 5'9" album) *"Layers", the title track of Royce da 5'9"'s sixth studio album *Layer, a female Maveric ...

, a new way of moving and overlapping objects within an image. It was available for older versions of

Mac OS Two major famlies of Mac operating systems were developed by Apple Inc. In 1984, Apple debuted the operating system that is now known as the "Classic" Mac OS with its release of the original Macintosh System Software. The system, rebranded "M ...

and

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

History

xRes was originally released by Fauve Software Inc., based on their earlier Fauve Matisse software – this latter was the earliest consumer software to use

, preceding their implementation in Adobe Photoshop 3.0 in 1994. Fauve was purchased by Macromedia, who rebranded the software as Macromedia Matisse and Macromedia xRes, and who then released xRes 2.0.

Features

The main feature promoted by Macromedia was the ability of xRes to process files much larger than could be handled in memory (called 'xRes Mode'). It accomplished this by performing user interactions on temporary copies of the original file at the resolution and region of the image that was being displayed on the user's screen. This resulted in only a fraction of the memory use and faster interaction. The biggest downside to this approach was that once all editing was done, the user's edits needed to be applied to the original high resolution file, which could take some time to process. xRes continued until version 3.0, when the project was cancelled. It couldn't sustainably compete with the newer versions of Photoshop. Macromedia required a faster release cycle, and it would have taken too much time to develop it to the stage where it could compete. At this point, three of the main programmers left the company. Once they were replaced, Macromedia's focus had changed so much that xRes was discontinued.

References

;Notes
Image Editing Software

External links

{{DEFAULTSORT:Macromedia Xres

Xres xRes was an image editing application by Fauve Software, later acquired by Macromedia. It allowed for a real time preview of work. An early version also introduced the concept of layers, a new way of moving and overlapping objects within an image. ...

Discontinued software Technology companies established in 1992