New: Apple Aperture

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Apple today anounced a new program in their pro lineup, called Aperture. It's a digital photo editing & organizing program, and sounds really nice. According to them, it handles RAW files really well, and is really nice at organizing and adjusting photos. This sounds really nice. It almost makes me want to go digital. Although the price is quite steep: $499. Check out their webpage for it at http://www.apple.com/aperture/
 
The questions are: A) being a Mac only program (I'm guessing) will it garner the mass support it will need to take down the mighty Photoshop, and B) is it good enough to take down the mighty Photoshop. My guess is no. At that price, it really needs to be spectacular, and as of late, Apple doesn't have a great track record for spectacular software... They seem to trade power and versitility for simplicity, which works for things like iTunes, but doesn't work at all for the OS (I still can't fathom OS X) or a photo editing program. We shall see...
 
Impressed with Aperture, Joe Buissink (a die hard film geek) is going to be completely digital! (This is just a matter of fact statement. No lame digital vs film wars please. :) )

I am a pc guy and have been drooling over the G5 since few months. This could probably be a nice chance to jump ship.
PS-RAW processing kills all my time even though I usually complete an image around 60 secs. If Aperture makes the RAW workflow easy as working with jpegs as they say, I do not think there would be any second thoughts for me.
Anyways, let the hype mellow down first.

a related yahoo news article - http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/051019/sfw095.html?.v=25
 
clarinetJWD said:
The questions are: A) being a Mac only program (I'm guessing) will it garner the mass support it will need to take down the mighty Photoshop, and B) is it good enough to take down the mighty Photoshop. My guess is no. At that price, it really needs to be spectacular, and as of late, Apple doesn't have a great track record for spectacular software... They seem to trade power and versitility for simplicity, which works for things like iTunes, but doesn't work at all for the OS (I still can't fathom OS X) or a photo editing program. We shall see...

A) Aperture is in no way trying to take down photoshop.
B) Aperture is in no way trying to take down photoshop.

This is a program for professionals to streamline their digital workflow. It lets users download, organize, arrange, display, and print their photos. I guess you could say that if anything it's competing against Adobe Bridge (CS2's new file-browsing and organizing program). Apple's new program is like the professional version of iPhoto on steroids. While it does have some basic features (basic for pros) like white balance, levels, etc., it does not come close to touching the feature set of Photoshop. But nor does Photoshop come close to touching the feature set of Aperture. The two programs are made to compliment each other. In fact, Photoshop can open Aperture files, as well as the other way around. And they're supposed to work pretty seamlessly. Aperture is for the kind of people who shoot like 1,000 photos a day, and have to go through and pick out the best ones from each shoot. Photoshop cannot feasibly handle 1,000 raw photos at a time, and even if it could it would have no way to organize them. That's what Apple's program is for.

And the fact that it's mac-only should be no detriment. All of apple's professional programs, except for shake (which is also made for linux), are mac-only. Macs are the well-known industry leader for pro media editing, and Aperture will help Apple gain an even larger hold in the pro photo area (it's already widely used for Photoshop).
 
I am new to this forum, but being an avid mac user and amateur photographer I thought I would browse some photography forums to see the reaction to Aperture.

Personally I find it incredibly exciting: not because it is an Apple product (although that gives me faith that it is certainly powerful), but because it fills a gap that has frustrated me for some time.

I use iPhoto to keep my photos organised, but use photoshop for all editing. Printing, layout, RAW manipulation, versioning etc are all manual processes that I have to keep organised myself and I find it extremely frustrating. Apple have launched a product at that gap in the market.

Adobe seem to have known that this application was coming and I find it hard to believe that Apple would challenge them directly from the outset. Adobe's continued support for the mac platform is often one of the big guns that Apple pulls out when trying to convince people to stick with them when they undergo a fundamental change as they did when they announced their move to intel processeors. This boils down to the fact that apple's grass root supporters have always been photographers and film makers. The ongoing support of Adobe for mac is gratifying but the differences between Windows and OSX becomes less when the most powerful tool in a photographers software line-up works identically on both platforms. Apple needed to shift the balance back in their favour and have done so with Aperture. It is an incredibly powerful application that makes use of CoreImage which is embedded into the OS. Aperture fills a gap in the market, but more than that, it fills a gap that can never be filled as well on the Windows platform because the technology isn't there - for now.

Aperture 1.0 may not have it all - few new programs do, but it does have much and it will improve quickly. Apple's recent track record is remarkable when it comes to rapid development. I won't go into why here because I have said so much already, but it is basically to do with the solid kernel of the OS and modular nature of the apps that makes it easy to plug in new functionality without having to go back to scratch or to expand carefully so as not to close doors that would be difficult to re-open in the future.

Anyway, a long first post. sorry. What this all comes down to is that I am damned excited by this product and can't wait to get my hands on it.
 

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