Product: Aperture Price: $3,900 Pros: great colour correction and useful light-table function Cons: massive processor requirements, hogs hard drive
What is Aperture? What isn't Aperture? Apple has aimed about as high as you can go with this everything-but-the-kitchen-sink application.
The target market is the professional photographer and the serious amateur, and Apple must hope they will sweep a hard drive full of applications into the trash in favour of this all-in-wonder.
Aperture allows photographers to rapidly sort through large folders of digital images, select the best ones, colour correct them and then output them for the Web, as prints or for publication, and it does so with assembly-line efficiency. The program is designed specifically to work with the RAW files produced by high-end digital cameras.
This file format produces images that are far more correctable and with potentially much higher quality than the garden variety JPEG. It also works with these files in a non-destructive way, always leaving the original file untouched.
Aperture archives the photos in a database for future use and incorporates key-wording and captioning functions so simple even a photographer can use them. Now we are looking at a single application that replaces four.