Aperture
I was very interested by Apple’s announcement of Aperture—-a Pro workflow, cataloging, editing and output application for digital images (specifically RAW files, but it will also work with other image formats). I’m certainly not a Pro photographer, nor do I have a camera that generates RAW files, but I’d really love something like this. I use mainly iView MediaPro to organise and view my images, and it’s generally excellent. However, it does lack some of the tight integration with the system and intuitive interface that iPhoto has. For example, I particularly like the new feature in Tiger in images attached to emails in Mail can be viewed as a slideshow and individually sucked into iPhoto while you are viewing them—-it’s very slick. However, iPhoto has a really awful interface for adding keywords and other metadata to images (iView MediaPro is much better in this respect).
It would be nice to try it out in person, but looking at the screenshots and video tours Aperture appears to be a nice combination of the strengths of both iPhoto and iView MediaPro, with some unique features on top. I particularly like the virtual ‘Light Table’, and the ability to compare two images side-by-side at a reasonable resolution. Why has no-one thought of that before? The archiving facility also looks excellent and very easy to use. The editing and retouching features look like they are more advanced than those in iPhoto, and would probably be perfectly adequate for my needs, though I’m sure that the real professionals would still need Photoshop for editing and retouching. It’s quite pricey, but as a lecturer in Higher Education, I can get an almost 50% discount on it. Which is nice.
There’s one big disappointment though; the system requirements are very demanding, and it appears that my 12-inch PowerBook wouldn’t be able to run it (I suspect the problem is the graphics card, even though it is capable of rendering CoreGraphics applications). I wonder if they’ll bring out an ‘Express’ version of Aperture, like Final Cut Express. It would be nice to have a version that doesn’t have the ability to work with RAW files, but has much lower system requirements and is cheaper—-I’m sure that there would be a lot of demand for it.
