Apple Introduced Aperture, Post-production Software for Digital Photographers

According to Apple, Aperture offers an advanced and incredibly fast RAW workflow that makes working with a camera’s RAW images as easy as JPEG. Built from the ground up for pros, Aperture features powerful compare and select tools, nondestructive image processing, color managed printing and custom web and book publishing.

"Aperture is to professional photography what Final Cut Pro is to filmmaking," said Rob Schoeben, Apple’s vice president of Applications Marketing. "Finally, an innovative post production tool that revolutionizes the pro photo workflow from compare and select to retouching to output."

"Until now, RAW files have taken so long to work with," said Heinz Kluetmeier, renowned sports photographer whose credits include over 100 Sports Illustrated covers. "What amazed me about Aperture is that you can work directly with RAW files, you can loupe and stack them and it’s almost instantaneous—I suspect that I’m going to stop shooting JPEGs. Aperture just blew me away."

Unique compare and select tools in Aperture allow photographers to easily sift through massive photo projects and quickly identify their final selections. Aperture is the first application that automatically groups sequences of photos into easy-to-manage Stacks based on the time interval between exposures. In an industry first, Aperture allows photographers to navigate through entire projects in a full-screen workspace that can be extended to span multiple displays, tiling multiple images side-by-side for a faster, easier compare and select. With Aperture’s Loupe magnifying tool, portions of images can be examined in fine detail without having to zoom and pan across large files. In addition, a virtual Light Table provides the ideal canvas for building simple photo layouts, allowing them to be arranged, resized and piled together in a free-form space.

Aperture will be available in November for $499. [Bill Fox]