The Battle for Professional Digital Photographers--Apple Aperture vs Adobe Photoshop CS2 with Bridge and Camera Raw

A couple of weeks ago we had a chance to talk to John Nack, Adobe's Senior product Manager for Photoshop & Bridge, about Adobe's products serving digital photographers. The backdrop for the conversation was Apple's impending release of Aperture, Apple's new professional digital photography workflow application. We have waited for Aperture to be released and independently reviewed rather than rely on Apple's pre-release marketing announcements to have a more realistic understanding of Aperture's capabilities versus those Adobe has built into its products: Bridge and Photoshop CS2 with the Camera Raw v3.3 plug-in.

The touted advantage of Aperture is working directly and non-destructively with RAW images throughout a complete workflow from importing through retouching and publishing to archiving. Aperture also works with Mac OS X's core image technology for speed and it has some great new tools like the light table and loupe for magnifying portions of images. Some reviews of Aperture 1.0 (see Ars Technica, Ars Technica: II, Photo District News: I and Macworld) are in and the general verdict is that Aperture has the workflow down, the new light table and loupe tools are terrific but many of the components need more work.

Adobe's John Nack pointed out to us that between Bridge and Photoshop CS2 with the Camera Raw 3.3 plug-in, Adobe also has the workflow of a digital photographer well-covered. While separate applications, they work together seamlessly. Bridge is Adobe's "next-generation" File Browser. With Bridge, one can process multiple camera raw images at once; resize, rate, and label thumbnails; review images in Slideshow mode; search metadata; etc. The images can be moved easily into the Photoshop environment for unparalleled re-touching and artistic modification.

What is the to-do about "raw" images? Raw is the original image format that a given digital camera uses. It contains all of the information exactly as the camera captured it, i.e. the image file is uncompressed and unmodified in any way. Of couse, not every "raw" file can be read by every digitial image application. Aperture handles many top cameras but less than two dozen in total. Adobe's Camera Raw 3.3 handles 102 cameras according to Nack.

While editing "raw" images is increasing, Nack presented us an InfoTrends article showing digital photographers currently edit their images in a number of formats, mostly in JPEG (57%), Camera Raw (55%) and DNG (19%)--obviously some use multiple formats. DNG (Digital Negative) is a fully-documented open format for Camera Raw images developed by Adobe. The DNG standard offers interchangeability among editors and photographers. "Our goal is to sell solutions to digital photographers with freedom," said Nack.

Apple touts that Aperture works non-destructively on RAW images but Nack countered that Adobe's products have worked non-destructively all along and on multiple file derivations of the same image at the same time. Still, Aperture works directly with the original RAW image throughout the workflow.

Apple has positioned Aperture at $499 to become the primary application for professional digital photographers. Adobe Photoshop CS2 at $649 is the established primary application for graphics artists working with digital images. So Aperture is not targeted at Photoshop per se but at Adobe's Bridge and Camera Raw plug-in for Photoshop CS2 that come included with Photoshop CS2.

From the reviews, it appears that Aperture has integrated the workflow and has some great tools but has a way to go to achieve its goal to be the application. In the meantime, we would bet the farm that Adobe will not be resting on its laurels. For digital photgraphers, competition for their workflow would be very good news, a situation that can only result in greatly improving support for them. It will be fun to watch the battle and see if Apple with Aperture can ace the field for digital photographers as it has done with Final Cut Pro for video. [Bill Fox]