At a special event in New York City on Wednesday Apple introduced Aperture, which it bills as the first all-in-one post production tool for photographers.” The new application is expected to ship in November and will cost US$499.
Aperture provides pro photographers with a RAW image-based workflow, and features import, editing, catalog, organization, retouch, publishing and archival tools. It’s non-destructive, so photographers don’t have to worry about making mistakes that damage their original images.
Aperture supports the RAW formats from all leading digital camera makers and supports JPEG and TIFF images as well. What’s more, it supports Adobe’s DNG format.
Compare and select tools let you sift through your photo projects and identify images you want in your final selection. Aperture introduces the concept of “Stacks,” groups of photos based on the time interval between exposures.
Aperture also features a full-screen workspace that can span multiple displays and tiles images side-by-side. A “loupe” magnifying tool shows you portions of images in fine detail without having to zoom and pan. There’s also a Virtual Light Table to assemble simple photo layouts, resize images and pile them together.
Aperture supports ColorSync profiles and includes print options like customizable contact sheets, local printing and online output. You can also use AppleScript and Tiger’s Automator software to streamline automated workflows.
System requirements call for a 15-inch PowerBook G4/1.25GHz o faster, 17-inch iMac G5/1.8GHz or faster, or Power Mac G5/1.8GHz or faster, 1GB RAM, 5GB hard disk space, DVD Drive, ATI Radeon Mobility 9600 or Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL or better 3D graphics— visit Apple’s Web site for more details.