Apple is gunning for Adobe. The company has introduced Aperture, a Mac-only software package the company is claiming is the first all-in-one post production tool that provides everything photographers need after a shoot.

Aperture offers a RAW workflow that promises to make working with a camera's RAW images as easy as JPEG. Built from the ground up for high-end photographers, Aperture also supports nondestructive image processing, colour 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 revolutionises the photo workflow from compare and select to retouching to output.'

Until now, RAW files generally take longer to work with. Aperture lets you work directly with RAW files, so you can loupe and stack them almost instantaneously. Unique compare and select tools also allow photographers to sift through massive photo projects and quickly identify their final selections. Aperture is the first application that automatically groups sequences of photos into Stacks based on the time interval between exposures.

In an industry first, Aperture also 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 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, resised and piled together in a free-form space.

RAW images are maintained natively throughout Aperture without any intermediate conversion process, and can be retouched using a suite of adjustment tools designed especially for photographers. Aperture's nondestructive image processing engine should never alter a single pixel of original photos either, so you have the power and flexibility to modify or delete changes at any point in the workflow.

As Aperture allows you to create multiple versions of a single image without duplicating files, you can also experiment without risk of overwriting the master image or using up large amounts of hard disk drive space. Aperture images can also be launched directly into Adobe's Photoshop for compositing and layer effects.

Aperture features a complete colour-managed pipeline with support for device specific ColorSync profiles and a set of high-quality output tools for photographers to showcase their work. Print options include customisable contact sheets, high-quality local printing and colour-managed online prints.

BIOS, Oct 21, 05 | Print | Send | Comments (0) | Posted In Apple Mac