I just finished reading an incredibly detailed Aperture review by Dave Girard on the excellent Ars Technica website. Dave discovers that there are some significant RAW issues with version 1.0 of Aperture, as well as some other drawbacks. It's unlikely that you'll see another review as detailed anytime soon (given that Apple hasn't sent me a copy!).

Yes, folks, you've been patient, and here's episode 7, with our first interview! Katrin Eismann is the Photoshop Diva, artist, teacher and author, and she shares her thoughts about all things Photoshop.

In this special hour long episode, David takes an in-depth look at Apple's new imaging application Aperture, and decides that Apple was indeed correct in stating that it's a companion, not a competitor, to Photoshop. Learn the good, bad and ugly about Aperture, and compete for a copy of Ben Willmore's "Photoshop CS2: Up to Speed" book (published by Peachpit Press) in this week's Photoshop trivia contest.

At the PhotoPlus Expo today, I received an extensive demo of Aperture from Joseph Schorr, the Senior Product Marketing Manager for Aperture. I'll be devoting the next episode of the show to discussing what I learned, but suffice it to say that while it's a very interesting application, there are more than a few significant omissions from the product as it stands today. As far as speed of manipulating RAW files, it's definitely a great performer (of course, I saw it running on a quad core Mac with a boatload of RAM, a machine on which Photoshop also screams), and it's a great way to sort and manage large numbers of RAW files (or any other significant image format, for that matter, including Photoshop files). The Light Box is awesome, and is a great way to look at and play with images. That's the good news. The bad news is that I found the color correction tools to be less than thrilling, and I'll sum it up like this: no Curves control, no densitometer (Info palette), no channel-by-channel capabilities, no masking, no layers, no CMYK output. Yes, the approach of keeping operations separate from the source data files makes tons of sense (as it does in Adobe After Effects), and is a big part of the reason for the speedy performance. I hope this puts some fire under Adobe to consider moving Photoshop towards a similar technology. For professional photographers looking to manage large numbers of Raw files, Aperture will be a useful tool, but for everyone else, the $499 price tag is a bit prohibitive, in my opinion. Listen to the next episode of Attention Photoshoppers! for my in-depth analysis.

I've been getting a lot of email from people who are _incorrectly_ guessing that the answer to the current contest - what was the name of the first version of Photoshop you could _buy_ - is "ImagePro". It seems that the source of this name is a Derrick Story article written for the 10th anniversary of the program, and for the record, this detail is incorrect. ImagePro was a name the Knoll brothers considered (along with PhotoHut), but it was never adopted. A couple of other folks have written in with the name of a scanner vendor, but the name of the scanner vendor is only part_ of the correct answer. Gee, I love this contest stuff!

After I posted episode 5 of the show, I received an invite from Apple (thanks, Christine!) for a press conference to be held next week at the PhotoPlus Expo in NYC. The invite has a picture of a camera lens (!), and says that they'll be unveiling "Apple's latest pro innovations". I am exceedingly psyched, and given that Steve Jobs was showing off the cool "Photo Booth" application this week at the video rollout, I wonder if this is going to be something of interest to Photoshop users. Thoughts?

As mentioned in episode 5, here is the Adobe RSS feed for top issues related to Photoshop, and here is the RSS link for recent Photoshop documents. Paste these links into your RSS news reader application.

In this episode, David continues his 16 bit rant, speculates on Core Image coolness, tells a story about precision crosshairs for painting, reviews "How to Wow - Photoshop for Photography" by Jack Davis & Ben Willmore, and "Photoshop CS2: Up to Speed" by Ben Willmore, and shows a cool little trick using Fade Filter. There's also a new contest for a copy of the excellent Dan Margulis "Lab Color: The Canyon Cunundrum" book.

So my comments about 16 bit per channel image manipulation in episode 4 brought in lots of email from listeners who continue to question the need for working with 16 bit data. Check out this link for a great discussion of HDR (High Dynamic Range) image processing and why it's important for the future. Also, check out this link for info on a cool HDR-capable display. Only costs $50,000, but hey, I remember when CD burners were $10,000. And the Andrew Rodney 16 bit challenge mentioned in episode 4 is here .

David gets into the advantages of working with 16 bits per channel and a Popular Science article on image forgery, reviews the Bruce Fraser "Camera Raw for Photoshop" book, links Emerson Lake & Palmer to the Crystallize filter (no kidding!), and tells you why iStockphoto.com rocks (thanks to listener Sean Collins for the tip).