Aperture 1st Look

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.