Aperture - Pick of the Week
This week I have a program for the avid photographer, pro or not. Aperture by Apple is a photo management and tweaking program. It does both of these very well so I will discuss both separately.
For photo management, Aperture is designed to handle large quantities of high resolution photos. You can organize by folder, album, etc but where Aperture really shines, especially when compared to iPhoto, is it’s keyword manager. If you are familiar with tagging in Flickr, then you will be familiar with keywords in Aperture. You can then create smart folders based on the keywords as well making organization a snap. Aperture also has the Stacks feature which allows you to collect like photos together and choose one to be the primary image. This is a great feature for those of us that take a number of the same picture with different settings.
Photo tweaking is the second major feature that Aperture has. Designed to handle both JPG and RAW format, you have full control over many different settings for your images. While it can do auto-level and color adjusting, you can also tweak these settings individually. You also have the typical shadows, brightness, exposure, contrast, etc that you can tinker with. It is all presented in a simple way so a beginner like myself was not scared off from trying the different settings.
One thing I would love to see the next version of Aperture support is HDR imaging. It seems like this would be a natural fit with the Stacks feature and would make the product complete for someone like myself. Even without the HDR right now, it is worth the rather hefty price tag of $150, however I think it is worth it. I have tried the competing product from Adobe, Lightroom, and found that Aperture is just more Mac-like for my liking. That being said, if you have a Windows machine, Lightroom is fairly comparable to Aperture.
February 3rd, 2008 at 2:43 am
I’m not much for photography, but I know some photographers that use Aperture. I’ve seen Aperture in use and I was quite impressed with it’s photo organizing and quick editing abilities. It can fulfill most of Photoshop’s basic functions: eliminate red-eye, color levels, etc and is definitely user-friendly, like most Mac apps
February 3rd, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Does Aperture export to Flickr? I hate iPhoto but FlickrExport is the pretty much the only reason I continue to use it.
February 5th, 2008 at 10:41 pm
You will be happy to know that there is FlickrExport for Aperture as well.
http://connectedflow.com/flickrexport/aperture/