Apple Woos Pro Photogs with Aperture

Not content with competing in the professional audio and video arenas, Apple Computer is now targeting pro photographers with a new application, Aperture.

At a special event today in New York City, Apple Computer introduced Aperture, a post-production tool aimed at professional photographers and offering a RAW-based, non-destructive workflow for importing, cataloging, editing, and archiving images. Unlike Adobe’s workhorse image editor Photoshop, Aperture is aimed at managing projects, large collections, and images, and managing image output.

Aperture is designed to work directly with RAW images from leading digital camera makers (including Nikon and Canon) and provides optimized support for higher-end pro cameras like the Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II, Canon EOS 20D, and Nikon D2x, along with the Canon Digital Rebel and Nikon D50. Aperture supports Adobe’s DNG format, along with CRW, NEF, TIF, CR2, OLY, DNG, and can output to JPEG, TIFF, PICT, BMP, PNG, TGA, and flattened Photoshop documents. And while Aperture provides some essential non-destructive image touch-up and editing tools (to correct exposure, edit histograms, levels, white balance, color, as well as straighten and crop images, remove red-eye, remove noise, etc.), some of its real strengths lie in managing a large number of projects using an efficient database with comprehensive metadata support. “Smart albums” automatically group images together based on metadata queries, and Stacks group shots together based on the time between shutter clicks. Aperture’s full-screen interface provides full editing capabilities across multiple displayed images, and helpfully provides integrated archival and backup options, including the capability to back up to multiple drives concurrently.

Aperture, naturally, will be available only for Mac OS X, and has relatively steep system requirements