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With Aperture, Apple steps in the arena of professional digital darkroom software. The software is focussed on the RAW workflow and supports all major brands (including Canon and Nikon). The philosophy of aperture is to use the Digital Negative as master and leave that unaltered. Together with the impressive speed on those images the application might be a real “Killer Application” for RAW. Note that the impressive speed comes from the recommended system: A Dual G5 with 2GB of memory! Also nice is the loupe — which is always available — to show a portion of the image at pixel size. It reminds me of Kai’s Power Tools for Photoshop. All changes are made on the original file and the modifications are stored as ‘versions’ in the same stack. Only the operations are stored so the original RAW file is never touched. If you need more radical modifications, then it is even possible to break out to an image editing tool like photoshop.

If you are a wedding photographer, some of the better features is the integrated light-box and booklet printing. You can define complete books and customize the pages and also create webpages with a photo shoot.

Thinking of this application more and more, I won’t be surprised if it will replace Photoshop as the default tool for professional photographers who want to get the best images without spending hours behind the computer!

“Designed from the ground up for professional photographers, Aperture provides everything you need for after the shoot, delivering the first all-in-one post-production tool for photographers.”