Aperture's elegant interface makes it a pleasure to sort through thousands of photos.

 

Apple hasn't taken a middle-of-the-road approach with Aperture - this app's aimed at professional photographers who need a workflow organizer to aid in processing and organizing their photos. Apple has created a resource-gobbling monster; chances are you'll need to upgrade your Mac to take full advantage of Aperture's considerable features. In other words, Aperture isn't for the dabbler.

 

Aperture is essentially an advanced photo viewer with some simple image-adjustment tools bolted on - after making basic adjustments to images in Aperture, you can export them to Photoshop to undergo more-advanced manipulation. Pro photographers and serious hobbyists will appreciate the fact that Aperture works with RAW photo files, which preserve the original 16-bit color information captured by a camera's sensor. RAW files give you much more latitude than JPEGs for adjusting exposure, contrast, color, and other image aspects.

 

Heavy demands. Aperture lets you quickly sort large numbers of photos and save numerous versions of them. But unlike conventional image editors such as Photoshop, which change the actual numerical data of affected pixels, Aperture always preserves your original image file in what Apple calls a master file; the instructions for your crops, color adjustments, sharpening, and so on are saved in a separate database file. The advantage to this is that multiple image versions can be created without hogging storage space; you can work freely, creating multiple versions of images quickly and without getting bogged down with a slew of large files.

 

To apply image instructions quickly and to power its fluid interface, Aperture demands a lot from your hardware - just take a look at the minimum requirements at the end of this review. Got one of those sweet 20-inch 1.6GHz iMac G5s? Sorry, its video card won't cut it. Luckily, Apple provides an applet called Aperture Checker (free, www.apple.com/aperture/specs) to see if your Mac makes the grade. And with Aperture's expansive interface, you'll need a generously sized display to avoid feeling cramped. You can get by with a 20-inch Cinema Display, but you'll find yourself pining for a 30-incher.

 

Stacks let you group similar images. You can even group images based on their time stamps.

 

 

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Engaging interface. Once you meet the hardware criteria, you'll be rewarded with an interface that is smart, efficient, and even beautiful. The Browser (which shows thumbnails of an entire set of photos) and the Viewer (which shows your selected photo) occupy most of the screen. On the left side, the Projects Panel lists projects, folders, albums, and other organizational elements. The Adjustments and Metadata Inspectors sit on the right. Images can also be viewed in list view, with their metadata in table form (though most, but not all of the metadata comes over when you import your images). This is only Aperture's basic default setup; the app has many so different viewing configurations that it is essentially customizable.

 

Importing a photo into Aperture's photo database is as simple as navigating to a folder of images and selecting the photos. Files and folders can also be dragged and dropped into Aperture's Browser, imported from iPhoto, or downloaded directly from your camera. Aperture promptly makes master files from your images and secures them in a vault. (Remember, all the changes made to these files are virtual; none of your altered images actually exist as pixels until you export them as copies from your master file.) This minimal pixel baggage makes sifting through tons of images snappy, and Aperture includes options for comparing more than one image at a time in the Viewer, making it easy to pick the best shot from similar images. Photos can be grouped into Stacks, which show your current pick on top and expand and contract with a click of the mouse. You can select several images and group them into a Stack, or even group photos together based on a selectable time-stamp range. Cool.

 

Aperture's Loupe is a wonderful tool for zooming in on your images. To see fine detail in your picture, just drag the circular Loupe over your photo, and it magnifies just that part of the image - a zooming method so fast and intuitive that it makes you wonder why no one thought of it before.
You'll also love Light Table, a viewer that lets you create layouts with your images. By dragging images to the large, gridded Light Table window, you can arrange them in any position and at any size or zoom level. It's an easy, fun, and useful tool for envisioning how images will work together as a set.

 

As in iPhoto, you can assign star ratings and keywords to images, but Aperture is more sophisticated in that you can drag words from your Keyword list right onto your photos, not the other way around. Smart Albums are collections of photos defined by user-specified criteria - as an image's attributes change (date, keyword, and so on), it's either deleted from or added to the Smart Album.

 

A digital Light Table lets you experiment with photo layouts.

 

 

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Limited adjustments. Aperture's adjustment options for exposure, levels, and white balance are adequate, but in no way does it replace true image editors such as Photoshop. One basic nuts-and-bolts omission is a curves tool for adjusting an image's densities in different ranges of its tonal curve (as opposed to uniform adjustments to the entire image). Aperture also provides no method for sampling an image's pixel values - a crucial exclusion because the only way to judge, for example, whether highlights are blown out to pure white or actually contain some tone is to examine the pixel values. You'll also have to do without selective changes; unlike Photoshop, there is no way to brighten a sky without brightening the entire image.

 

If you've nailed your adjustments in Aperture, however, they can be easily applied to a large group of photos from the same shooting session with a simple drag-and-drop tool called Lift And Stamp. This is where Aperture's database-driven method of managing file changes really pays off; doing this kind of work in Photoshop would be exhausting.

 

Image conversion and RAW export is as simple as choosing a destination and format (JPEG, TIFF, PNG, or PSD). Aperture's RAW conversions are a tad brighter than those from Photoshop, with more detail in shadows and less in highlights. Unfortunately, converted images exhibit quite a bit of color fringing - a troubling shortcoming, but one that could be remedied in an upgrade if Apple can smooth out the conversion algorithms.
At the output end, Aperture is fully prepared to format your photos for contact sheets, the Web, or even into book form. The output looks professional and is at the world-class level of design one would expect from Apple.

 

The bottom line. With its elegant and efficient interface and ability to easily create multiple versions of a photo, Aperture will satisfy pros who must sift through the hundreds of shots taken on an assignment. But with its limited color-adjustment tools, it's no replacement for Photoshop - and Photoshop's own companion workflow organizer, Adobe Bridge, is quite adequate for browsing and organizing less-industrial-size projects.

 

COMPANY: Apple
CONTACT: www.apple.com
PRICE: $499 (UPDATE: Current version, Aperture 1.5, is $299)
REQUIREMENTS: 1.8 GHz G5 or 1.25GHz PowerBook G4; Mac OS 10.4.3 or later; 1GB RAM; 5GB disk space; ATI Radeon X600 Pro, ATI Radeon 9600, ATI Mobility Radeon 9600, nVidia GeForce 6600 LE, or better video card
Sublime organizational tools and interface. We're loopy over the Loupe, Light Table, and Lift And Stamp.
Pricey. Demanding system requirements. Image-editing shortcomings. Begs for a jumbo-size display.