Aperture

Product Description
Amazon.com


Designed from the ground up for professional photographers, Apple Aperture 1.1 provides everything you need for after the shoot, delivering the first all-in-one post-production tool for photographers. And now it's fully compatible with Intel-powered Macs. With advanced RAW workflow, professional project management tools, advanced image processing, and versatile printing and output options, Aperture will radically simplify the way you produce and manage your photography.

And with the most powerful image processing in the world, Aperture is fast -- whether you're working with RAW, JPEG, or TIFF images. Aperture supports the RAW formats from all leading digital camera manufacturers (including Canon and Nikon) and provides optimized support for such market leading cameras as the Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II, Canon EOS 20D, and Nikon D2x as well as the highly popular Canon Digital Rebel and Nikon D50. It also supports the Adobe DNG format.

Whether you're a fashion, wedding, sports, portrait, fine art, commercial, or editorial photographer, Aperture's color-managed workflow and flexible design tools will help you easily create stunning prints, customized contact sheets, elegant books, and web pages as beautiful as the images you capture.

Advanced RAW Workflow

As a photographer, you know all about the benefits of shooting RAW. With access to all the data your digital SLR can record, you're capturing images of startling quality, great dynamic range, and virtually no noise. And now, for the very first time, you have an application that provides you with more control of the final image than you've ever had before. One that actually makes working with RAW files as easy as working with JPEGs.

Providing the very first all-in-one tool for your post-production needs, Aperture lets you work with RAW images through every step of the digital workflow without first having to convert your images into another format to make necessary image adjustments, eliminate red-eye, remove dust, crop, organize images, or print contact sheets.

Aperture provides you with the tools to do it all -- import, edit, catalog, organize, retouch, publish, and archive your photographs -- in a RAW-focused workflow that's the first of its kind. Rather than using another application to manage your images, Aperture offers built-in project management with robust and flexible tools that make it easy to handle thousands of projects.

They include a powerful suite of tools for editing a photo shoot. It's one of the most tedious jobs any photographer faces, and it's been particularly taxing when shooting RAW. But Aperture provides tools specifically designed to work with RAW files and to speed you through the process of sifting through thousands of images, culling the rejects, comparing the keepers, and identifying your absolutely finest photographs.

Nor do you have to convert your images in order to make needed adjustments. You can perfect them without having to leave Aperture, using a powerful suite of nondestructive image editing tools. The tools -- including Levels, White Balance, Exposure, Sharpening, Noise Reduction and more -- afford you the freedom to experiment without having to worry about damaging your valuable original images. That's because Aperture applies modifications only to "versions" of your images and never to the original "master" images themselves.

Professional Project Management

Aperture, the first all-in-one post-production tool for photographers, provides everything you need to manage your photo library: flexible organizational tools, comprehensive metadata support, and powerful search tools that let you find files instantly.

Aperture lets you import photos from a wide variety of sources and preserves the method you used to organize files when you drag folders from your hard drive and drop them into Aperture. In fact, because Aperture supports both AppleScript and Automator, you can streamline many aspects of your workflow by automating those day-in day-out tasks you repeatedly find yourself doing.

Organize a photo library with thousands of projects any way you want -- in Projects, Albums, Folders, or any combination thereof. Create multiple Albums of related images within a Project. Or nest folders inside a project to organize albums, books, websites, and light tables. You can even have Aperture automatically group images together into Smart Albums based on defined criteria. With Aperture, you can work on multiple projects at once and freely copy or move photos among folders, projects, and albums.

Aperture lets you view, extract, and add metadata with unprecedented ease. On import, it automatically extracts all industry-standard EXIF and IPTC metadata. What's more, it lets you comprehensively add important metadata -- copyright, captions, keywords -- at the point of import.

As you work with images, you're never more than a keystroke away from seeing your metadata in, for example, the customizable Metadata Heads-Up Display, where you can customize the metadata to suit your needs. You can also choose what metadata Aperture displays with your images and what metadata to embed when you export images. And when it comes to keywords, Aperture significantly outshines other applications. It not only supports true, hierarchical keywording but also provides a number of intuitive ways to assign keywords to images.

For example, Aperture comes with collections of associated Keyword Sets (and lets you create your own). Call up the Wedding Set, for example, and you'll have a group of associated keywords -- bride, table shots, wedding party, vows, candids, limo, cake cutting -- any of which you can assign with a keystroke.

Using the Keyword Heads-Up Display, you can drag and drop keywords onto a single image or entire group of images at once. And, here's a real time-saver, once you've assigned a variety of keywords to an image, Aperture lets you "lift" them from one image and "stamp" them onto other images. Assigning and working with keywords has never been simpler or more rewarding.

Powerful Compare and Select Tools


Open any of the Heads-Up Displays (HUDs) available in Aperture to adjust levels, increase brightness, modify color temperature, assign keywords, straighten horizons, or make any other adjustments you'd like. It's the biggest, most taxing job you have as a photographer. You've finished your shoot. You've taken thousands of photographs. Now you need to quickly edit the shoot, reviewing all of your photos and identifying your very best. Aperture helps you accomplish this with powerful and flexible tools designed specifically to address the needs of the professional photographer. If you've shot transparencies, you're familiar with stacks. You've almost certainly created piles of similar images for fast comparison on your light table. In Aperture, you can employ the same technique with digital stacks.

Aperture lets you create stacks manually, pulling images into Stacks from any album, project, or folder in your Library. Or you can have Aperture automatically create Stacks for you based on the time interval between shutter clicks (1 second to 1 minute). This provides a quick and easy way to compile a sequence of bracketed or sequentially shot images for review. To further aid image comparison, Aperture lets you quickly rate your images using a six-level rating system (1 to 5 stars plus "reject"). When you're finished, you can collapse the Stack to eliminate clutter from your workspace.

Of course, with that large, high-resolution screen right before your eyes, wouldn't it be great if you could take advantage of all that real estate and review your images full screen? With Aperture, you can. In fact, Aperture lets you view your images full screen as large as screen real estate permits. And if you have two displays, you can take advantage of Aperture's expansive full-screen mode on both of them to create an incomparable working environment.

Using the Filmstrip displayed along the bottom or side of your monitor, you can see thumbnails of all the images you're reviewing. You can navigate through them quickly and easily to find the images you want to see, even organizing them on the fly. Open any of the Heads-Up Displays (HUDs) available in Aperture to adjust levels, increase brightness, modify color temperature, assign keywords, straighten horizons, or make any other adjustments you'd like. Aperture also lets you view multiple photos side by side, offering a great way to evaluate similar images or multiple versions of the same image.

Nondestructive Image Processing

With Aperture, you never have to worry about retouching images or trying out different image adjustments because Aperture makes protecting your RAW images job one. Designed to protect your images from the moment they're imported, Aperture identifies your original images as digital "masters," and it has built-in safeguards to ensure that you can't accidentally overwrite or modify them. In fact, it's physically impossible to alter a single pixel of a digital master. Instead. Aperture takes a novel and completely nondestructive approach to image editing. Thanks to Aperture's no-regrets retouching policy, you can experiment freely without fear or concern, creating as many "versions" as you'd like with different exposure settings, image croppings, color temperature modifications, level adjustments, or any combination thereof until you achieve the exact results you're after. And you don't have to worry about making a mistake. You can modify or delete any adjustment at any time and with no consequences.

Unlike the duplicate files you need to create in other applications, image "versions" take up virtually no storage space, so you don't pay an overhead penalty. And Aperture automatically keeps track of all your image versions for you, sequentially numbering them on the fly and connecting them to the "master" image as part of a Stack.

Offering native RAW image editing and breakthrough speed, Aperture puts the most essential adjustment tools at your immediate disposal via either the Adjustments Inspector or the Adjustments Heads-Up Display (HUD). Using these tools, you can fine-tune exposure, use a Histogram to check and adjust levels, set white balance, or modify highlight and shadows. If you need to crop, straighten horizons, reduce noise, correct red-eye, or eliminate dust, you'll find intuitive tools available to you. In fact, if you use any of the adjustment tools to modify or retouch an image, you can use Aperture's unique "Lift and Stamp" tool to apply those modifications to any number of additional images.