Product Description

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. Featuring a RAW-focused workflow, Aperture makes RAW as easy as JPEG, letting you import, edit, catalog, organize, retouch, publish, and archive your images more effectively and efficiently than ever before. From capture to output, you work directly with your RAW files, never having to first convert them into another format before viewing, adjusting, organizing, or printing them. And with the most powerful image processing in the world, Aperture is fast — whether you’re working with RAW, JPEG, or TIFF images.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7659 in Software
• Brand: Apple
• Model: MA438Z/A
• Released on: 2006-05-09
• Platforms: Mac OS X Intel, Mac OS X
• Format: DVD-ROM
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.72 pounds

Features

• Universal Binary version: works with Intel- and PowerPC-based Macs
• Featuring a RAW-focused workflow, Aperture makes RAW editing as easy as JPEG
• Powerful organization and project management tools
• Preview and compare photos in a variety of useful ways
• Includes versatile Web and print output tools

Amazon.com Product Description
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.

Fine-tuned to maximize the advantages offered by Macintosh hardware and Mac OS X Tiger, Aperture offers breakthrough speed and quality -- whether you're working with RAW, JPEG, or TIFF images.

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.

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. View larger.

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.

For easy organization and searching, Aperture comes with collections of associated Keyword Sets (and lets you create your own).

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.

Aperture lets you view multiple photos side by side, offering a great way to evaluate similar images or multiple versions of the same image. View larger.

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.

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.

Versatile Printing and Publishing
Using Aperture, you can produce high-quality prints and contact sheets, design customized books, and create impressive websites as beautiful as the photographs you take. Best of all, you can do it all with drag-and-drop ease.

Produce high-quality prints and contact sheets, design customized books, and create impressive websites as beautiful as the photographs you take.

Once you select the profile for your printer, you're ready to take advantage of an Aperture feature you're going to use over and over again: Softproofing onscreen in the live Preview area of the application's robust and resizable Print dialog. If the image you see isn't perfect, fine-tune your output by making Gamma adjustments or by turning on black-point compensation.

If you've ever tried to print contact sheets using other photo applications, you're probably familiar with the expression, "there's gotta be a better way." Now there is. Aperture lets you print contact sheets more quickly and easily than you can using just about any other photo application available today.

There's more good Aperture printing news. In addition to helping you create your own color-correct prints, Aperture also provides an integrated print-ordering service that lets you order silver-halide prints directly from Kodak and Fuji at highly competitive pricing. Color managed for consistency, the prints assure predictable results and are available in standard sizes and large formats.

You can also depend on Aperture's built-in color management if you use a service bureau to print your photos. Aperture's Export Preset editor lets you simply select the ICC profile recommended by or obtained from your service bureau from a drop-down menu. Aperture embeds the profile in your files upon export, so you'll know what to expect when you get the photos in the mail. Beautiful, color-accurate prints.

Presenting prospective clients with a handsome, bound and printed Stock Book sends a powerful message. And Aperture makes the production of such high-quality bound books both simple and affordable. To help you put a unique stamp on them, Aperture includes a sophisticated book-layout engine that offers significant design flexibility.

Need to publish your photos to the Web fast? Aperture's WYSIWYG Web publishing tools make it easy. View larger.

Want your website to be as beautiful as your photos? Aperture makes it drag-and-drop easy. No need to learn HTML or to use cumbersome wizard-based page generators. Aperture includes professionally designed Gallery and Journal templates to get you started. With the former, you can create pages of thumbnail galleries; with the latter, narrative-style web pages that mix photos with text and can include your own photos as custom headers.

Unlike other photo applications, Aperture templates aren't set in stone. Using the web gallery template, for example, you can decide how many rows and columns of images appear on each page, how large the thumbnails should be, and what metadata should accompany the images.

What's more -- and this is important -- Aperture's web-authoring environment is WYSIWYG. Any change you make happens on screen in real time, so you can see the effect right away. This offers a significant advantage over the many wizard-based applications that force you to step through one dialog after another. Cumbersome to use, they don't let you see the results of your changes until the very end. Aperture offers a welcome change, letting you see your site develop right before your eyes.

Customer Reviews

Aperture

This program took me back to my dark room days of "Light Table" & "Loupes". Aperture definitely brought back memories of many hours pouring over negatives and slides and heading to the dark room to try out different techniques. Instead of hours looking through the loupe and messing with smelly chemicals to create different versions of your photos, you can now do it all on your computer right in front of your clients with a few clicks of the mouse. If you have two monitors setup you can do all of your work on one and show the clients the end result on the other monitor all very effortlessly.

A note about this program it is a beast when it comes to your system requirements you need at the minimum 1GB of RAM, at least a MAC with a 1.8Ghz processor for the G5's or a Powerbook G4 with 1.25Ghz or faster. Plus the latest Tiger and a good graphics card otherwise the program won't even load.

Essentially Aperture which can run natively on Intel and PowerPc- based Mac's is a great tool for professional photographers that allows for easy import, organization and "basic" adjustment and storage of photos.

There are many ways to import your images into Aperture. You can load directly from the camera or a storage device. You can also use existing photos that you may have on your hard drive(s). You can also import from your IPhoto library. Native RAW format as well as Jpeg, Gif, Tiff, PNG, PDF & PSD2 formats all work very easily in Aperture.

With the digital world we now have tons and tons of images on our hard drives and storage devices instead of hard copies when we all would have hundreds of prints, slides and negatives to store, and catalogue. Aperture makes the cataloguing part much easier. Aperture has a high performance database that allows you to add keywords to an image. Or you can use the star rating system to show the best of the best. You can setup Smart Albums based on your metadata queries. Or organize your photos into projects or albums. Within these systems you can create many different versions of your images. So if you want to tint and tone or apply a sepia toned effect no more smelly chemicals just make a copy of the photo you would like to see with some variation and presto like magic you can have those images in Black and White or with a tighter crop.

Don't worry Aperture does not touch your original image at all. Aperture creates a version of the digital master your original photo. Instead of making actual copies of the same image with variations which as we know can eat up lots of storage space Aperture uses a set of instructions for each image pretty much code that is read by the computer to store and show the different versions so those large RAW files aren't duplicated on your hard drive hogging that much needed space.

Aperture is at its best when working with RAW images. So instead of the multiple steps that some of us had gotten used to with converting our images and waiting forever for the process, Aperture now makes it a very streamlined process. Aperture supports many of the high end digital cameras from Canon, Nikon as wells as other brands and some compact cameras. You can visit the website to see if your camera is part of the lucky group.

When you import your photos you can create Stacks for rapid sorting. By Stacking your images you can have a more organized work space. Basically you can create Stacks in a number of ways you can have your images stacked if you shoot in burst mode or if you bracket your shots. The Auto Stacker lets you choose the time frame that you shot your images in to create a stack. You can also manually create Stacks. A number appears on the bottom left of the first photo in your stack to let you know how many photos are in that Stack. You can layout a Stack and then collapse it when done.

The library for Aperture allows you to get a handle on your photos. You can create nested folders to organize and view your images. You can also use albums within a project to organize and group photos in as many ways that you can think of all geared to how you work best.

We all should have heard of Metadata by now. Thats all the nifty stuff that tags along on your photo. In Aperture it displays the standard stuff like camera type and focal length and lots of other info. You can add keywords to the Metadata file, copyright info, caption plus loads more. You can make that image appear in different searches if you want to. Some of the data you add can be straight across the board if all of the images in that batch are from the same photo session or you can customize it for each image.

Then there are Queries and Smart Albums. With Queries you may want to see all the photos that you took during the winter, or all the images with water in them just set your criteria and those images will appear. With Smart Albums you can setup the album to include all images with snow in it, between a certain time frame and the query will find the images also any new images that you take with the keywords snow will also be added to the Smart Album. You can get really precise and detailed when setting up Smart Albums.

Aperture also has vaults for your photos which make backups a regular part of your workflow. When you create a backup Aperture automatically mirrors your entire Aperture Library on any Firewire drive that you designate as a "vault". You can have multiple vaults with some of your work being saved offsite. Once the vaults are setup Aperture lets you know if your vaults are in sync with your Library. Black means you're up to date, Yellow means that the master files in the library are backed up but that there have been changes since the last update and Red means that at least one of the master files has not been backed up.

Aperture also has One-Step Archiving. The archive contains all of your project data, to include the masters, all of your versions and metadata which you can burn to a DVD. Everything is self-contained. You can open and import the project into Aperture if you need to go back to it.

In the middle of learning about this program I started using two monitors and man-o-man that's the way to fly with this program. You can move your palettes around and setup the screens to get the most out of your particular work style. The HUDs or heads-up displays are great to put on the other monitor when you are working. The HUDs are floating adjustment controls that you can open and close as needed. So if you like to have certain info at a quick glance position the HUD to where you would like it to be.

As with many programs you can customize your workspace and toolbars. There is a great Full-Screen workspace that works awesome with two monitors. When working with two monitors you have so many options to choose from. You can span the entire screen over both monitors, use one monitor to compare images, stack images three, four and more deep lets just say you can set this up to the way you really work. In the tool bar just drag and drop the features that you use the most and take out the ones that you don't use that often.

The digital loupe is a free floating magnifier that lets you really see if that image is as crisp as it appears. You can view any portion of an image at 100% resolution this also includes RAW images which are decoded on the fly by Aperture. It was great to really quickly look through the images to find the ones that were nice and sharp.

Back in college I remember when room at the light tables were at a premium some days. It was great when it was your turn to look at all of your negs/slides and spread everything out. With Apertures' Light Table you can lay it all out. You can move your images around to create little clusters that work well together. You can do a story book layout before placing the images in a book or use the light table to compare which image looks best. When using two monitors the light table works like a champ. So while you have all of your images on one screen any image you select can be viewed at full size on the other. Plus the light table expands as you add more images so you don't have to resize the canvas manually every time you add something to it. You can save your layout in a Light Table album you can in fact create multiple Light Table layouts for a client and print it out in a high res PDF file for your client to review.

Some of the photo adjustments controls include RAW fine tuning, exposure & levels, color & white balance, composition, filters & effects and the very much appreciated red-eye correction, plus the spot & patch control. The great thing about the adjustments once you have applied an adjustment to one image you can apply the same adjustments to any other image(s) you would like using the Lift tool. Then apply the Lift and Stamp to apply the adjustments to multiple images. You can also sharpen an image however it sharpens the entire image you cannot select just the eyes for example. Sometimes having the entire image sharpened may not be what you want so just pop the image over to your other photo editor which in my case is Photoshop and make your necessary changes and then bring it back to Aperture. You can send an image to Photoshop as a 16-bit PSD or TIFF file with a click. Once you are done with Photoshop, Aperture then creates a new version of that image in the Aperture library leaving the master untouched.

Aperture also supports PSD files so you can go between the Aperture library and Photoshop where you can apply other effects like text, masking and compositing.

I really loved the versions approach. Your original version is never touched the program creates a small separate file that references the original image. This is great because it doesn't slow down your hard drive with multiple copies of the same image. You can make adjustments galore and show what the image can look like with different tints, tones, crops etc and all of the versions associated with a particular image are stacked together so you don't have to worry about where did that file go.

After all of the tweaking you can make great contact sheets, proofs and prints for your clients. You can make prints yourself or order them through Aperture. You also have the capability of making professional web pages. There are customizable templates for web pages to showcase your photos. Aperture does it all you don't have to know code to create you own web page. There are two different types of pages in Aperture web galleries and web journals. With web galleries Aperture creates the appropriate number of pages of your images once you specify the number of rows and columns that you would like. What's great is you can adjust image size and positioning of these images plus there is a setting in the Export dialog that lets you watermark your images. Whereas web journals offer more extensive with creative options. Use the Webpage editor to create pages that combine groups of photos with paragraphs of text just like a journal. You can publish these layouts if you have a .Mac account or you can put them on another server using FTP software.

The coolest part of all of this is the Custom Book Publishing. You can design a custom book of your images either for your clients or to showcase your best work. The templates are really customizable. There are some themes available and you can build up from these themes to give the book your special touch. The choices include a Proof Book, Stock Book, Picture Book, Special Occasion Book and Art Collection Book. So go ahead and arrange, group, resize, colorize apply filters to your hearts content. Add a story to your photos to really make that trip come alive or document a wedding for a special client telling about their courtship to the wedding. It is best to print the pages out yourself to make sure everything looks great before ordering the book. Once you have checked that everything looks great go for it and get that hard back book to share with your family and clients.

If you have the first version which is Aperture 1.0 you MUST get the updates for the program and load them in the correct order. The updates fixes many of the bugs that lock the system up, colorization issues and many other little tweaks that get the program running in the right direction for you.

I was not a great fan of iPhoto it just made too many copies of my photos and finding all the locations was just getting to be too much so I did all of my editing and reviewing in Photoshop. Now with Aperture I can really set things up the way I would like and then head to Photoshop for my fine tuning of specific photos. Between the two programs I think I have found the best of both worlds. With the new lower price I think if you have lots of photos be you a Professional or Amateur you will enjoy using Aperture. There is a bit of getting used to with all of the drop downs menus, layout options and the HUDs but once you have mastered that you will find that keeping track of your images is much easier and the ability to make changes on the fly worth it.

It rocks
As an amateur photographer slowly turning semi-pro, this software makes my life easy. The updates from Apple were free, 2 now, and the changes are great.

I did lose some files during some whacky glitch that happened, causing me to learn some hard lessons about backing up before erasing the flash cards. Also, don't go messing with where the library lives unless you really know what you're doing.

The cataloging and rating systems alone are worth the price of admission. I still go to photoshop for really intricate touch-ups, but for most shots we're good to go right from Aperture. Easy user interface. Easy to learn. Good to go.

Good but not good enough
Aperture does not communicate well with other devices such as scanners and USB storages and other softwares such as ilife.
It makes some projects very difficult such as making DVDs and Movies with photos.
It offers less functions such as effects and provides unnecessary features which make things complicated.
I bought it so I will deal with it. But I wish I can reverse my decision.
However, it is easy to publish (of course it cost money). Apple company is trying to make money at every corners as you know.
I was going to buy a movie production software, but at this point I will hold the purchase.