Source: CreativePro.com
Written By Terri Stone

Apple says that Aperture, its new photo-editing and -management program, is a boon for photographers shooting Raw files. Creativepro.com looks past the hype to the bare truth.

More and more digital cameras now provide an option for generating files of raw, unprocessed data. Many serious photographers prefer Raw files (also referred to as RAW) because they allow for the creation of 16-bit images. Since a JPEG file is limited to 8-bit images, raw files preserve more of the color that your camera’s sensor can capture. When you shoot Raw, all of the processing that would normally occur inside your camera gets moved into your desktop computer. Because the basic image processing decisions are left up to you, you can often coax much better images from a raw file than you can from a JPEG. Finally, because raw files are uncompressed, they lack the compression artifacts that can occur in a JPEG image.

However, Raw files haven’t fit smoothly into photographers’ workflows — workflows that are already stressed by the need to process and manage thousands of digital images. That’s why I’m so interested in Aperture, Apple’s upcoming software program, which promises to help photographers convert Raw files and manage, compare, process, and output images of many formats, not just Raw. It’s scheduled to be available (though only for the Mac OS) in November for $499.

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This story was posted on Wednesday, October 26th, 2005 at 3:54 pm and is filed under 3rd Party Apps. You can follow any responses to this story through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.