Source: RobGalbraith.com
Written by Rob Galbraith

Apple has revealed that the next release of Aperture, the company’s pro photo workflow application, will be about more than just support for Macs using Intel processors. During a press briefing yesterday at the PMA 2006 trade show in Orlando, Florida, Aperture product manager Joe Schorr showed off numerous refinements in the upcoming v1.1, including what appears to be much-improved processing of RAW files, as well as greater control over contrast, sharpening and noise reduction during the RAW conversion.

Here’s a summary of these and other changes in 1.1:

* Improved RAW processing

* Raw Fine Tuning Adjustment HUD for control of image contrast, and either the tailoring or disabling of sharpening and noise reduction

* Support for NEFs from the Nikon D200

* Numerous performance enhancements: searching and performing Lift and Stamp operations is described as being about 2x quicker, while the responsiveness of adjustment sliders that affect the appearance of a photo has been noticeably improved

* A Color Meter for measuring colour values selectively in a photo

* Photoshop (PSD) documents with layers that exist as Masters in an Aperture Library will not be flattened when the program creates a version to export to Photoshop

* A dpi setting has been added to the Export Version dialog, to make it simpler to export a file with specific height x width x resolution requirements. Similarly, a dpi setting has been added to the External Editor section of Preferences, to enable photos sent to Photoshop from Aperture to arrive with a specific resolution value (this doesn’t change the total number of pixels in the file)

* The maximum thumbnail size in the Viewer has been bumped up from 256 pixels to 512 pixels

* An option to turn off the display of image labels in web galleries

* When magnification is set higher than 100% in the loupe, pixel data is no longer smoothed for improved clarity of individual pixels

* Native code for both PowerPC and Intel Macs; v1.1 will ship as a Universal Binary. Overall program peppiness and speed of RAW file decoding to the screen looked decent in Schorr’s demonstrations on a MacBook Pro and an iMac, both with Intel Core Duo processors

* Improvements to the histogram, soft-proofing, cropping and printing

Most of these changes will make Aperture more pleasant to work in, since there’s a little something for everyone: a Color Meter for those who like to adjust pictures by the numbers, a speedier Lift and Stamp for those making adjustments to large numbers of pictures and smarter handling of layered PSD’s. These are all welcome changes. And of course Apple had to make its flagship imaging application run on its newest Macs with Intel processors.

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This story was posted on Monday, February 27th, 2006 at 6:41 pm and is filed under 3rd Party Apps, Digital Photography. You can follow any responses to this story through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.