Apple Aperture 3.6

Overview

Imagine that you just took a great shot and you want to improve the image as well as make it even better. Apple Aperture gives you access to a lot of tools that will allow you to transform your photography skills into a truly fantastic piece of art. Developed by Apple, Aperture is a powerful tool for editing your photos and managing your photo collections. If you are serious about photography, you will find that Aperture is a wonderful software product to boot. It is jam packed with features, easy to use and it is very exciting to work with. Let’s analyze the feature of Apple Aperture and find out more about this image editing tool.

Installation

You might be happy to find out that the installation process of Apple Aperture is fast and smooth.The straightforward installation works only on the Mac platform though. Being an Apple product, in terms of specs, Aperture requires a Mac system, 1GB of RAM (2GB for the Mac Pro) and 1GB of free space on your hard drive. Apple Aperture doesn’t come with adware/malware or other programs bundled with it.

Interface

Apple Aperture is a stable tool that you will surely enjoy working with. The interface of Aperture is easy to use, all thanks to the well placed tabs and buttons. The sleek, straightforward and customizable interface provides you with toolsets and tabs that are easy to utilize. Benefiting from a fairly automatic process, from import to export, users will only need to input the metadata and make slight adjustments. Some tools require more time spent with them but in general, Apple Aperture boasts simplicity and ease of use. You will enhance and improve your images and photos easily; whether you are a novice or a more professional user.

Pros

The main strengths of Apple Aperture are the photo restoration and spot-blemish removal features that are both accurate and effective, the full built-in support as well as Apple iLife and iWork products integration, Loupe zoom tool/magnifying glass and the sheer amount of customizability of the commands. The iPhoto heritage is superb and integration works great as iPhoto libraries are correctly ported across. Centered upon restoration and processing, coupled with image enhancement, Aperture’s functionality will certainly satisfy you. As stated above, the spot improvement and blemish removal tools and are some of the best tools that propel Aperture into one of the leading tools out there.

Unlike other tools, when using Aperture, you don’t end up with color bleeding or conspicuous layer superimposition as it does a fantastic job of repairing red-eyes and blending blemishes. Other features include adjustments to highlights as well as brightness, shadows, saturation, hue and other photo levels. A scrollbar adjustment tab coupled with numerical input for all the levels is provided by Aperture.

Another big feature of Aperture is called Brushes. Corrections can be painted selectively using this useful tool. Pressure-sensitive graphics tablets are supported by Brushes and a wide range of modes including a Photoshop Quick Mask-like red overpainting is offered. As a result, retouching can be quickly identified. You can apply more than one instance to one adjustment and overall, the Brushed feature is a wonderful addition to Aperture. Regarding Aperture’s presets, cross-process, a range of filtered black and whites, and white balance nudges are among the many presets you can use. These presets can be shared with others, saved or others can be imported.

Keep in mind that there are many presets packs sold by pros. With excellent printing and slideshow features, Apple Aperture also offers support for Flickr and Facebook. In addition, you can upload your finished photos directly on to these social networking websites. In terms of files compatibility, in addition to the usual JPG, PNG, GIF, TIFF formats, Aperture also supports the RAW files. These files are utilized by digital cameras.

Cons

For those already using Adobe’s Lightroom, there’s absolutely no reason whatsoever to migrate to Aperture. Hours will be wasted in order to transfer your Lightroom library to Aperture and this is not a viable option for the masses. As you can see, this is hardly a con to be considered as a discredit to Aperture so this also adds up to the fact that Aperture hardly has any cons for me to nitpick on.

Alternatives

Some alternatives to Apple Aperture include the following photo editors: Photoshop, iPhoto, Adobe Lightroom and many more.

Conclusion

All in all, Apple Aperture is a strong image editing tool with enough features to warrant a purchase. Honestly, I myself seldom purchase software products that come with a price tag but with Aperture, it’s going to be hard for me to say no!