Last year, photographers interested in Apple’s software had to choose between Aperture, a pro-level image organizer and editor, and its farm-club counterpart, iPhoto ’09. It was a tough decision because power users needed the editing tools in Aperture but were tempted by Faces, Places, and other iPhoto-only tricks. Aperture 3 rebalances the roster, adding those iPhoto functions while also juicing up with high-end tools like Brushes. It’s an impressive update, and Aperture’s streamlined, iPhoto-esque interface welcomes intermediates while meeting the demands of power users.

You can brush in most tools to alter a specific area, as we're with Levels to brighten the faces.

But Apple didn’t just add those three headlining new features to Aperture--Version 3 boasts 200 additions. When we see a list of new stuff that runs that long, we worry about bloated interfaces and useless additions, but Aperture proved us wrong. As an intermediate photographer, I used many of the new bells and whistles--or could foresee situations where they’ll come in handy. For instance, if you’re shooting RAW plus JPEG together, you can have Aperture handle them as two files, combine them into a single file embedded with two formats, or just discard one. Aperture is packed with these little bonuses without getting too cluttered.

Aperture’s handy new Places geotagging tool assigns locations to your photos in several ways. Text searches reference Google and Apple databases to assign metadata. We entered “Mill City flour museum Minneapolis,” and it found the proper location--and name--for the Mill City Museum. Better yet, Aperture automatically updated photo tags so we could find images from searches for those words or for “Minnesota,” which Aperture inferred from “Minneapolis.”

Faces also moves over from iPhoto, and it recognizes and names the people in your pictures. As in iPhoto, you’ll have to train the tool by identifying people in a few dozen pictures. But even on a quad-core Mac Pro with 6GB RAM, the software took so long to complete its part of the process that we thought it had stalled. After about a half hour, it finally blurted out the results. It’s a useful trick, but it can be a slow one.

Advanced photographers will most appreciate the updated editing tools; there’s enough power to forgo Photoshop for much of their work. The new Brushes make the biggest difference, selectively painting in adjustments to specific areas of a photo with newbie-friendly options for not making a mess of things. This tool lets you brush in Dodge, Blur, Contrast, and many other adjustments--including Curves, one of the new high-end color-correction tools.

Photoshop’s Layers and Masks still rule for advanced compositing and manipulation, such as mixing multiple images into a photorealistic scene. But Aperture’s alternatives adeptly handle many single-image scenarios. An Edge Detection toggle does a good job keeping you within the lines on photos--for example, when lightening an underexposed person in front of a bright treetop background. Instead of layer editing, you can go back and change individual Brush parameters for best results. If you’re ever unhappy with an edit, you can hit Undo or just toggle changes off and on--Aperture’s fully nondestructive. All of this makes it feel much more approachable than Photoshop.

Aperture also offers dozens of manual adjustments, including Levels, Exposure, Curves, and White Balance tweaks. You can save your favorites as presets or pick from Aperture’s included bundles--or even see how presets will affect your photo before applying. An improved full-screen mode presents big images without distractions, and you can upload images automatically to MobileMe, Flickr, and Facebook, or export a web gallery ready for uploading to your own server.

Our biggest complaint: Aperture felt fast enough working with our RAW files, but it never quite seemed speedy. When processing other tasks in the background, photos sometimes took a half-second to appear. At least they get cached, letting you instantaneously flip between recent images. And when clicking quickly, we sometimes had to wait just a moment for the interface to catch up.

Faces and Places work just like iPhoto, using face detection and tagging, so you can organize photos by people or by where you took them, though now it uses thumbnails of photos that you can actually drag-and-drop photos onto a map. It's the same Faces engine, but you can restrict face recognition to particular projects, instead of having it scour your whole library. With Places, it works with GPS trackers in a pretty neat way: When you import your tracklog, all you have to do is tell it where the first photo was taken, and then using timestamps, it'll automatically plot the rest.

Also like iPhoto, you can now upload directly to Facebook and Flickr. Since they're heavily targeting the hardcore iPhoto user who now wields a DSLR, not only have they streamlined the interface to make it a more natural transition, when you import your iPhoto library, it preserves all of your image adjustments, events, places and faces.

Brushes brings non-destructive painting effects to Aperture, with 15 Quick Brushes for effects like dodge and burn. You can actually apply or remove any adjustment—like contrast or saturation or curves—using brushes. With its new edge detection tech, you can, for example, boost contrast over the whole image, and then use the brush + edge detection to cleanly wipe the effect off of the sky. Adjustment presets are radically improved too—you can save combos of adjustments, like boosted sharpness and saturation with a cooler white balance, and they can be imported and exported.

One of the new things for pros is that they've rewritten the way the database works, so you can now sync and merge libraries. Which means you can take a self-contained library out on the road, do a bunch of imaging work, and then merge it back to your master library, and it'll sync just the changes you made while you were out.

Perhaps the most interesting bit from the creator standpoint are slideshows that integrate photos, audio, text and HD video that can be exported to iTunes and work with the iPhone and iPod touch, though we'll have to see how powerful it really is.

Apple doesn't mention it, but the thing I'm really hoping they added a lot of? Speed. Speed. Speed. Speed. Especially after using Adobe's Lightroom 3 Beta. Since Aperture 3's fully 64-bit on Snow Leopard, I'm pretty hopeful, actually. The bad news is that's restricted to Intel Macs only, it looks like. It's available today for $200 for the full version, or $100 to upgrade, with a 30-day free trial here.

Apple Releases Aperture 3

New Features Include Faces, Places & Brushes

CUPERTINO, Calif., Feb. 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Apple® today introduced Aperture™ 3, the next major release of its powerful photo editing and management software, with over 200 new features including Faces, Places and Brushes. Building on the innovative Faces and Places features introduced in iPhoto® '09, Aperture 3 makes it even easier and faster to organize large photo libraries. Aperture 3 introduces new tools to refine your photos including Brushes for painting image adjustments onto parts of your photo, and Adjustment Presets for applying professional photo effects with just one click. Stunning new slideshows let you share your work by weaving together photos, audio, text and HD video.

"Millions of people love using iPhoto to organize, edit and share their digital photos," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "Aperture 3 is designed for both professionals who edit and manage massive libraries of photos and iPhoto users who want to take their photos further with easy-to-use tools such as Brushes and Adjustment Presets."

"Aperture 3 gets it right," said National Geographic photographer, Jim Richardson. "The image editing tools are exactly what I have been asking for, they're so easy to use and give me a level of control that I never even thought possible."

"I chose Aperture because it was the most powerful archiving application around, but it's now an unbelievable imaging tool as well," said Bill Frakes, Sports Illustrated staff photographer. "I am beyond impressed with the massive changes made in Aperture 3."

Aperture 3 allows you to organize large photo libraries with even more flexibility using Projects and the new Faces and Places. Faces uses face detection and recognition to find and organize your photos by the people in them. You can view faces across your entire photo library or view just the faces that appear in selected projects. In a new view that speeds up the organization process, Aperture 3 displays faces that have been detected but haven't yet been named. Places lets you explore your photos based on where they were taken, and like in iPhoto, Places automatically reverse geocodes GPS data into user-friendly locations. In Aperture 3, you can assign locations by dragging-and-dropping photos onto a map or by using location information from GPS enabled cameras, tracking devices or your iPhone® photos.

The new Brushes feature allows you to add professional touches to your photos by simply painting effects onto the image. Aperture 3 includes 15 Quick Brushes that perform the most popular tasks like Dodge, Burn, Polarize and Blur, without the complexity of layers or masks. Brushes can automatically detect edges in your images to let you apply or remove effects exactly where you want them. Aperture 3 includes dozens of Adjustment Presets that apply a specific style or look to the entire image with just a click. You can create your own custom presets or explore the techniques of other photographers by importing theirs.

Aperture 3 makes it easy to share your work with stunning slideshows that weave together photos, audio, text and HD video. You can select one of six Apple designed themes or choose your own transitions, background, borders and titles, and even add your own soundtrack. You can export your slideshows directly to iTunes® to take with you on your iPhone or iPod touch®. You can also share photographs as beautiful prints, create custom-designed hardcover books and publish to online photo sharing sites like Facebook and Flickr, right from Aperture 3.

Pricing & Availability

Aperture 3 is available through the Apple Store® (www.apple.com), Apple's retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers for a suggested retail price of $199 (US) and existing Aperture users can upgrade for a suggested retail price of $99 (US). A downloadable 30-day trial version is available at www.apple.com/aperture/trial. Aperture 3 runs as a 64-bit application on Mac OS® X Snow Leopard® on Macs with Intel Core 2 Duo processors. Full system requirements, online tutorials and more information on Aperture 3 can be found at www.apple.com/aperture.

Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary iPhone.

© 2010 Apple Inc. All rights reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, Mac, Mac OS, Macintosh, Aperture, iPhoto, iPhone, iTunes, iPod touch, Apple Store and Snow Leopard are trademarks of Apple. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

[Aperture]

A number of reports suggest that amongst announcements of new Apple products due next week, photographers could see an update of the company's own Aperture software.