Announced by Apple Computer in October 2005, at a media event held in New York, Aperture is a program for Mac OS X built to help professional photographers with the post-production tasks. In November, the program became available to the masses, and yesterday, Apple launched an update, bringing the current version number to 1.5.2. If you didn't get it yet, then you have enough time to download it, but first you should answer the following question - do you really need aperture?

Classifying this program can be rather tricky, since some people consider Aperture a competitor to Photoshop or Adobe Camera Raw, or even a Photoshop replacement. Joe Schorr, Apperture product lead from Apple, mentiones that this program tries to break out of what people have already defined as photography-related software product categories, and I must agree with Scott Bourne from O'Reilly, which calls this program "a photo workflow tool".

The 131MB update is recommended to all Aperture users and addresses issues related to overall reliability and performance in a number of areas, including contact sheet printing, smart albums, watermarks, lift and stamp, image export and versions created using an external editor. The program's feature list includes now complete RAW support, many image adjustment tools, including specific color retouching, luminance-based edge sharpening and spot repair, project management, multiple display spanning, a zooming tool called "loupe" that allows magnification factors from 100% to 1600%, native Adobe Photoshop support, nondestructive image editing, support for import from Compact Flash I, II and Microdrive, Memory Stick and Memory Stick Duo, Secure Digital, SmartMedia, xD Picture Card and MutiMedia Card.

If you run into compatibility problems between Aperture and your digital camera, Apple strongly recommends you to download and install the Digital Camera RAW Support Update 1.0.1. that provides RAW file format compatibility for Canon Digital Rebel XTi/400D/Kiss X Digital, Nikon D80, Pentax *ist DS and also takes care of three issues - handling of large Canon RAW files, DNG compatibility on Intel-based Macs, as well as those lines that appeared sometimes in images exported from Aperture.