I have spent several hours playing with Apple Aperture 2.0 this past weekend and I have to say I am impressed with all of the improvements Apple has made to the Lightroom competitor. I am also glad to see that Aperture continues to improve as competition will bolster both Lightroom and Aperture, just as the Canon versus Nikon competition continues to work for the benefit of all photographers. And oddly enough, looking at the improvements in Aperture to some degree gives us a glimpse of where these applications are headed in terms of features and user interface.

One of the first things I noticed about Aperture, besides the simplified user interface, was that the Vibrancy, Clarity and Recovery sliders from Lightroom are all in Aperture now. And the only difference is that the Clarity slider is named Definition. This is great for Aperture users and confirmation that Adobe got it right in Lightroom. And the addition of editing plug-ins available for Aperture including dodging and burning and others bode well for both applications. In Aperture, the new dodging and burning, local sharpening, and other features are not the normal non-destructive variety as are most other editing features; hence, they are termed plug-ins. If Lightroom includes a similar (or more advanced) set of features in the next version one would hope they can engineer a method to make them all non-destructive as has been their trend.

Instead of going over the details of what's new in Aperture, I'll leave it to the reader to research this topic online - where there are a lot of resources. I'd instead like to look at the bigger picture. As Aperture and Lightroom continue to improve in their functionality at some point they will overtake most of the localized corrections once saved for Photoshop. In the not too distant future (and I am just spit-balling here), I can see Lightroom allowing non-destructive masking, compositing, High Dynamic Range compilations, panorama features and much more. This will make it easier for the layman who doesn't know Photoshop intimately to perform complex image adjustments with comparative ease in Lightroom.

As an example, one of the current processing trends for a lot of high end advertising photography, sometimes called the Hollywood Look, involves some serious Photoshop work that can be replicated in Lightroom with a lot less effort. Another version of this technique is the "300" look. If you search for it, there are quite a few websites offering a Lightroom preset that achieves a very similar look with the click of a button - here is one from Lightroom Killer Tips.

Back to the bigger picture here, one of Apertures other nice new features is that it allows the use of third party plug ins and a lot of companies are jumping on the bandwagon including Noise Ninja and Nik Software. This introduces some very powerful additions to Apertures editing suite and hopefully Lightroom will follow suit in allowing third parties to produce plug ins for Lightroom. I would be overjoyed to have the superior noise reduction capabilities of Noise Ninja available from within Lightroom, especially if it can be used in a batch process on large numbers of images.

It is nice to see that the software companies are working hard to improve their products just as the camera manufacturers are. With every new product announcement digital photography is improving significantly above and beyond previous offerings. Photography, in terms of technical quality, seems to have advanced more in the last eight years than it has in the previous 150 years. In fact National Geographic recently posted a web page showing some of the historical highlights of photography - and after looking at these images, it seemed to drive that point home even more. We truly are in a revolutionary time for imaging.

That's it for this session. See you next week.

Adios, Michael Clark