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Apple Unveils New Pro Products
porcupine8 writes "As many had speculated, today Apple unveiled upgrades to their PowerBook and Power Mac lines (although no PowerBook G5). They also introduced a new professional photography application known as Aperture, rounding out their software lineup for creative professionals. Can't wait to find out what they announce next week!"
"Although, no PowerBook G5."
Were you asleep during the Intel announcement?
Everyone who actually thinks there will be G5 PowerBooks at this point, please stand up.
Crickets?
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
If this is just an organization and editing program, then how is this any different than iPhoto?
RAW workflow. Apple is calling this "the first of its kind" in that it can work directly on RAW images, but that's not true. I'm not sure if the parent poster really knew what he was talking about or not, but from looking through the features this has on Apple's web site, it does seem that Picasa 2.1 does pretty much the exact same things, and Picasa is free.
(There are probably things that Apple doesn't mention that people like me would consider pretty important, but I can only go by what's on their web site right now. I'm interested to learn more, as a real Photoshop-level app that can work straight on RAW files might be enough to get me to finally switch to Mac.)
It is highly desirable to work directly on RAW files, which as Apple says is "non-destructive", i.e. all of your original sensor data is still there. This is not the case when working with RAW files in Photoshop, which have to be rasterized even before they're actually opened. You can make basic adjustments in Adobe Camera RAW before the file is opened but to do real retouching, you have to rasterize and open in Photoshop itself.
Picasa will let you do editing and retouching on the RAW file, then export it after you've edited. But Picasa's tools are pretty basic. Apple might offer more, but under their "all the tools you need" sidebar on the web site, they just list the same stuff Picasa does and that even Adobe Camera RAW will mostly do. The real questions for me are:
a) does Aperture support layers?
b) does Aperture have a clone tool/healing brush/patch tool? These are the tools I use most often for actual retouching.
c) does Aperture support 16 bit images? (My guess is it would pretty much have to in order to truly support RAW, but I don't think they specifically say it does anywhere.)
If the answers to all of these questions are "yes", I'm tempted. If the answers to any one out of the three are "no", then it's really a worthless app if you've got Picasa, and especially if you've already got a combination of Picasa and Photoshop. (So you can use Picasa for images that need only light retouching, and Photoshop for the heavy stuff that Aperture wouldn't be suited for either.)
Of course, both Apple and Adobe will probably improve their products to compete with each other as time goes on. I would love to see true RAW support in Photoshop itself and I would love to see more features in Aperture. Adobe has had no real serious competition in pro image editing for a good while up to now.