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Journalists Cover Microsoft, Using Macs

It’s not an easy time for Microsoft — with Steve Ballmer having to field questions about being “buffoons” and an “evil empire”  at the shareholder’s meeting (.doc) — so when they get together “the world’s most influential technology pundits and online writers” (nb: we weren’t invited) for Mobius to discuss super-secret mobile tech you’d think [...]

Guide To Black Friday Apple Bargains: Cheap MacBooks, iPods and Accessories Galore

Here’s a guide for finding the best bargains on Apple-related gear during the infamous Black Friday sales on November 27. We’ve compiled a comprehensive list of gear from leaked photos of sales flyers and descriptions of sales.
The bargains include a 2.26 GHz MacBook + $150 gift card at Best Buy for $999.99 ; a 32GB [...]

Review: Voices Is Today’s Best Thing Ever, Grab It Now While It’s Cheap

New on the App Store is Voices from the clever folk at Tap Tap Tap. You can guess what it does.

Open it up, pick a silly voice. Helium is pretty silly. A microphone appears and the app even clears your throat for you (try it, you’ll see what I mean). Now speak your brains, and [...]

Review: Sony Walkman S540 Series Video MP3 Player

Press releases, you will hardly be surprised to hear, are rarely very interesting. But one arrived in my inbox a couple of weeks ago that made me double-take.
“Sony’s S Series Walkman,” it chattered, “is a serious challenger to the iPod Nano.” Gosh, really? Perhaps the Cult had better have a look at one, then, despite [...]

Aperture Uber Alles? (Apple Attacks Photoshop)

Filed under, it’s never too soon.

Aperture 2.1 update - smaller

This evening, without so much as a beating drum to alert the dogs of war, Apple fired a shot right across the bow of Adobe Photoshop’s dominion over photo editing.

Aperture is already my favorite photo organizing and fine-tuning software –it’s brilliant, and offers a seamless upgrade to the familiar iPhoto. What’s been frustrating however is the need to export to Photoshop to perform anything more than basic RAW adjustments to highlights, shadow, sharpness and re-touch.

Today, this all changed. Apple has released an example plug-in “Dodge and Burn”, and with it, demonstrated Aperture’s plug in architecture. Per this review, additional plug ins are in the works from Nik Software, PictureCode, and Digital Film Tools.

Sure we won’t be able to “paint” in it (and why would we), but if Aperture will shortly have access to the kind of plug-in library available to Photoshop, there may be virtually no need for Adobe in any professional photographer’s workflow. This is clearly one step further in Apple’s strategy to dominate their core “creative professionals” market. Remember when Avid/Adobe Premier owned film editing? Who is going to pick that over Final Cut now?

I’ve been playing with the version 2.1 now for a few hours and love the new functionality, but what’s got me more exited is the potential, I see a huge library of plug-ins on the horizon. So Aperture users, sound off, what plug-ins do you desire most? Me, top of the list, I want an HDR merge and tone-map plug-in, Right Now.

About the author

LeighMcMullen

Leigh McMullen leads the Advisory Services & Strategy practices for the professional services arm of one of the Big-Five firms. He has written several books that would cure any insomnia you might have, and is an avid Mac junkie.

Email the author | Read more posts by Leigh McMullen.

13 comments

    I’ve just started using Aperture;I think I will forego using PS for part of my work flow. A panorama plug-in would be nice to see with blending tools.

    I dream about Noiseware plugin…

    I use LensFix CI to straighten out barrel and pin cushion distortions in my imags when taking pictures of things with straight lines that get tweaked with lens abberations. ..

    I really want that functionality in an Aperture edit plugin, but would prefer that it worked on the RAW image instead of a tiff version of the image.

    Perspective control please! I really can’t justify a Tilt-Shift lens, and software is the right place for it now. HDR and Pano stitching – preferably with QTVR links – would be wonderful too.

    Why do we have to use German? It’s getting a little too trendy and cliche to use German, especially the “uber” word. Please drop it.

    I’d like a CMYK plug-in for making separations for print publishing.

    I use FixerLabs FocusFixer plug-in and would love to see some similar lens compensation sharpening tool work with Aperture 2.

    ‘there may be virtually no need for Adobe in any professional photographer’s workflow’

    Until there are layers and layer masking, PS will always be in the workflow for finishing an image.

    I am still waiting for my Aperture 2 (I live in South Africa), but I agree that the potential is huge. When Apple introduced widgets in it’s Operating System, only a few widgets were available. Just check how many different widgets you get now.

    Aperture 2 (I had the test version installed) is a big leap forward in Aperture’s development and 2.1 seems to emphasize this. I look forward to lots of great plugins to make my life easier…

    Yeah, lens correction PLEASE. And curves.

    Gads how could I forget that… AUTOMATIC Lens correction if you please. I want to be able to put in correction figures for my lenses at various zooms, and have it AUTOMATICALLY do it for that lens from then on…

    [...] not rushing right out to get my tinfoil hat, but this coupled with the new Aperture plug-in framework, really starts to make me wonder. The only question which remains is how might Apple augment its [...]

    [...] mode on the Mac. I’m not rushing right out to get my tinfoil hat, but this coupled with the new Aperture plug-in framework, really starts to make me wonder. The only question which remains is how might Apple augment its [...]

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