Aperture, Apple’s new professional photograph management and editing application, is a tool that complements Adobe Photoshop instead of competing with it. Even Adobe sees it as a supplement to Photoshop, according to a Publish article.
Apple touts Aperture as workflow tool for professional photographers who deal with images in the Camera RAW file format. In essence, it’s a photography post production studio, complete with light table, packed into a Macintosh.
Instead of including all of the pixel editing and image creation and manipulation tools found in Photoshop, Aperture has a subset of tools for image correction and a powerful file management system.
Kevin Connor, director of product management for Adobe’s digital imaging products, commented “It’s clear Apple is positioning this as complementary to Photoshop.”
Apple even went so far as to include basic Photoshop compatibility by including support for native single layer and flat Photoshop files, Photoshop generated image versions, and opening Aperture managed files in Photoshop with a single click.
Many photographers may use Aperture as a replacement for Adobe’s Bridge. Aperture imports RAW images faster, and has a potentially more powerful batch image processing capability thanks to its AppleScript and Automator support.
Since Aperture doesn’t ship until November, we’ll have to wait and see what effect it has on the products it will compete with, like Capture One Pro from Phase One.