Every so often Apple comes up with something so cool, so awe-inspiring, that all you can say is “Wow”. QuickTime High Definition video. Watching PowerMacs “toast” PC systems in photo, video and audio “shootouts”. Expose´, Spotlight, Dashboard, and other features in Mac OS X. The iPod. Applications like iMovie and iPhoto. You get the point.

Today, I had another of those “Wow” experiences. At another “Special Event” press conference, this time at a professional photography tradeshow in New York City, Apple introduced a new application. It’s called “Aperture”, and it will do for the photographic industry what Apple’s Final Cut Pro has done for the video and motion picture industry.

Think of Aperture as iPhoto on steroids. Aperture performs the same basic photographic functions that iPhoto does (managing, editing, and sharing), except with far more power, flair, and speed, and designed for the pro rather than the consumer.

Here’s some highlights. When capturing photos from the camera or memory card, Aperture lets you look at thumbnails of the photos and assign keywords, descriptions, and other metadata before you being the import. Once imported, you can arrange the photos on a floating “light table” (leveraging Mac OS X’s Core Image technology), and easily compare, for example, several shots of the same subject to determine the best version.

Aperture has a full complement of photo editing tools, even its own implementation of the “layers” used in Photoshop. As in iPhoto, editing is “non-destructive”, meaning you always have access to the original that came out of the camera. Aperture also plays well with the increasingly popular RAW format, and doesn’t require the intermediate processing steps needed in Photoshop. It’s also very “color savvy”, which is critical when you go to print.

One of the coolest features of iPhoto is its ability to create beautiful “coffee table” books of your photos, and, with an internet connection, even whisk your book off to Apple’s print shop. Aperture takes this feature to a new level, with fully customizable books that you can print yourself. Same thing with exporting and building web galleries. More flexibility, more templates.

Here’s what you need to do to get your own “Wow” fix. Go to www.apple.com/aperture with a broadband connection. And, here’s the best part. As with other pro applications, its only a matter of time before Aperture’s grace and beauty show up, in some form, in iPhoto 6 and beyond.

© 2005 Peter F. Zimowski