Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

450
The Digital Photographer's Software Guide
by the year 2005, when Aperture first launched, PhotoReflect.com showcased 100 million
photos. It has grown substantially since then, helped in part by the ease with which
users can now connect to the site without leaving Aperture. See www.photoreflect.com.
Soundslides
Export your selected images straight to a Soundslides project. Soundslides audiovisual
authoring software is favored by photojournalists when they put their work on the
Internet. See www.soundslides.com.
Other plug-ins include connections to the following photo sites—Getty Images
(www.gettyimages.com), iStockphoto (www.istockphoto.com), Photoshelter (www.photo
shelter.com), and Pictage (www.pictage.com).
Comments
For sorting out pictures after a shoot, for general image handling, cataloging, and
backup, for consistent color management, dual monitor support, creative contact printing,
and easy Web gallery loading, Aperture is hard to beat. It raises the question—if
you do not own an Apple Macintosh, is Aperture so good that you have to buy one?
Were it not for Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, the answer for any photographer
would certainly be “yes!” But the competition is formidable, so there is no clear-cut
answer. The best advice for non-Mac users is to see it in action and decide whether its
unique facilities, and those of the Mac environment, are worth the switch.
Version: Aperture 2.0.1 (2008)
OS: Mac OS X 10.4.11 or later
RAM: 1GB, Mac Pro 2GB
Supported file formats: Major RAW formats; JPEG, TIFF, GIF, PNG, and DNG
Price level: Approx. $200
Address: Apple Inc., 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA 95014, United States
www.apple.com
Summary
The featured products presented in this chapter were discussed in greater depth because
they shed light on many different aspects of the photographic workflow. Both of them
have been created with substantial input from the photographic profession. Both possess
exceptionally well designed user interfaces, showing plenty of evidence that the
developers have thought long and hard about every feature and its implementation.
In a real sense, Lightroom and Aperture have been made possible by the development
of the dozens of other software packages and plug-ins listed elsewhere in this book. All
developers are striving for the best solutions to problems that photographers are likely