By David Fekke
January 17th, 2011
Apple just announced its "Professional" image editing program, Aperture. It is designed for professional image editing. So how does it compare to PhotoShop? The answer is it is very lame compared to PhotoShop.
Aperture does not allow you to do any actual retouching, even though Apple says you can in their marketing. There are no cloning or paint tools. The only editing that Aperture lets you do is make tonal and color changes in a nondestructive way. Photoshop has allowed for this for over seven years now.
The one thing that Aperture lets you do that is pretty cool is that it uses Apple's Core Image API. The Core Image API is Apple's underlying image processing using the Quartz imaging engine. Adobe has always used their own engine for image processing. This may give Apple some speed advantages.
The price tag is steep at $499.00 US. For 100 bucks more, I would just buy a copy of PhotoShop.