Fine-tuned to maximize the advantages offered by Macintosh hardware and Mac OS X Tiger, Aperture offers breakthrough speed and quality -- whether you're working with RAW, JPEG, or TIFF images.

And with the most powerful image processing in the world, Aperture is fast -- whether you're working with RAW, JPEG, or TIFF images. Aperture supports the RAW formats from all leading digital camera manufacturers (including Canon and Nikon) and provides optimized support for such market leading cameras as the Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II, Canon EOS 20D, and Nikon D2x as well as the highly popular Canon Digital Rebel and Nikon D50. It also supports the Adobe DNG format.

Whether you're a fashion, wedding, sports, portrait, fine art, commercial, or editorial photographer, Aperture's color-managed workflow and flexible design tools will help you easily create stunning prints, customized contact sheets, elegant books, and web pages as beautiful as the images you capture.

Advanced RAW Workflow
As a photographer, you know all about the benefits of shooting RAW. With access to all the data your digital SLR can record, you're capturing images of startling quality, great dynamic range, and virtually no noise. And now, for the very first time, you have an application that provides you with more control of the final image than you've ever had before. One that actually makes working with RAW files as easy as working with JPEGs.

The tools -- including Levels, White Balance, Exposure, Sharpening, Noise Reduction and more -- afford you the freedom to experiment without having to worry about damaging your valuable original images. View larger.

Providing the very first all-in-one tool for your post-production needs, Aperture lets you work with RAW images through every step of the digital workflow without first having to convert your images into another format to make necessary image adjustments, eliminate red-eye, remove dust, crop, organize images, or print contact sheets.

Aperture provides you with the tools to do it all -- import, edit, catalog, organize, retouch, publish, and archive your photographs -- in a RAW-focused workflow that's the first of its kind. Rather than using another application to manage your images, Aperture offers built-in project management with robust and flexible tools that make it easy to handle thousands of projects.

They include a powerful suite of tools for editing a photo shoot. It's one of the most tedious jobs any photographer faces, and it's been particularly taxing when shooting RAW. But Aperture provides tools specifically designed to work with RAW files and to speed you through the process of sifting through thousands of images, culling the rejects, comparing the keepers, and identifying your absolutely finest photographs.

Nor do you have to convert your images in order to make needed adjustments. You can perfect them without having to leave Aperture, using a powerful suite of nondestructive image editing tools. The tools -- including Levels, White Balance, Exposure, Sharpening, Noise Reduction and more -- afford you the freedom to experiment without having to worry about damaging your valuable original images. That's because Aperture applies modifications only to "versions" of your images and never to the original "master" images themselves.

Professional Project Management
Aperture, the first all-in-one post-production tool for photographers, provides everything you need to manage your photo library: flexible organizational tools, comprehensive metadata support, and powerful search tools that let you find files instantly.

For easy organization and searching, Aperture comes with collections of associated Keyword Sets (and lets you create your own).

Aperture lets you import photos from a wide variety of sources and preserves the method you used to organize files when you drag folders from your hard drive and drop them into Aperture. In fact, because Aperture supports both AppleScript and Automator, you can streamline many aspects of your workflow by automating those day-in day-out tasks you repeatedly find yourself doing.

Organize a photo library with thousands of projects any way you want -- in Projects, Albums, Folders, or any combination thereof. Create multiple Albums of related images within a Project. Or nest folders inside a project to organize albums, books, websites, and light tables. You can even have Aperture automatically group images together into Smart Albums based on defined criteria. With Aperture, you can work on multiple projects at once and freely copy or move photos among folders, projects, and albums.

Aperture lets you view, extract, and add metadata with unprecedented ease. On import, it automatically extracts all industry-standard EXIF and IPTC metadata. What's more, it lets you comprehensively add important metadata -- copyright, captions, keywords -- at the point of import.

As you work with images, you're never more than a keystroke away from seeing your metadata in, for example, the customizable Metadata Heads-Up Display, where you can customize the metadata to suit your needs. You can also choose what metadata Aperture displays with your images and what metadata to embed when you export images. And when it comes to keywords, Aperture significantly outshines other applications. It not only supports true, hierarchical keywording but also provides a number of intuitive ways to assign keywords to images.

For example, Aperture comes with collections of associated Keyword Sets (and lets you create your own). Call up the Wedding Set, for example, and you'll have a group of associated keywords -- bride, table shots, wedding party, vows, candids, limo, cake cutting -- any of which you can assign with a keystroke.

Using the Keyword Heads-Up Display, you can drag and drop keywords onto a single image or entire group of images at once. And, here's a real time-saver, once you've assigned a variety of keywords to an image, Aperture lets you "lift" them from one image and "stamp" them onto other images. Assigning and working with keywords has never been simpler or more rewarding.

Powerful Compare and Select Tools

Open any of the Heads-Up Displays (HUDs) available in Aperture to adjust levels, increase brightness, modify color temperature, assign keywords, straighten horizons,