Aperture 3: Review of Aperture 3

Aperture 3 has newly expanded abilities to edit images. Its new Brushes feature lets you apply specific effects by simply painting the area where you want to apply an effect. Aperture 3 comes equipped with 14 Quick Brushes that allow you to apply Dodging, Burning, Skin Smoothing, Polarizing, and 10 other effects at the stroke of a brush. There are more than 20 additional adjustments you can perform on images, including the old standbys, such as white balance, exposure, color, levels, and sharpen. The nice thing about the new Brushes tools is that they don’t require you to first create multiple layers and masks to apply them. Their intuitive use makes retouching images much simpler than with some competing editing applications.

You can apply predefined adjustments to images, including Auto Exposure, +1 or +2 Exposure, and Color Effects, as well as create your own presets. Presets make routine adjustments easy. You can also use them to automatically perform a basic cleanup when importing images.

All of the Adjustment tools are non-destructive, letting you back out changes at any time. In fact, the only time you commit to an image version is when you export, print, or upload it to another service.

Aperture 3 also has had its slideshow system revamped. At first glance, the new slideshow system seems to be borrowed from the iLife suite, specifically iPhoto, iDVD, and iMovie. Just as in those iLife applications, you select an overall theme, add your photos, and add an audio track, if you wish. You can define transitions as well as slide durations. You can also include videos as well as add text to your slideshow.

Of course, once you create a slideshow or an album of images, you're going to want to share it with others. Aperture 3 has a built-in ability to upload selected images, albums, and slideshows to popular online services such as MobileMe, Facebook, and Flickr. You will need to run through a setup routine once for each of the online services, but once that's done, you can simply select images and publish them to the online account.

Aperture Books is another way of sharing your photos. With Aperture Books, you can design and lay out a photo book, which is then professionally printed. You can print one copy for yourself or a friend, or multiple copies for resale. Aperture Books uses a multi-master layout design. You specify one or more master pages, such as introduction, table of contents, and chapters, that define the layout's look, then add your photos and text as appropriate.

Aperture Books can be published as hard or soft cover, with prices ranging from $49.99 for a 20-page, 13"x10" hardcover, to a 3-pack of a 20-page, 3.5"x2.6" soft cover for $11.97.

Besides photo books, you can use the Aperture Books layout system to create calendars, greeting cards, postcards, and more. You can see a video about how photo books are made in Aperture 3 at Apple's web site.

I spent a week using Aperture 3 and came away impressed with its capabilities. Its library management is second to none, and it gives you the choice of Aperture managing your master images within its own database, or you controlling where they will be stored on your Mac.

Along with the library, Aperture also provides a great deal of control over image importing, from a camera, a memory card, or one or more locations on your Mac. I felt like I had control over the import process from start to finish, unlike some other applications, where the import process seems more of a hold-your-breath-and-see-what-happens affair.

I expected Aperture 3 to meet my needs when it comes to editing photos. I didn't expect a full-fledged image editing application like Photoshop, but something I can use to make basic adjustments to the RAW files (or JPEGs) from my camera. I wasn't disappointed. Aperture 3 has all of the basic tools I need, and they are easy to use, either individually or as batch processes.

The big surprise was how well the new Brushes feature works. The brushes let me do complex editing that I normally reserve for Photoshop. Aperture is no replacement for Photoshop, but I can now do a lot more of my editing in Aperture and reduce the number of trips I need to make to Photoshop to complete a project.

The sharing, slideshow, and Aperture Books features are a nice touch, though not something I personally will use often.

Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.