Posted Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Say Hello to Aperture (and Yes, it Supports Automator)

Well, well! Today at the PhotoPlus Expo in New York, Apple announced Aperture, a digital image manipulation program aimed at advanced photographers.

Aperture's interface looks gorgeous. Suddenly, Photoshop looks so...twentieth century.

Aperture also appears to borrow from, and work with, iPhoto: you can access an iPhoto library directly within Aperture, and you can organize photos into albums and smart albums. You can even use Aperture to create photo Web pages and books.

Aperture appears to work with Adobe Photoshop, though it's not immediately clear to me how the two programs might mesh, since Apple's tech specs page says that Aperture supports only flattened (not layered) Photoshop files.

Aperture ships in November; rest assured I'll be saying more about this exciting new program in the weeks to come.

Oh, and one more thing: Aperture supports Tiger's Automator technology. Aperture will include a set of Automator actions that handle common chores.