Apple Aperture 2.1 Released
It seems that Apple is starting to take Aperture and digital photography seriously, with the release of Aperture 2.1 today, incorporating a number of key features that improve the already impressive feature-set of the recently released Aperture 2.0.
Whilst there are numerous bug fixes and small feature enhancements/additions, the biggest feature to be included is the open image editing plug-in support. This has opened the door to allow image editing plug-ins to be developed by third-parties.
The following is taken from the Apple press release.
“By clicking on one or more images within Aperture, users can choose from a menu of installed plug-ins and apply specialized imaging operations to either TIFF or RAW images. Apple is working closely with key developers to bring the most requested plug-ins to Aperture such as:
- Nik Software’s Viveza plug-in, powered by U Point technology, which provides a powerful, precise and easy way for photographers to selectively control and adjust color and light in their digital images;
- PictureCode’s Noise Ninja plug-in that delivers advanced high ISO noise analysis and reduction;
- Digital Film Tools’ Power Stroke plug-in that features a simple, stroke-based interface to quickly mask and intuitively perform targeted adjustments;
- The Tiffen Company’s Dfx plug-in that provides an expansive suite of creative filters and effects;
- dvGarage’s dpMatte plug-in, which is a high performance chroma key tool for creating seamless composites, and the HDRtoner plug-in that enables the selection of multiple photos to create a single high dynamic range (HDR) image; and
- Image Trends’ plug-ins that include Fisheye-Hemi to quickly and effortlessly correct fisheye lens distortion, ShineOff which automatically removes shine from faces and PearlyWhites that automatically whitens and brightens teeth.”
This is great news for Aperture users, a feature that has been requested since version 1.0. The number of vendors already building plug-ins for Aperture is very impressive, and will hopefully bring some of our favorite Photoshop plug-ins to Aperture.
An Apple developed plug-in ‘Dodge & Burn’ is included in the update. Even though Apple has provided it as an example plug-in, it provides a lot of the functionally offered by Photoshop. In itself this is a worthy inclusion, and will help to reduce the number of round trips to Photoshop for simple image editing.
A very impressive and worthwhile update to Aperture 2.0.
Tags: Aperture
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