Apple releases Aperture 2.1 for professional photographers

Apple released the latest edition of its popular image processing software Aperture on Friday. The first version of this software program, designed to assist professional photographers in post-production work, had been released in November 2005.

Several later versions and updates were also released, with the Aperture 2.0 edition making its debut in February 2008. This was immediately followed by version 2.0.1 to addresses issues related to the performance and overall stability of Aperture 2.0.

Now Apple has announced the release of Aperture 2.1 which introduces an open plug-in architecture that makes it easy for photographers to use specialized third party imaging software right from within Aperture, available as a free download to customers of Aperture 2.0.

It features the Apple-developed plug-in, Dodge & Burn, which adds brush-based tools for dodge (lighten), burn (darken), contrast, saturation, sharpen and blur. Over the coming months, third party software developers will deliver image editing plug-ins for localized editing, filters and effects, noise analysis and reduction, fish-eye lens correction and more.

The third-party features especially add to the value provided by the software. 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.

Even for the few photographs which needed to be touched up outside Aperture, the new plug-in offers the flexibility to open any other application to tone those images. John Stanmeyer, founding member of the VII Photo Agency and contributing photographer for Time and National Geographic magazines, said as much.

Apple is in talks with many other software developers to offer their popular products as plug-ins to Aperture. These include:

1. Nik Software's Viveza plug-in -  provides a powerful, precise and easy way for photographers to selectively control and adjust color and light in their digital images
2. PictureCode's Noise Ninja plug - provides an expansive suite of creative filters and effects
3. 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
4. Image Trends' plug-ins including Fisheye-Hemi - to quickly and effortlessly correct fish-eye lens distortion, ShineOff which automatically removes shine from faces and PearlyWhites that automatically whitens and brightens teeth.

Apple has always enjoyed a niche following in personal computers and operating systems, and now enjoys a mass following with its ubiquitous portable music player (PMP) iPod and the iPhone. It is all set to extend its dominance in the field of specialized application software like image processing with the improved version of Aperture.