Crave

Canon's Rebel T1i

(Credit: CNET)

Apple released a software update Thursday to let its Aperture 2, iPhoto '08, and iPhoto '09 photo-editing software handle raw images from three newer SLRs, Canon's Rebel T1i, Nikon's D5000, and Olympus' E-30.

Higher-end cameras offer raw image formats that provide more flexibility and quality than JPEG, but the raw file formats are proprietary, vary from one camera model to another, and require companies such as Apple and Adobe Systems to release a constant stream of updates. Microsoft relies on camera manufacturers to supply software for Windows that can interpret the raw data, which is taken directly from camera image sensors without in-camera processing.

Camera makers typically supply their own software for handling raw images, but many people prefer their own photo software.

Further detail on Apple's support is available on Apple's raw camera support page.

Apple Aperture in action.

(Credit: Apple)

LAS VEGAS--Apple on Monday added support in its software for raw image files from Nikon's top-end SLR, the $8,000, 24.5-megapixel D3X.

Apple's Digital Camera Raw Compatibility Update 2.5 also adds support for Epson's Epson R-D1x digital rangefinder camera, according to the Apple support page.

The software enables Aperture 2, iPhoto '08, and iPhoto '09 to interpret the cameras' raw files, proprietary formats that include more information than JPEGs. The update requires Mac OS X 10.4.11, Mac OS X 10.5.3, or later.

A full list of Apple's raw image support is available on Apple's support site.

Aperture's competitor, Adobe Systems' Photoshop Lightroom, also got D3X support Monday, which is eve of the Photo Marketing Association (PMA) show here.

(Via Rob Galbraith.)

With Adobe Systems' release of version 2 of its Photoshop Lightroom on Monday night, the company no doubt hopes customers will be drawn by a number of new features in the software for sorting, cataloging, and editing photos.

But the company believes an external factor will also help the software: the booming sales of high-end SLR cameras. These high-end models are helping usher in many of digital photography's biggest changes, and Adobe is trying to intercept the trend with Lightroom.

From 2007 to 2008, digital SLR shipments increased a dramatic 41 percent to 7.5 million units, according to market researcher IDC. And though plenty of those cameras went to gadget-happy doctors or to snapshooters who won't exploit the cameras' full features, plenty of others went to the photography enthusiasts at whom Lightroom is aimed.

Lightroom 2.0 is geared for editing flexible but complicated 'raw' images taken directly from higher-end cameras' image sensors. (Click image to enlarge.)

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

"Prices are coming down, so more people with entry-level SLRs are experimenting," said Tom Hogarty, the Adobe senior product manager in charge of Lightroom. "If you pick up the camera for the sake of creating an artistic thing and not just recording a family event, you've really taken the plunge into serious photography. Anyone at that level is an ideal Lightroom customer."

One significant feature common to SLRs is the ability to shoot "raw" photos--the images taken directly from the image sensors without the camera baking in its own assumptions about what's right. ... Read More

Update 6:40 AM PDT: I added some links to Adobe information and further detailed some new features.

The most interesting new capability in the Lightroom 2 beta is localized corrections. This image from an Adobe demonstration shows the control for a brush that can adjust saturation, brightness, exposure, and clarity of the area of the photo you 'paint.'

(Credit: Adobe Systems)

When Adobe Systems launched Photoshop Lightroom, it presented users with an all-or-nothing photo editing philosophy. But with version 2, which goes into public beta testing Wednesday, the company is changing course.

Lightroom 2 offers local editing abilities that permit photographers to edit just a patch of an image--whitening a person's teeth, deepening the blue of a sky, illuminating a child in a tree's shadow. Changes are "painted" on with a variably sized circular brush.

Local editing doesn't open the door to the super-detailed pixel-level tweaking of regular Photoshop, but it's a major step in that direction. It's also a timely answer to version 2.1 of Apple's Aperture, released last week with a plug-in architecture permitting local editing such as dodging and burning to brighten or darken parts of an image.

Regular Photoshop certainly won't be consigned to oblivion. Even within the relatively limited task of editing photos, Photoshop offers a wealth of tools, plug-ins, and options that are beyond Lightroom's scope. But local editing could help free Lightroom fans from the awkward round trips taking photos to Photoshop and back.

The new feature doesn't depart from Lightroom's nondestructive editing approach: the changes are recorded as metadata that leaves the underlying digital file unaltered. Reconciling local editing with nondestructive editing was one reason the feature has taken so long to appear, Adobe has said.

Lightroom is designed chiefly to handle "raw" photo formats that come unprocessed from camera image sensors. Raw images offer more flexibility and quality, but they're proprietary and often tricky to handle, and raw images generally must be converted to more universal formats such as TIFF or JPEG for further handling.

Further details from Adobe are available from Photoshop product manager John Nack, Lightroom product manager Tom Hogarty, and the Lightroom 2 beta release notes (in PDF form). The software itself can be downloaded from Adobe Labs.

Other features
Local editing is among several new features and some tweaks to the Lightroom interface. Among the other changes:

• Smart Collections, which enables the software to automatically group photos based on various attributes such as a particular keyword. I like this: I get sick of adding new photos to various ever-expanding thematic collections.

• A built-in panel for better searching with multiple parameters such as time, keywords, camera lens, and photo location. Specific search interfaces can be saved.

• The ability to apply sharpening during the export process, which is useful especially given that sharpening an image often depends on where it's going to be used (printed images generally require more than those published online, for example), so sharpening settings might not be something you want saved along with the master file.

• The ability to export a selection of images directly to Photoshop CS3's tools for merging multiple photos into a single high dynamic range or panoramic image. The composite image arrives handily in Lightroom's catalog.

• Dual-monitor support, which Aperture already has. You can open up a second window that can be devoted to various tasks such as showing close-ups as you move the mouse pointer over various thumbnails in the main catalog.

• A 64-bit version that lets the software take advantage of more than 4GB of memory on Mac OS X 10.5 and Windows Vista.

•  The ability to edit photos 30,000 pixels on edge instead of just 10,000--very handy when dealing with panoramas.

• A "print package" feature for printing custom layouts with the same photo in multiple sizes.

• The ability to add the corner-darkening vignetting effect to cropped images, not just to the full-sized uncropped version.

What's missing? Doubtless there will be developments with the plug-in architecture and accompanying software development kit (SDK) that could let others write plug-ins. Photoshop has a rich selection of plug-ins, but it's tougher with Lightroom in part because of the nondestructive editing aspects.

Adobe said a "primary focus" for Lightroom is an SDK for "workflow"--translate that to tasks for import, export, perhaps file management, but not editing. However, Apple figured a way to produce a plug-in architecture that includes editing abilities, so I wouldn't rule it out as impossible. Notable Apple partners include companies such as Nik Software's Viveza technology for adjusting colors and PictureCode's Noise Ninja for noise reduction, both available as plug-ins for Photoshop.

Local editing details
Adobe's tool lets you "paint" the edits onto a section, with feathered edges to soften transitions and an auto-masking option to limit changes just to a particular color range.

Each change can be selected later and modified. I'm not clear yet on the extent to which painting over the same patch multiple times intensifies the effect, but I'm guessing you'd have to fire up a new brush and make another pass.

Lots of people crabbed about the lack of local editing--I've publicly pined for a local tool to simulate split neutral-density filters, a promised feature. But it might actually be a good thing that local editing is only arriving in version 2. That's because photographers got to try out a new set of Lightroom 1 tools that often could accomplish the same goals with a whole-image editing approach.

For example, I find that brightening dark tones with Lightroom's fill tool often yields an image that looks more natural than what results from spot-editing approaches such as dodging and burning. And I like the "targeted adjustment tool" that lets me click on a particular color range to change saturation or luminance. The change is across the whole photo, but often that's just fine.

Whole-image editing problems crop up, though. Say you want to give a shot that uber-vivid blue sky and green grass that you see in the surreal world of prescription-drug ads--but not throw the colors of other blue and green out of whack. For this kind of thing, local adjustments are just the ticket.

In fairness, Lightroom did have some local-edit abilities, such as one tool to touch up dust specs or skin blemishes and another for fixing flash-induced red eye. I like the first, but find the red-eye tool finicky and often ineffectual. (Update 10:20 a.m. PT April 8: I removed a reference to Aperture that incorrectly described its touch-up abilities.)

Free beta, with a catch
With the beta, Adobe is continuing what it began with 1.0, a much more open development process than the company has used historically. Not only is the approach in vogue, it helps diminish Apple's competitive threat, recruit new users, and shape software that's in flux.

I'm sure Adobe hopes the beta process will help eliminate the fiasco of its most recent Lightroom update, too. The company released the Lightroom 1.4 update in March only to pull it when discovering serious bugs. The company told users to reinstall the older version; it still plans to release a 1.4.1 update after further testing, a release that's separate from the 2.0 beta.

Adobe wouldn't say when the final version of Lightroom 2 will be available, though this particular beta version will expire August 31. If the 1.0 beta series is anything to go by, a second beta will be available by then.

The beta is free to anyone, but perversely it expires after 30 days for those who aren't Lightroom 1 users or who haven't been invited by a version 1 customer. Maybe Adobe is trying to generate some viral-marketing buzz that invitation programs sometimes help new Web sites benefit from, but I'm not sure how much cachet an invite will have with the free 30-day version.

CNET senior editor Lori Grunin contributed to this report.

I was in a pinch a few weeks ago, and Google's Picasa software saved my skin. But now my warm glow of gratitude has begun wearing off, replaced by a simmering annoyance with camera makers for their profusion of proprietary raw formats.

Let me explain. I was covering the Photo Marketing Association trade show in Las Vegas, toting my Canon EOS Rebel XT camera to photograph products and people. For my personal photography I usually shoot in raw format to maximize the detail and flexibility, but for work purposes I use JPEG because it's faster to process and CNET News.com graphics are too small to require top resolution.

This screenshot shows a raw image from an Olympus E-3 SLR in Google's Picasa software. At right is the low-resolution JPEG preview, at left the garbled view after an incorrect decoding Google's support for the E-3 is on the way.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

But I had a brief moment of panic when I discovered, on a tight deadline, that I'd photographed a Sony full-frame SLR press conference and accompanying photo gallery in raw only. I wasn't happy, because I hadn't installed any software for processing raw images on my laptop. I briefly considered downloading a trial version of Adobe Systems' Photoshop Lightroom, which I use at home, but dreaded the time it would take to get myself to a network connection and install the software.

Then I remembered that Picasa supports some raw formats. Sure enough, it did the trick--after I made my usual end run around Canon, which annoyingly doesn't include a mass storage driver on its cameras, requiring me to retrieve raw files using a separate flash card reader.

Picasa lacked some editing tools I like in Lightroom (and now Apple's Aperture 2.0, too), but I wasn't about to complain.

Until Wednesday.

That's when I received an Olympus E-3 that I'll be testing on an upcoming vacation. The camera has been out since November, but Picasa still doesn't support its raw images.

Raw-support challenges
Picasa showed the low-resolution JPEG preview fine, but as soon as I clicked on the thumbnail, the photo became a speckly mess of pixel gibberish.

For its part, Google said Thursday that E-3 raw support is coming. "We're in the process of testing it and plan to support it soon," the company said in a statement. Picasa uses Dave Coffin's freely available dcraw software, which supports the E-3, but Google said it makes its own modifications "to make it run faster."

It's no surprise Google employs outside software for the complicated task. Olympus told me it leaves programmers on their own to reverse-engineer raw formats: "When asked, we will provide sample raw files to companies, but it is up to them to figure out what to do with them. Our raw format is not difficult, and anyone with any experience with graphic file formats will figure it out in a matter of seconds."

For photographers, there are unpleasant consequences of camera makers' opacity and non-standardization. Programmers from Adobe Systems, Apple, and other companies must toil constantly to support new cameras, and camera makers must develop and support their own software. And the obstreperous nature of raw can curtail the innovation of other programmers, too.

For example, software that can embed location data known as geotags in raw files is much rarer than software that supports JPEGs. Adding metadata such as titles, captions, ratings, and tags is another risky operation; Microsoft Vista can do this, but relies on camera makers to supply software to support their various raw formats.

A programmer's plight
Sachin Garg, a programmer in India, is another example. He's been working on software that can compress raw files more efficiently--about 20 percent to 60 percent more than those already compressed by the camera.

Programmer Sachin Garg

(Credit: Sachin Garg)

That's work that conceivably could be useful for those of us with vast archives of raw images, but Garg said the difficulties of working with raw files makes it tough.

"I have started with Nikon's NEF (raw format), and it's a mess. What makes it worse is that even for this single format, there are variations based on each camera, and camera's firmware version," Garg said. "I have managed to read and compress the file, but re-creating the original file again is giving me nightmares."

And that's just one popular format. There are also cameras from Canon, Olympus, Fujifilm, Pentax, Sony, Panasonic, Samsung, Hasselblad, and others to contend with.

"It's a much different ball game to write an algorithm (than just) trying to put it in a practically usable application," Garg said. He understands the camera makers' situation, though. "Looking at each format, one can see the technical reasons why different camera makers are doing things differently and that adopting a common standard can possibly limit the innovations they introduce in newer cameras."

One possible alternative to the raw plight could be HD Photo, which Microsoft is trying to standardize as JPEG XR, a higher-end alternative to conventional JPEG. My guess is that this file format stands a reasonable chance of catching on--especially given the warm response from Adobe and more recently Canon--but even then it's more likely only to intercept photographers just moving beyond JPEG rather than replacing raw.

That's because HD Photo/JPEG XR requires the camera to process the image for de-mosaicking, noise reduction, sharpening, and white balance, all of which are "baked" into the image. For the folks who want total flexibility, they'll stick with raw.

DNG to the rescue?
A more likely alternative is Adobe Digital Negative (DNG) format, a raw format whose specifications are openly shared if not a neutral industry standard. Adobe explicitly created DNG to deal with the raw format "tower of Babel."

But larger camera makers have been reluctant to embrace DNG. It's hard to get firm answers on exactly why not; I'd imagine a variety of factors are involved, ranging from not wanting to be reliant on Adobe or a fixed format to inadequacies of DNG to fully represent raw images. And Pentax, whose SLRs support both DNG and its own PEF raw format, told me that most customers shooting raw use PEF, so users apparently need more convincing, too.

Maybe Adobe just needs to do a little more marketing, standardize DNG, or come up with an improved version 2.0. But for now, the raw format mess shows no signs of being tidied up.

The good news is that there's some competition again for software to edit and catalog raw images, the detailed and flexible file formats from higher-end cameras. The bad news is that anybody buying the software has a harder choice to make.

With the new Aperture now available and Lightroom just celebrating its first birthday, I thought it opportune to survey readers. What would you buy? What would you advise somebody else?

Please vote in the poll here, and share your reasoning in the Talkback section below to enlighten others.

Photographers would be best to think carefully about which software to purchase, and not just because of the necessary investments of time and money. Unlike applications such as Photoshop, which can easily be substituted or used in conjunction with other software, Lightroom and Aperture are equipped to extend their tentacles to manage your library of images.

In essence, that means the software can be a gatekeeper to your data--not the original images, but the editing settings, titles, captions, tags, and organizational structure. For me, having a rich, searchable catalog is definitely worth it, but tread carefully before you commit, because it'll be difficult to extricate yourself.

Apple was first to enter the higher-end photo software market with Aperture in 2005, but the software languished at the same time Adobe Systems released and rapidly updated Photoshop Lightroom over 2007. But now Apple is back in the game with Aperture 2.0, which reproduces some features in Lightroom, boosts performance, and has a price tag $100 less than Lightroom's $300.

Pros and cons
Both packages are solid overall, but there are some features I preferred with one or the other. Here's how I see things stacking up--be warned, though, that I've used Lightroom for countless hours but by comparison only dabbled with Aperture 2.0.

Let's start with the interface. I like Lightroom's pull-out panels--as many as four--that can be deployed or tucked away as needed. Most of the time I only have zero, one, or two showing.

But I think Aperture makes smart design decisions with a few interface options. Its movable panel isn't very obtrusive, and now in 2.0 you can toggle it easily between editing, tagging, and file management modes. For me, editing and adding metadata such as titles, captions, and tags are much closer operations than the big divide between Lightroom's develop and library modules would suggest, and I don't like switching back and forth between editing and tagging.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is used to edit and catalog photos, chiefly the raw images that come from higher-end digital cameras.

(Credit: Adobe Systems)

Speaking of metadata, though, one option I like better with Lightroom is the ability to assign five colors to photos (but where's the keyboard shortcut for purple?). The one- to five-star ratings that both packages offer is dandy, but I use colors to classify photos in other ways.

It looks to me like Aperture has a better search interface, especially for complicated operations that combine multiple parameters such as keywords, date ranges, and the handy photos-I-actually-edited filter. I've sometimes gotten bogged down swimming through Lightroom search. And I love the smart folders feature, which automatically updates a folder that's been set to watch for a particular attribute. For example, with Lightroom, I would love for the software to automatically add a photo with a specific recurring tag to a particular collection.

On to editing. For sophistication, I'd give the edge to Adobe, though to be fair I haven't looked in detail at important aspects of Aperture, namely noise reduction and edge sharpening. I sometimes find those wanting in Lightroom.

I like Lightroom's targeted adjustment tool (TAT), which lets you adjust the tone curve as well as color saturation and luminance by clicking on the relevant portion of the image directly and dragging the mouse up and down. And Adobe was smart to actually employ user testing to determine which colors are individually adjustable--orange has more psychological importance than most software, including Aperture, gives it. And I'm a big fan of tone-curve adjustments, though I sometimes wish Lightroom divided the curve up into five or six subranges instead of four.

One unknown is the plug-in future of both applications. Right now Lightroom has a software development kit for export options, and there's work of unknown scope to come. Apple said it's future SDK will permit editing plug-ins, too, which Adobe says is a difficult challenge. On the other hand, Adobe's already got some editing plug-ins of a sort, with the ability to import custom settings for all manner of adjustment options.

Apple's Aperture is used to edit and catalog photos.

(Credit: Apple)

One major edge Lightroom has had is much earlier support of the raw image files of new cameras. Apple said it was held back by an overhaul of its raw-processing engine and that things should now go more swiftly, but it'll take real work to win back the hearts of disgruntled Nikon D300 owners. In the meantime, Apple now can make use of Adobe Systems' Digital Negative (DNG) format as an intermediate step to handle raw files Adobe supports and Apple doesn't.

Something Aperture does better is vignetting, the darkened corners that once were a lens deficiency but now have caught on (altogether too widely in my opinion) as an effect to focus attention on the center of an image. Lightroom can fix lens vignetting or add it to a full image, but if you want to apply the effect to a cropped version of the photo, only Aperture offers that mechanism.

Correcting lens problems is a real issue, though, and Lightroom has a chromatic aberration correction I find very useful. It lets you fix some of the magenta, red, yellow, and blue fringes that show up in high-contrast areas, especially near the corners of images, and it also can alleviate the purple fringing overall. Aperture lacks this.

Performance is better with Aperture 2.0 (it was faster on the dual-core iMac I played with than Aperture 1.5 was on a quad-core Mac Pro I used for Aperture 1.5), and a particularly nice feature is the ability to work in a preview mode that employs only JPEGs--either the images built into the raw image or an Aperture-rendered version. You can't edit with it, but it's good enough at least for the first pass through a photo shoot to delete the duds and add tags and titles.

Looking beyond editing, my expertise thins out because I don't do much in the way of exporting photos to Web galleries or printing at home. But I will note one Aperture advantage: Apple expanded its book-export options with 2.0, and Lightroom has no answer so far. That's a drag for wedding photographers and amateurs (like me) who want to whip up a quick birthday present for the grandparents.

Of course, one of the biggest advantages Lightroom has is a Windows version, and that alone is likely to ensure its market dominance over Apple. And where Apple has a lot going on with iPods and iPhones, image editing is Adobe's bread and butter. Should those externalities be factors, too? Weigh in.

CUPERTINO, Calif.--Apple, why hast thou forsaken me?

That, loosely paraphrased, is what some Aperture customers had been asking after Apple went too long without updating its higher-end photo editing and cataloging software. It got to the point where some were plotting strategies on Apple forums about how to flee to Adobe Systems' rival Photoshop Lightroom software with their photo metadata intact.

On Tuesday, though, Apple came back with the new Aperture 2.0, a version that addressed many common gripes, caught up with Lightroom in several important respects, and signaled that the company hasn't lost interest in the market. On the contrary, a price cut to $199 from $299--also Lightroom's current price--shows Apple wants to expand Aperture's use.

Apple's Aperture is used to edit and catalog photos.

(Credit: Apple)

"There's huge interest from the hobbyist market," said Joe Schorr, Apple's senior product manager of photo applications. "It was clear this was the right price to make that more palatable to them."

He said Apple's October 2007 market research showed 54 percent of iPhoto users thought of themselves not as mere snapshooters but rather as photo hobbyists, some serious enough to aspire to sell photos. Apple is trying to bring those customers into the fold while also catering to the professionals whom the company initially targeted with Aperture.

Schorr bridled a bit when I asked him Wednesday about some people's fears that Apple isn't committed to Aperture. "Releasing a new version is as big a commitment as you can demonstrate," he said. "This is not a maintenance release. It takes quite a bit of engineering resources. Apple's commitment is unmistakable."

Aperture is designed to edit the detailed and flexible but unwieldy and proprietary "raw" image files taken unprocessed from higher-end cameras' image sensors. Apple was first to market with software that not only handles this computing-intensive editing task but also lets photographers sort images into catalogs and add metadata such as captions, tags, and titles.

However, since then, Adobe came on strong with Lightroom in 2007, outpacing Aperture's adoption among professionals in a matter of months, even after factoring out the fact Lightroom also runs on Windows. Apple has clout with creative professionals, but that's the center of Adobe's business.

Whipping Aperture into shape
Schnorr knows the company hit a rough patch with Aperture 1.5, which wasn't able to support many high-profile new cameras such as Nikon's D3 and D300 and Canon's 1Ds Mark III and PowerShot G9. Apple's new raw support only arrived this week, months after Lightroom could handle those cameras' raw files.

The problem: Apple's product cycle was out of sync with the camera companies. The new cameras "happened to hit when we were in the thick of replacing the entire raw engine...It was a perfect storm," Schnorr said.

Another big problem was performance. Processing raw-image files is a computationally onerous job, but Lightroom outperformed Aperture, and speed is essential for either to meet their potentially.

With the ability to manage images, edit them in large batches, and export them as Web galleries, Aperture and Lightroom have liberated raw images from the one-by-one plodding interface of regular Photoshop and other raw-processing tools. The vision was ahead of the technology, though: a free-wheeling editing style, jumping from one photo to another, only works if you don't have to spend a lot of time waiting for the computer to laboriously construct and update images from the raw originals.

Apple has done well with Aperture 2.0, based on my test of ingesting and editing a batch of my own photos on a dual-core iMac. On top of a general performance boost, it's got a new preview mode that specifically emphasizes speed by using only fast-rendering JPEGs instead of the full-on raw images. Lightroom and Aperture are geared to map a photographer's image workflow, but I generally take an extra step to review images with BreezeBrowser to cull out the duds before I import the rest into Lightroom.

I also liked the single-keystroke ability to switch editing controls swiftly into metadata controls. I find that adding tags and captions is a process that's not as far removed from editing as Lightroom's separate library and develop modes would have you think.

I'm not alone in noticing Aperture's kick in the pants. "I feel like someone snuck a new CPU into my machine," gushed photographer Josh Anon in a Wednesday blog posting about Aperture 2.0.

Plug-ins ahoy
One of the unknown factors for Lightroom and Aperture is what the future holds for third-party editing plug-ins. Photoshop has a rich supply, but the nondestructive editing requirements of Lightroom and Aperture throw a wrench into the works of an algorithm that permanently alters an image's pixels.

Lightroom's future here is fuzzy, though Adobe has released a beta version of a software development kit (SDK) for plug-ins limited to actions during the photo-export phase.

Aperture 2.0 will accept editing plug-ins, though, Schorr said.

"We've laid the groundwork for an image-editing plug-in architecture," he said. Asked about the difficulties of nondestructive editing, he said, "We've found a way of implementing a plug-in system we believe is very effective."

Schorr wouldn't share further details about the plug-ins architecture, but did say Apple will release its own SDK.

Raw engine overhaul
Aperture 2.0 got several of its new editing abilities through Apple's new raw-processing engine. So what's so great about the new raw engine? Schnorr points to several changes:

• It handles highlights better and lets photographers use a recovery slider to pull back overexposed regions.

• It handles noise better, preserving details and changing the turning speckles into a something closer to the grain of high-speed films of analog photography days.

• It preserves more detail in shadow regions rather than blocking them up into a dark murk.

• It's got changes in color rendering to handle skin tones better.

The flip side of the new raw engine, which is is that it requires the latest software to use it. That means Aperture 1.5 users will have to pay the $99 upgrade fee if they want the new camera support, Schnorr said. For iPhoto users, the newer version 7 released last fall, is required.

Apple has supported many cameras much closer to their debut in the past, sometimes even releasing new camera support software independently from operating system updates. With the new engine now done, adding support for new cameras "should be easier for us," Schorr said.

Apple's Aperture is used to edit and catalog photos.

(Credit: Apple)

Update 11:35 a.m.: I added information about Aperture 2.0's plug-in architecture, which could provide an advantage over Adobe Lightroom.

After pioneering a high-end photography software niche, then losing ground to Adobe Systems' Photoshop Lightroom, Apple on Tuesday counterattacked with Aperture 2.0.

The software, like Adobe's Lightroom, is aimed at enthusiasts and professionals who need to edit and catalog "raw" images, the unprocessed data from higher-end cameras' image sensors; raw files preserve more detail than JPEGs but require time and specialized software that can deal with the profusion of different proprietary raw formats.

Aperture 2.0 has a new raw image-processing engine and streamlined work flow, and the first new feature Apple touts is better speed, one of the common knocks against it, compared with its rival.

Other features (this list should sound familiar to Lightroom users) include highlight recovery to better deal with bright areas; tools to deal with vignetting, the darker tones some lenses leave in the corners of images; a retouching tool to clean up sensor dust specks or unsightly skin blemishes; a repair tool to subtly clone one area of an image to another; vibrancy to boost saturation without making skin look blotchy; and local contrast to give a bit more definition to images.

It also benefits from new camera support of Mac OS X 10.5.2. And for when Adobe's camera support is ahead of Apple, Aperture can handle raw images converted into Adobe's Digital Negative (DNG) raw format.

The upgrade from Aperture 1.5 costs $99, and buying it new is $199--about $100 less than Lightroom and Aperture 1.5.

Another core element of Aperture and Lightroom is managing photos. Aperture lets photographers rate images; sort them into projects; add keywords, titles, and other metadata; click on GPS coordinates for photos that have been geotagged with location data to see where on a map the photo was taken; and export photos directly to a Mac gallery on the Web or to a photo book--even hardcover, foil-stamped books that likely will carry appeal for the wedding photographer crowd.

Specifically regarding metadata, Aperture can write titles and other information into raw files, recognizes lens metadata, and can adjust photo time stamps. And scripts can be used to add other metadata when images are exported.

Aperture has a significant ability Lightroom lacks: quick preview, which speeds culling, ranking, and labeling tasks by showing only preview images that load much faster than the raw images.

Aperture 2.0 lets photographers pull overexposed highlights back from the brink.

(Credit: Apple)

Lightroom's come-from-behind victory
The update no doubt will be welcome to Aperture users, several of whom have crabbed that Aperture stood still for more than a year while Lightroom benefited from many updates. And worry over Aperture's fate was a common subject at the Photo Marketing Association trade show two weeks ago.

Adobe began creating Lightroom, code-named Shadowland, between the release of Photoshop 7 in 2002 and Photoshop CS in 2003, according to Kevin Connor, Adobe's senior director of professional digital-imaging product management. But Apple brought the first such product to market, releasing Aperture 1.0 in October 2005, more than a year before Lightroom 1.0 arrived, in February 2007.

Aperture fanned Adobe's competitive flames and helped prepare the market for a new category of software, Adobe has acknowledged.

However, by October 2007, Lightroom had won the raw-conversion software popularity contest over Aperture: an InfoTrends survey of more than 1,000 photo professionals found 23.6 percent using Lightroom and 5.5 percent using Aperture.

Even just looking at Mac OS X users to account for the fact that only Lightroom runs on Windows, Lightroom had 26.6 percent to Aperture's 14.3 percent. (Both lost out to the incumbent, the regular version of Photoshop, with 66.5 percent.)

Plug-in architecture
One significant departure in 2.0--and a potentially dramatic advantage over Lightroom--is the arrival of a plug-in architecture that will let third parties add their own editing features, according to David Schloss of the Aperture Users Professional Network, who has worked with the new version of Aperture and wrote about it extensively Tuesday. However, there's no software development kit (SDK) yet to write the plug-ins, he said.

"Apple has added the ability to create editing plug-ins for Aperture, which will, over time, revolutionize the program," Schloss said. "It'll be possible to create plug-ins that replicate film effects, add borders, allow for selective edits like dodging and burning--the possibilities are pretty endless."

Schloss elaborated in a post on Apple's Aperture forum: "Here's the word on the plug-in architecture. It's in Aperture 2, they just haven't released an SDK on it. Personally, I hope Apple starts to really push this, as it will change everything. From what I understand, there's very little that can't be done in the plug-in. Right now, if you go to Images>Edit With, you'll see 'no plug-ins installed.' Once those are available, that's where you'll find them."

Adobe has released a beta SDK for Lightroom that lets people add export options but not editing options. The nondestructive nature of Lightroom editing, in which all changes are reversible, complicates editing plug-ins, Adobe has said.

With Apple's Mac OS X 10.5.2 update on Monday, Leopard now can handle the unprocessed "raw" images produced by several new higher-end digital cameras.

Higher-end "raw" image files from Nikon's D300 now is supported natively in Mac OS X.

(Credit: Nikon)

Among high-profile newer cameras that Leopard now supports are Canon's top-end EOS-1Ds Mark III and its top-end compact camera, the PowerShot G9. Nikon's new SLRs, the D3 and D300, also are on the list, as is Sony's Alpha A700.

Raw images provide more flexibility and detail than JPEGs, but to use them, people must convert the unprocessed camera data. Apple's Mac OS X handles this conversion on its own. Software such as Apple's iPhoto or Aperture must wait for the update to be released before images from those cameras can be handled without other software, but one operating system update handles those applications and others that use the raw tools.

In contrast, image-editing leader Adobe Systems writes its own raw conversion software, available in Photoshop, Photoshop Lightroom, and its Digital Negative (DNG) converter utility.

Adobe, whose bread and butter is software of this sort, beat Apple to the punch with the raw support. Adobe added support for the Canon 1Ds Mark III, Canon G9, Nikon D3, and Nikon D300 in November and the Sony A700 in September; it also already supports the Olympus E-3 and Panasonic's DMC-L10, neither supported in Mac OS X.

Apple's lagging raw support has rankled some users, driving some to drop Aperture in favor of Lightroom. "I am seriously considering switching for one reason: the length of time for Apple to enable Aperture to support new cameras. It took months for support of the Nikon D200, and now the same with the D300. And yes, Lightroom already supports both cameras. This serious flaw is of great concern considering how solid the program is otherwise," wrote one commenter in the Apple Aperture forum.

In the discussion, Joe Schorr, Apple's senior product line manager for photo applications, offered assurances that Apple knows about the issue. "We at Apple are acutely aware of the pressing need to get support for the newest round of cameras into your hands as soon as possible. This is a top priority," he said. "We fully intend to give our customers what they need in this regard."

Microsoft has added raw support to Vista, and with a download users can retrofit Windows XP, too. Microsoft, though, relies on the camera makers to supply a conversion plug-in.

Also supported in Apple's update are Hasselblad's CF-22 and CF-39 and the Leaf Aptus 75s, Apple said.

Tom Hogarty, the Adobe executive in charge of Lightroom, said the Mac OS X 10.5.2 update also fixes a bug he reported in November. That problem could crash Mac OS X's Finder file management software when viewing image files accompanied by Lightroom editing data stored in XMP files. That issue now is "confirmed as fixed," Hogarty said.