Apple introduced Aperture, its professional workflow management application at the Photo Plus trade show in New York on 2005-10-19. Initial speculation was that Apple had finally decided to bring its deteriorating relationship with Adobe to a head and release a Photoshop competitor. This was quickly dispelled and its true positioning as a high-end workflow application for professional digital photographers became more apparent. This is not just a fig leaf to appease Adobe — Aperture does indeed lack most of Photoshop (or even Elements’) functionality. It is a Bridge-killer of sorts, not that the sluggish, resource-hogging piece of bugware that is Bridge could be really be qualified as “alive”. The simplest description of Aperture is that it is iPhoto for professional photographers.

I received my copy today, and will be putting it through its paces in a series of longer articles over the coming weeks, with this article as the central nexus:

1. First impressions
2. Asset management
3. Under the hood: file format internals