Apple’s Aperture 3 is way much better than previous version

If you’re one of the many people who were not satisfied with Apple’s photo application, Aperture 1 or 2, that you were forced to switch to Adobe Lightroom, it’s time to go back and take a look at Aperture 3. They made a lot, no a TON of improvements with this version. I saw a demo of the application and I was pretty impressed (I’m a Lightroom user mind you).

Familiarity for iPhoto users

If you love how iPhoto “˜09 manages your photo library then you will love how it is now incorporated with Aperture 3. Yup, Aperture 3 can now replace your iPhoto as your photo editing and management software. It also inherited iPhoto 09’s Faces (face recognition and tagging) and Places (geo-tagging) feature that is quite useful if you take a lot of vacation photos. Uploading to Facebook and Flickr is also included.

iPhoto in steroids

Aperture 3 is not your ordinary photo organizer software. If you usually edit your photos to correct lighting, white balance, etc., then you would you find it easy to use Aperture 3’s presets and brushes.

Users of Adobe Lightroom are familiar with presets where you can treat photos with artistic effects based on preset settings. Aperture 3 has those but also offers brushes if you only want to treat a certain portion of a photo. You can set presets to your brushes so you can only apply for some spot treatments like only brushing the sky or the water with the polarizer preset.

Create beautiful slideshows on the fly

If you want to show your relatives your vacation photos but want to do it with style, Aperture 3 allows you to create beautiful slideshows with a click of a button. Just select a library to show and the theme that you want and that’s it. You can also choose a soundtrack from your iTunes and export it as a video for your iPhone, iPod, HDTV, etc. and never show a boring slideshow to your family ever again.

Pricing

Aperture 3 is available through the Apple Store® (www.apple.com.ph) and Apple Authorized Resellers for a suggested retail price of P10,290 and existing Aperture users can upgrade for a suggested retail price of P5,190.