Aperture

Simple, quick, and easy iOS-like photo editing comes to the Mac desktop with the new application, Flare - The Iconfactory.

Since the introduction of third-party apps to the iPhone (now the iOS platform), one of the many genres of apps that have flourished are photo editing apps. Not surprising when you consider that the iPhone comes equipped with a built-in digital camera. A camera that at least with the iPhone has been getting better and better with each new model. While there have been some full featured, complex photo editing apps released for the iOS over the years, for the most part, they have been clean and simple to use due to the inherit design and use of the iOS mobile platform.

Before getting an iPad, I belabored over the model size I should get. I knew that 16GB would be out of the question, as I have too much media. 32GB seemed right because I have been managing the same storage size on my iPhone quite well over the past year.

My plan was to sync my Aperture photo library to the iPad. After all, making the iPad a portfolio for my photography was part of the reason of getting one. With that said, the iPad has a larger screen than the iPhone 3GS. Will it need more space? iTunes may optimize the image files larger than what it does for the iPhone 3GS.

Last week, Apple finally release the long awaited update to the their image post-processing workflow application, Aperture from Apple®.

As I expected and hoped for, the latest upgrade to Aperture incorporates many of the great features introduced in iPhoto '09 (which is part of Apple's iLife suite of software). Chiefly, it now brings "Faces" and "Places" from iPhoto '09 to Aperture. I had been waiting for this upgrade before making the switch from iPhoto to Aperture for my photo post processing workflow. I would had moved over to Aperture long ago, but after iPhoto '09 came out, I became addicted to its (then) new aforementioned features, especially the geo-tagging of photographs. With "Places" in iPhoto '09, it allowed for geo-tagging of photographs, so location data stored in the metadata of image files will be used to place that photo on a worldwide map within iPhoto (via Google Maps). Photos taken with the iPhone will automatically contain the location information (via GPS and/or Skyhook technology). For photographs taken without a camera that will embeds location data in the metadata, you can assign them yourself. I had done just this with the several decades of photos already managed by iPhoto. In addition, iPhoto '09 introduced "Faces" which used face recognition technology to identify faces in your photo library and it would learn faces and make suggestions. I was already tagging certain people in all my photos using keywords, so this made the process easier and also allow me tag more people than I had been doing perviously with earlier versions of iPhoto.