Apple’s Aperture for Mac continues to give Adobe’s Lightroom a run for its money as both programs compete for the title of the best photo manipulation and management software on the Mac. As you know, Apple’s long been bundling a free copy of its iPhoto application with every new Mac (and now also with new iOS device purchases). But for photography fans whose needs go beyond the basic set of iPhoto’s editing and photo management tools, Aperture is a logical progression.
In its latest 3.5 update, Aperture brings a couple welcomed new features to the table and a host of tweaks and bug fixes. Jump past the fold for the full breakdown…
Aperture 3.5 neatly integrates with the popular image hosting service SmugMug, allowing you to publish photos and sync galleries directly to your SmugMug account without leaving Aperture.
And if you use iCloud, you can now post post videos to your Shared Photo Streams and have subscribers contribute with their own photos and videos.
Speaking of sharing, this version of Aperture now lets you share videos up to three minutes long to Yahoo’s Flickr photography service, which includes 1TB of free storage for your full-resolution photos and videos.
I’m not sure what took so long, but Aperture’s Places feature has finally been updated to tap Apple’s Maps backend instead of relying on Google. Moreover, the app improves reliability when adding names to Faces (the screenshot below).
Last but not least, Aperture will now import your iOS Camera roll images that have been touched up using the built-in iOS 7 camera filters. These filters allow for non-destructive edits and are now available in Aperture to make cross-platform iOS/Mac filter compatibility a reality.
Here’s Aperture 3.5 changelog:
• Adds support for iCloud Photo Sharing, including the ability to post videos to shared photo streams and to have multiple subscribers contribute to a shared stream
• The Places feature now uses Apple maps to display photo locations
• New integration with SmugMug, with support for publishing and syncing galleries directly to a SmugMug account
• Adds support for iOS 7 camera filters applied to photos imported from iOS devices
• Fixes an issue that sometimes resulted in Retouch adjustments not being applied to exported images
• Addresses an issue that could cause the black and white points in Curves to shift incorrectly when using the eyedropper tools
• Fixes a problem that prevented caption data from being embedded correctly when exporting versions of some RAW file types
• Improves reliability when adding names to Faces
• Addresses an issue that could cause Aperture to hang after adjusting a very large panorama
• Fixes a problem that could prevent memory cards or hard disks from ejecting properly after import when clicking the Delete Items button
• Improves reliability of slideshows on a 15″ Macbook Pro with Retina display
• Addresses an issue that could cause thumbnails to display incorrectly in the iLife Media Browser
• Videos up to three minutes long can now be shared to Flickr
• Captions instead of version names are now synced between Aperture and Facebook for newly-created albums
• Improves reliability when printing a light table
• Fixes an issue that could prevent adjusted images from being published to My Photo Stream
• Includes stability and performance improvements
Of course, this update is free to existing Aperture users. Keep in mind that the 557MB download now requires OS X 10.9 Mavericks so non-Mavericks users won’t see the update in the Mac App Store unless they hit the Show Incompatible App Updates link at the bottom.
Good thing Apple yesterday released OS X Mavericks as a free update.
If you’re into casual image editing, Pixelmator may be a better choice.
I’ve been using Pixelmator for two years now to produce graphics, edit images and optimize them for various devices and web sites à la Photoshop. For what it’s worth, I never regretted abandoning Adobe.
Pixelmator costs $29.99 on the Mac App Store and just yesterday received its major 3.0 update bringing support for new OS X Mavericks technologies and new features such as Layer Styles, Liguify Tools and more.
You can download Aperture for $79.99 from the Mac App Store.