Adobe, watch out! Here comes Apple with its own photo editing application. Announced in late November, Aperture is built to lure the professional photographer with powerful image editing tools. I received a note from a colleague at Apple this week to fill me in concerning the new release. Rob Schoeben, Apple's vice president of Applications Marking, said, "Aperture is to professional photography what Final Cut Pro is to filmmaking." Built with the RAW file format in mind, Aperture promises a quicker workflow when working with these files. "Until now, RAW files have taken so long to work with," said Heinz Kluetmeir, renowned sports photographer. "What amazed me about Aperture is that you can work directly with RAW files. I suspect that I'm going to stop shooting JPEGs." According to an Apple press release, unique compare and select tools in Aperture allow photographers to easily sift through massive photo projects and quickly identify their final selections. Aperture automatically groups sequences of photos into easy-to-manage Stacks based on the time interval between exposures. In an industry first, Aperture allows photographers to navigate through entire projects in a full-screen workspace that can be extended to span multiple displays. The extended workspace tiles multiple images side-by-side for a faster, easier compare and select. With Aperture's Loupe magnifying tool, the user can be examine images in fine detail without having to zoom and pan across large files. RAW images are maintained natively throughout Aperture without any intermediate conversion process and can be retouched using a suite of adjustment tools designed especially for photographers. Aperture's nondestructive image processing engine never alters a single pixel of original photos, so photographers have the power and flexibility to modify or delete changes at any point in the workflow. As Aperture allows users to create multiple versions of a single image without duplicating files, photographers can experiment without risk of overwriting the master image or using up large amounts of hard drive space. Aperture images can also be launched directly into Adobe Photoshop for compositing and layer effects. I'm always glad to see a new option for newspapers. In the coming months, we'll take a closer look at Aperture and see how it handles in a newspaper workflow. Know this. Aperture is not for the vintage computer. Minimum requirements include a 1.8 GHz G5 or a 1.25 GHz Powerbook running OS 10.4.3. MSRP is $499 (US) / $599 (CAN) / $699 (AUS).