Apple’s Aperture 2.0 throws down on Adobe’s Lightroom.

Apple released a major upgrade to its Aperture professional photo editing software. Some of the new features are; highlight recovery, color vibrancy, local contrast definition, soft-edged retouching, vignetting and RAW fine-tuning as well as smooth publishing workflow to a .Mac Web Gallery for viewing on the web, iPhone, iPod touch and Apple TV.
Another new feature is “tethered” shooting, which is the ability to shoot images directly to a Mac from a camera via USB or FireWire and save the photos directly in an Aperture project.
Aperture 2.0 is available now for $199 at the online Apple store.
The price is a hundred dollars less than Adobe’s Lightroom photo editing software and trumps many of the older Adobe product’s features.
Aperture can also handle Adobe’s .DNG format files for smooth integration with Photoshop, but Lightroom still has the advantage of being a cross-platform application.
Both programs have free trial downloads, so you can compare the programs side by side.
Aperture 1.0 users can upgrade to Aperture 2.0 for $99 and recent purchasers of Aperture 1.5 (Jan 1-Mar 14, 2008) can upgrade for $9.95.