Most professional or serious photographers shoot in RAW format rather than in JPEG or some other file type that does not allow later lossless correction to what their camera’s digital sensor originally recorded when the shutter fired. However, the software for manipulating RAW files which comes with cameras — including top of the line models — is never polished enough and what is usually comes at a premium.

There is competition in the marketplace — something that is more than illustrated by two recent announcements from Apple and Adobe, the manufacturers of two such professional digital manipulation and workflow software. First off, let’s deal with Apple who’s Aperture software has been updated to 2.1. Rob Galbraith takes a look at the changes, and in particular, its support for third-party plug-ins.

Without much fanfare, Apple introduced in Aperture 2.0 an architecture with which third-party developers could create image adjustment plug-ins. Now that v2.1 is out, the company is bringing this feature to the forefront, revealing both how image editing plug-ins work and who has already signed up to make them. Let’s look at who first.

Apple Apple itself is one of the first plug-in developers. Included with Aperture 2.1 is Dodge & Burn, a tool for brushing in tone, colour and detail changes to a photo. Dodge & Burn can of course be used to lighten and darken areas of a photo, as well as adjust contrast, saturation, sharpness and blur.

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Apple is describing Dodge & Burn as an “example” plug-in, but this understates its usefulness, since you can perform a fairly broad range of selective adjustments with it, and do so with relative ease. We expect that for some Aperture users, Dodge & Burn will quickly become an indispensable tool.

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Image editing plug-ins are a powerful new Aperture feature.

For many users, however, Apple’s Aperture will not be a contender in the quest for finding a professional photo management and RAW conversion application if only because it is not available for Windows. The software is Apple Mac only which leaves the PC market open to Adobe with its Lightroom product. In the Mac market, Lightroom is Aperture’s main competitor, something that is more than evident in the press release announcing the download of the beta of Lightroom 2.0.

Adobe does not preannounce products. However, the team is working on the next version and we’ll be sure to keep you updated. One thing we can say, however, is that we plan to continue with a more aggressive release schedule than we’ve seen from Apple, which took over two years between release of Aperture 1.0 and 2.0. This is still a new product category, and we believe it’s important to respond quickly to evolving customer needs.

With Photoshop CS3 still firmly the number one image editing software, Adobe has a significant advantage over Apple. Even so, some blogs are reporting that competition between the two is fiercer than its ever been. Welcome to Pixeltown even suggests that it is this rivalry which has led Adobe not to release a 64-bit version of Photoshop CS4. An Adobe blog, however, says that a 64-bit version will be available for Mac for Photoshop CS5.

So, assuming that as few people are going to upgrade to the 64-bit version of Windows Vista anytime soon, the development and support cycle is likely to remain the same. Which leaves the next question still unanswered. Which is better — Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture? To be honest, it depends on your computer setup and how you plan to use it. For PC users, there’s no issue as Aperture is not available for them. Mac users are advised to download the trial versions of both and give them a spin.

When you’ve decided, both are available on Amazon.

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