…field of depth…

Amelioration, or the condition of being made better, has been Aperture’s theme song of late. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the program, it is Apples attempt to capture a piece of the photography work-flow and raw image processing market.  If I already lost you, think iPhoto or Picasa on steroids.  Currently, the major players right now are Adobe Lightroom (or bridge), Bibble and Aperture.  Some photographers swear by the Raw conversion of Nikon Capture as well.

So which one is the best?  At this point, they are all very good.  I wouldn’t spend to much time sweating the details.  Download some trials, see which interface feels the most intuitive to you and stick with it.  Updates are frequent these days so I often avoid the cost and trouble of jumping ship each time a new “killer feature” is introduced.  Wait it out and most likely you’ll get what your asking for.  That being said, after running all three through their paces, I went with Aperture.

So that brings us to the big announcement: Today one more plugin has been added to the stellar ones already available.  Previously, Nik had been working overtime cranking out these three can’t-do-without plug ins: Viveza, Color Efex Pro and Sliver Efex.  Now Noise Ninja by PictureCode is finally available as a plugin.  With this suite of plugins I now find myself rarely, very rarely in fact, leaving Aperture to enter Photoshop for photo editing.  The work-flow has been streamlined and I’m loving the results.  Keep ‘em coming.