Apple Aperture Reminds Us That Apple Is a Media Company

Late last week Apple disclosed to the folks over at The Loop that it would be ending development of another one of its professional products, Aperture. They committed to providing a round of compatibility updates so it would continue functioning on OS X Yosemite. Replacing it, and iPhoto, will be a new prosumer-geared “Photos” app which will be the gateway to the iCloud Photo Library. Overall, cloud apps make me jumpy about performance, pricing, and intellectual property rights, especially for those of us that make 30 MB RAW format files every time the shutter clicks, in places where we’re lucky to get a bar of EDGE cell data service. More importantly, as a Windows Lightroom user I valued Aperture as competition. Lightroom still lacks many …

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Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5 Wish List

It looks like TechCrunch & USA Today blew an embargo on the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5 beta due to be released, and now lots of places are getting in on the action. I thought it’d be a good time to update my Lightroom wish list from version 4. The leaked posts mention a few new features that make it easier to retouch images, some automation around leveling photos (which would be a godsend for me, I cannot seem to take a level handheld vertical shot), and some catalog improvements. By & large, though, the announcements were pretty content-free, so I’ll definitely need to spin up a virtual machine to see what else they might have added.[0] Here’s my list of …

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