Creative Toolbox

The promised Universal update to Aperture is now available as a free Software Update to current Aperture customers. Along with the new release, comes a lower price of $299 for the post-production tool for photographers. But early adopters shouldn’t feel bad, Apple is offering a $200 coupon redeemable at the Apple Online Store as a thank you for their support.

The Aperture 1.1 Update includes a variety of new feature enhancements along with the Universal support:

• New RAW adjustment controls in the Adjustments Inspector and Adjustments HUD.
• A new Color Meter tool, which allows you to quickly and easily sample any area of an image in just about any color space.
• New controls to specify the resolution of your image when exporting or sending it off to Photoshop for further edits.

And what update wouldn’t be complete without the usual tune up. The update is said to address reliability and performance issues in all areas of the application including, RAW image decoding, image export, cropping, printing, and more.

Apple is also claiming significant performance gains for both PowerPC and Intel-based Macs. But of course Intel-based Macs is where we’re looking for the real gains and it seems as though we might realize them…

Performance tests on a MacBook Pro have shown that common repetitive workflow tasks such as Lift and Stamp and searching are processed up to 4x faster on a MacBook Pro than on a PowerBook® G4.

With a lowered price of $299 along with these fixes and enhancements, now might be the time to pick up a copy of Aperture, if you haven’t already.