Nipped down to Focus on Imaging in Birmingham yesterday, and found myself lingering around the Apple booth watching the Aperture demos for a while.

In a word... Amazing!

Apple clearly know what they are doing with this peice of software, and they are listening to what professionals want in terms of features too. Gonna save my pennies to get a new Mac I think.

I've been keeping my eye on this and Adobe's Lightroom too, and it looks like the competition is keeping the software developments coming.

I was concerned when I first heard of Aperture that it's just going to be a bog-standard image editor wrapped up in the nice Apple interface design, but on seeing it recently it looks quite special! (in a good way)

Erm, at the risk of sounding a bit, well, thick could you tell me a bit more about Aperture. E.g. what the hell it is!!! Is it just a mac based photoshop alternative?

Mmmmm, new mac.... I'm tempted :P (using a pc at the mo) Shame i don't have the money at the mo!

RD, Apple Aperture is a photography RAW-workflow editing application. It's more analogous to Adobe's new Lightroom than Photoshop, but for many photography-only users of Photoshop, Aperture (or Lightroom) would be a highly suitable replacement.

Saw both Lightroom and Aperture at Focus 06 too and i'm impressed by both, especially Adobe's - they know what they are doing by now.

From what I saw of the two, they would work perfectly well as a replacement for Photoshop as well, although doing so would lose a fair bit of the functionality of the programs.