Review: Apple Aperture 3

Editing Improvements
Apple has added some nice video capabilities to Aperture. Not only can you view all your HD video clips from within the browser, you can trim them and add them to slide shows. (Lightroom 3 previews the clips, but stops there.) This makes the program truly useful for DSLR shooters who make short videos to supplement, say, a travelogue.

Aperture flnally includes a fllter to reduce chromatic aberration, which users have been asking for since day one. You can apply it as a global fllter or brush it on with the new Brushes feature. This lets you apply or remove most of the other available adjustments to areas of your pictures, too.

Unfortunately, Brushes isn’t exactly intuitive to use. First, you make your adjustment, which functions as a preview. Then, when you click to brush the adjustment “in,” your adjustments disappear, then reappear where you paint. You can also choose to brush the adjustment “out” to remove it—the effect remains on your whole image, and the brush makes it go away.

Another long-requested tool that’s been added is a real version of Curves. You’ll especially appreciate it if you’re used to high-end image-editing software, and it works well. The only drawback? It lacks an RGB preview in the builtin histogram display.