Although it suffered initially from performance problems and other shortcomings, Aperture has really matured into a great product.

A lot of people were frustrated and disappointed with the initial 1.0 release; I actually thought it was a pretty good start, but I'm not a professional photographer. My basic point-and-shoot camera doesn't shoot RAW, and I'm not producing high quality prints for clients or anything like that. Nonetheless, even version 1.0 was already a great tool for organizing photos, applying metadata, and creating web galleries and such, and for the most part, I find its editing functions sufficient. I've only had to turn to Photoshop for maybe 1 out of every 100 images I shoot, and even then, the integration is quite good -- when you're finished editing in Photoshop, a new master image appears right next to the original in Aperture with all the metadata intact.

In addition to dropping the price, which was initially too steep, but is now quite reasonable, Apple also worked hard to fix the bugs, refine the usability, and improve the performance of the app. Version 1.1 was a significant upgrade; it resolved most of the problems of the initial release, and provided several important improvements as well. As of 1.1, I've been able to recommend it to other people as a worthy tool for at least intermediate photographers. I would recommend reading the very thorough reviews of Aperture 1.0 and 1.1 on Ars Technica for an excellent overview of how things progressed from 1.0 to 1.1...

Ars Technica Review: Aperture 1.0
Ars Technica Review: Aperture 1.1

That brings us to the new version 1.5. Like many others, I've been looking forward to the update ever since it was announced on Monday, checking Software Update several times a day throughout the week. Since I had to pay $20 each for the updates from Logic Pro 7 -> 7.1, and 7.1 -> 7.2, it was a welcome and refreshing surprise that Aperture 1.5 would be a free update. Now that I've got it in my hands, and had a chance to play with it for awhile, I can say I'm quite happy with all the new and improved features. Apple has clearly been working hard, and I think they've done a great job.

The ability to store photos in multiple places is a welcome addition, especially for pros that have libraries that are hundreds of GB in size. My library is much more modest -- a mere 10 GB -- but even for me this is a great new feature, as my PowerBook's internal hard drive is only 80 GB, and I've got more than 20 GB of audio files on here as well, so there really isn't much more room for things to grow. Because Aperture 1.5 now creates full quality previews of each image, it means I can move older photo projects to an external drive, keep the newer ones available for editing, and still be able to view all of them (and use them in iLife/iWork apps) even when my external drive isn't connected.

Meanwhile, Adobe's been working on their answer to Aperture -- Lightroom -- and I've been checking out the betas of that as well. Overall, I think it pales in comparison to Aperture, but one area in which it's (not surprisingly) quite capable is image editing. The latest Lightroom beta (b4) added new "curves" algorithms that I find very impressive, and so I was definitely hoping to see some image editing improvements in Aperture as well. Aperture 1.5 doesn't have anything that matches Lightroom's curves yet, but it did add an excellent new edge sharpener, which gives *much* better results than the previous sharpen filter, as well as individual hue, saturation and luminance adjustments for each of six ranges of hues, for very precise color adjustments. I recently discovered several important uses of this feature in Lightroom -- for example, when you increase the exposure of a photo, reds tend to get quite hot, and you can use these fine tuning controls to pull back the reds and make them look natural while improving the overall exposure. You could also, say, adjust the blueness of the sky without affecting other color ranges in an image.

These are just a few of the new features in Aperture 1.5, and by now I think it's really matured into a great product that I would recommend to anyone looking for a powerful took for organizing and editing photos. I'd still like to see some more editing capabilities, such as curves that can match the quality of those in Lightroom, but based on the direction it's been going so far, I feel confident that Apple will continue to raise the bar with each new update.