Opinion: Apple's Aperture software may demonstrate that an intuitive workflow trumps software every time, and eat away at Photoshop's monopoly of the image editing market in the process.Apple's release of Aperture seems to have caught the Photo industry by surprise.
We now have a new light-table for the Raw images generated by digital SLRs.
Aperture is a workflow tool that will allow us to conveniently sort through the hundreds of captures generated during a single professional photo-session.
Aperture lets us stack and sort the "digital negatives" much as we used to stack and sort slides.
Now the question, as always, with Steve Jobs, is "what's next?"—it's clear that the $500 Aperture is the star turn of a new range of Photo applications, and I dare say that we will soon see a more modestly priced Aperture Express, aimed at photo enthusiasts with smaller image-sets.
It's credible that we might also see an iAperture that comes bundled with iLife on new Macs and iMacs.
I don't think they're very happy with Steve Jobs out at Adobe headquarters in San Jose.
It's not today's Aperture they're afraid of; that's clearly complementary to Photoshop.
Nor are they frightened that that Aperture Express might slow the sales of Photoshop Elements.
But they might be very wary of a retouching app that would follow on the heels of the Aperture lightbox.
(The world is strange, it hits you from your blind side. It happened to me recently, I was hit by a bus while looking the other way on a pedestrian crossing. True story.)
Now, Adobe was certainly on the lookout for competition from Microsoft--what with Metro taking aim at PDF, Sparkle setting up shop to compete with Flash, and the Acrylic drawing program and Quartz Web Designer competing with other core apps.
But Photoshop was safe. A golden cash cow. Total customer lock-in. No more!
Apple has realized that workflow matters.
Moving imagery in and out of Photoshop takes too long in a production environment. For every minute you really spend tweaking an image, there are five minutes spent hunting through the files on your disk.
And if Apple provides a new tool—call it Retouch—that will do 10 percent of what Photoshop does, but integrates seamlessly with Aperture, then many people who need to deal quickly with imagery will adopt it.
And corporate clients will realize that it's not Photoshop that matters, it's the workflow environment.
Frankly, I don't think that Aperture matters very much to me, because I deal in small numbers of images which I spend hours and hours Photoshopping.
I don't think Aperture matters very much to Apple either, except that anyone who buys it might accessorize his or her Mac with one or two 30-inch Cinema Displays.
But I do think that Apple has done more injury to Adobe with this single announcement than Microsoft in one year of striving: Photoshop is invulnerable no more.
Edmund Ronald has a Ph.D. in applied mathematics, but he is currently on a sabbatical as a photographer in Paris. He can be reached at photofeedback@gmail.com.
