Aperture gets torn a new one by the mighty Ars

That font of supremely in-depth technical information, Ars Technica, has reviewed Aperture - Apple's new pro-photography software - and given it an absolute mauling:

It saddens me to say that Aperture's innovations are only skin deep. If it could deliver on the promise of being both fast and produce flawless results, it would be the dream package. At this point it is an expensive and questionable alternative to Camera Raw, a free extension to Photoshop, and Adobe's Bridge which can batch produce better quality images in arguably less time. For US$500 (Photoshop itself retails for US$750), there is no excuse not to be aware of professional needs like a high-quality sharpen tool, DNG exporting or more basic things like curves, a sampler tool for RGB pixel readings, or retention of EXIF data on output.

Furthermore:

The quality of Aperture's RAW converter is bad, and for an application that's selling point is iterative nondestructive RAW editing, that's like building a house on a plate of Jello.

And this:

They have only themselves to blame: they set themselves up for a big fall by attempting to dig themselves a chunk of the pro market by purporting to have the lossless holy grail of imaging. The trouble with that is they obviously didn't have the engineering or expertise in RAW processing to pull it off or, if they did, they chose not to include it because of speed constraints due to Core Image.

I had previously been considering buying Aperture. Now I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole, at least until these numerous fatal flaws have been fixed.

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