NEW YORK, NY – At a media event preceding the Photoworld trade show in New York last week, Apple Computer announced a new photo production tool called Aperture. Geared towards professional photographers who want to work with files in the native RAW image format, Aperture will offer both photo editing and photo management tools, and make the process of working with RAW format files significantly less time-consuming.“Aperture is to professional photography what Final Cut Pro is to filmmaking,” said, Apple’s Vice President of Applications Marketing, Rob Schoeben. “Finally, an innovative post production tool that revolutionizes the pro photo workflow from compare and select to retouching to output.”

According to the Apple website, “Aperture makes RAW as easy as JPEG, letting you import, edit, catalog, organize, retouch, publish, and archive your images more effectively and efficiently than ever before.”

Unlike JPEG compressed images, RAW files can be edited and saved without loss of image quality. The difficulty in working with the RAW format has always been the sheer size of the files, which are CPU-intensive, and therefore painfully slow to work with. Apple claims that due to having “the most powerful image processing in the world, Aperture is fast – whether you’re working with RAW, JPEG, or TIFF images.”

Aperture is compatible with every major still image format, including JPEG, PICT, TIFF, PNG, BMP, PSD and TGA, and offers an impressive array of management tools, image processing options and metadata support.

“Aperture lets you organize a photo library with thousands of projects any way you want – in Projects, Albums, Folders, or any combination thereof,” according to Apple’s website. “You can even have Aperture automatically group images together into Smart Albums based on defined criteria”.

Apple said the feature-laden Aperture will ship next month, with a price tag of $499.