Apple Aperture will be competing directly --albeit a subset only-- with the capabilities and features of Photoshop CS2. No doubt about that, and regardless of what Adobe may have to say. But Aperture competes with other applications as well. For example, with Digital Asset Management software.

We can be short on the Photoshop features in Aperture. There are features which you will also find in Photoshop, but they’re limited to photo correction. For example, Aperture comes with highlights and shadows correction tools, patch brushes and red eye correction, but it lacks filters like the lens flare or lighting filters, to name only these two.

Nevertheless, professional photographers in journalism, fashion and any other “market” where the photo by itself is the art form, will take a good, thorough look at Aperture. That we can bet our lives on. Photographers for whom the art part starts with processing the photo in Photoshop, will find Aperture interesting, but little more.

But Photoshop isn’t the only sort of application Aperture aims at. Celartem/Extensis Portfolio, iView Multimedia, Canto Cumulus, and many other vendors developing digital asset management (DAM) tools will feel the impact of Aperture’s “natural” way of doing things. Rather coincidentally, Extensis has only just announced Portfolio 8 and iView MediaPro 3.

Let’s take a look at what is new in those DAM applications, and then compare their capabilities to Aperture’s.

Portfolio and iView

Portfolio 8 will enable users to fully custom sort galleries, smart galleries and disk folders. This new feature will support dragging, re-ordering and sorting by menu selection. The sort order will be remembered automatically for each user in the workgroup.

Scratchpad galleries will be temporary baskets that allow users to sort, edit, and merge collections of files from multiple galleries so they can be printed or otherwise processed further. Portfolio 8 will also support private galleries, which are only viewable by the creator.

NetPublish will allow you to publish only part of a catalogue instead of the whole shebang, to the web. Custom namespace XMP metadata can be extracted by users in Portfolio 8.

iView MediaPro 3 will contain a lightbox that will support 4 images side by side. Annotation will be supported via user-defined controlled vocabularies with support for IPTC/XMP Core and UniCode.

You will be able to batch rename files and import files from the web in batch and through cURL technology. There are many more improvements to iView, but I’m sure you are beginning to see the light.

Aperture’s features overlap those of DAM applications. While DAM can manage many more file formats than just photograph formats, it’s a large part of their functionality.

Aperture’s DAM features

By looking at Aperture’s feature list, you’ll have learned the application supports photo management. That’s a polite name for DAM. Instead of calling photo collections “collections” or “catalogues”, Aperture calls them “projects”. And we read Aperture can handle thousands of those.

One major difference between Aperture and the DAM software I’ve covered very briefly above, is that Aperture will support backup to multiple drives concurrently. The archival and backup feature is also lacking in Portfolio and iView MediaPro. You can of course move the complete catalogue to an off-site location, but that’s a rather dumb way of backing up or archiving. And it probably is not what Aperture will do.

The biggest difference and the area in which DAM applications like iView MediaPro should worry at least a bit, is the way Aperture handles photos. The Stack feature will allow photographers to group sequences of shots together, and the program will automatically group bursts and bracketed shots. I don’t know of any other software which does this, DAM or not.