Apple has added another program to its range of professional digital editing tools, this time aimed at pro digital photographers and their post-production needs. At the heart of Aperture is the ability to handle RAW files swiftly.

Pro photographers will be won or lost by this core ability alone. If Apple can pull that off, it will have carved out a large chunk of the digital imaging market for itself.

Aperture started to draw abuse from photographers before it was launched and the flak has continued. Criticism has come in two flavours: slowness and process inefficiencies. Speed is the critical issue. The whole premise of Aperture, and its much-paraded selling point, is its ability to handle RAW files quickly and this just doesn't happen. It imports files at the rate of your average ice age, and a long time is needed to apply metadata tags batches at a time.

Tellingly, when we let Apple know our test machine's specs, which are comfortably within Aperture's spec range, it still sent us review software preinstalled on a lean Power Mac G5 Quad with RAM in abundance.

This was a good move by Apple, because when our boxed copy arrived separately the Apple Compatibility Checker told us that our 1.8GHz Power Mac G5 - running an NVIDIA 5200 graphics card and 1GB of RAM - was too weak a machine, contrary to Apple's online technical specifications.

RAW power?

Even on the Quad though, things can hang, especially during large imports. We dropped 50 RAW files from a CompactFlash card into Aperture as our first action with the app, and had enough time to go and get a cup of tea, come back and get comfortable, and still see a dozen shots left to load. It's slow.

People expecting lightning-fast workflows are going to be disappointed. In its favour, you do get thumbnails of RAW files on camera cards appearing in Aperture before you import anything, so this could save some time. Still, the per image download rate sucks.

For professionals, the main performance gripe has been, bizarrely, to do with Aperture's RAW conversion engine - the program's centrepiece. A baying crowd of photographers foaming at the mouth are saying that RAW file conversion into TIFF files produces noisy images around JPEG quality.

Also, as Aperture saves adjustments as sets of output instructions rather than creating new images, each time you output an adjusted image it has to convert the RAW original. This is a catch-22 situation in terms of time management, because while you do save time during the editing by not having to make duplicates, this time gain is lost during output.

Generally the claim that Aperture is an all-in-one digital imaging application doesn't hold much water. This would be true if you only made common adjustments and retouches to whole images, but if you want to zoom into photos and change elements creatively you will need Photoshop or a competitor. In Aperture you can't cut, add layers or warp, and your list of filters is dwarfed by Photoshop.

There's also no pixel-level eyedropper tool so, unlike Photoshop, you can't put the tip of the dropper onto a pixel and get a readings table off that colour - you can't know if the black in the shot is an absolute black, for example. Also, EXIF metadata doesn't export to Photoshop. The list goes on...