Apple's Photo Op, Adobe's Frown

The Aperture software appears to be a complete rethinking of the user interface for digital-image-editing software, giving users the option of seeing their photographs laid out like slides or negatives on a light table.

And the software puts particular emphasis on RAW files, a format containing the complete, unprocessed data from a camera's image sensor. According to Apple, Aperture will enable users to edit RAW files in much the same way that they would JPEG files or images in other file formats.

Beyond the program's merits, Aperture's adoption could be boosted by Apple's network of retail stores. Those stores can act like an ongoing tradeshow exhibition, allowing the company to show off its products to potential customers in a wide range of locations, Swenson says.

That's a marketing tool Adobe just doesn't have, he says.

Apple Infiltrates

Aperture is only the latest move by Apple in the multimedia software space. The company previously offered professional-quality editing software for movies, animation and sound.

Also, it developed iLife, an entry-level suite of creative software that the company offers preinstalled on its Macs.

What has to worry Adobe further is its history in the digital-video-editing segment, Swenson says. In the late 1990s, the company's Premiere program dominated the market for video-editing programs under $1,000.

But Apple's Final Cut program, which the computer company introduced in 1999, changed all that. Apple had taken away such a significant chunk of Adobe's business on the Mac that by 2002, Adobe stopped making Premiere for Apple computers.

Now Apple now has about a third of the market for professional video-editing software, according to Swenson.