Digital photography maven Rob Galbraith has written a good quasi-review for Aperture, the professional photo workflow app announced by Apple early last month. I’ve been reading a ton about Aperture over the past few weeks, both because of the weblog world’s jittery excitement about the product (as is usually the case with anything manufactured or authored by Apple) and because I’m becoming more and more frustrated with the shortcomings of Apple’s consumer-level entry in the arena, iPhoto. Aperture looks like, in some respects, it’ll be the Real Deal — version control for any photo imported into its library, internal handling of each camera’s RAW files, management of embedded caption information, reasonable color management, and a workflow which acknowledges that many people will continue to use external photo editing apps (e.g., Photoshop) to work on files that are managed by Aperture. I agree with a few of the downsides mentioned by Galbraith, though, like that Aperture doesn’t have the ability to manage photos that aren’t on a currently-accessible disc and that it’s reasonably clear you’ll need a pretty fast, dual-processor Mac (with a huge hard disk!) to take advantage of Aperture in the first place. Looking at how far iTunes and iPhoto have come from their version 1.0 days, though, I’m still excited to see with Aperture 1.0 (if I can corral a Mac that’s up to spec) and put it through its paces a bit.