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Apple discontinues Aperture, users migrate to Photoshop
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Apple has announced they are retiring their photo editing tool Aperture along with iPhoto, impacting millions of both professional and amateur photographers that work on the Mac platform. Professional users will likely be moving to Photoshop or Photoshop Lightroom as a result. While the Apple products will still continue to run, there will not be future versions of the applications, and new development work on them is stopping.
Apple has announced a new tool, Photos for OS X, releasing the following statement about their strategy: “With the introduction of the new Photos app and iCloud Photo Library, enabling you to safely store all of your photos in iCloud and access them from anywhere, there will be no new development of Aperture. When Photos for OS X ships next year, users will be able to migrate their existing Aperture libraries to Photos for OS X.” This creates many questions, as Apple is trying to serve both consumers, who currently use iPhoto, and professionals, who use Aperture, with a single application. This would be like Adobe consolidating their consumer product Photoshop Elements, Photoshop Lightroom, and the core Photoshop application all into one.
The new Photos for OS X is heavily integrated into i Cloud, and will allow users to more easily share files among devices. While some editing capabilities are included, they have not yet been fully announced.
While Apple had originally grown its company by providing integrated tools and a platform loved by designers, digital artists, photographers and other creative professionals, the company is now focused heavily on iPhone, iPad, and iPods. The Mac products and applications are appearing to be a lesser focus for the company. For the time being, Apple has indicated that they are continuing to develop video and motion graphics products Final Cut pro and Logic Pro. Yet Apple is showing that it is focused on opportunities that scale to the largest possible audience, and the niche of providing tools for creative professionals is being left to companies like Adobe.
Professionals may also need to endure higher prices, as Adobe will have a near-monopoly on high-end digital imaging with their Photoshop products. Apple’s competition had previously caused Photoshop Lightroom prices to be dropped, and without this competitive pressure, Adobe will be free to raise their prices, as professionals will lack other digital alternatives.
Aperture users being left behind can benefit from the many Photoshop courses offered at American Graphics Institute, including regularly scheduled and private Photoshop retouching training classes and Lightroom courses.
About the author
Jennifer Smith is a user experience designer, educator and author based in Boston. She has worked in the field of user experience design for more than 15 years.She has designed websites, ecommerce sites, apps, and embedded systems. Jennifer designs solutions for mobile, desktop, and iOT devices.
Jennifer delivers UX training and UX consulting for large Fortune 100 companies, small start-ups, and independent software vendors.She has served as a Designer in Residence at Microsoft, assisting third-party app developers to improve their design solutions and create successful user experiences. She has been hired by Adobe and Microsoft to deliver training workshops to their staff, and has traveled to Asia, Europe, India, the Middle East, and across the U.S. to deliver courses and assist on UX design projects. She has extensive knowledge of modern UX Design, and worked closely with major tech companies to create educational material and deliver UX workshops to key partners globally. Jennifer works with a wide range of prototyping tools including XD, Sketch, Balsamiq, Fireworks, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Blend for Visual Studio. She also works extensively in the fields of presentation design and visual design.
Jennifer is also an expert on Photoshop, digital image editing, and photo manipulation. Having written 10 books on Photoshop, and having consulted and provided training to major media companies and businesses around the globe.
Jennifer is the author of more than 20 books on design tools and processes, including Adobe Creative Cloud for Dummies, Adobe Creative Cloud Digital Classroom, and Photoshop Digital Classroom. She has been awarded a Microsoft MVP three times for her work with user experience design in creating apps for touch, desktop, and mobile devices. Jennifer holds the CPUX-F certification from the User Experience Qualification Board and assists others in attaining this designation in leading a UX certification course at American Graphics Institute. She is a candidate for a Master’s degree in Human Factors in Information Design.