Apple announced the latest update to its professional digital image editing and management application, Aperture 1.5, on Monday. The update adds a new open library architecture that lets you store your images anyplace on your hard drive, external disks and CDs and DVDs, improved iLife i06 and iWork i06 integration, XMP metadata support, and a new export API so that third party developers can build their own Aperture plug-ins.
Aperture also gained several new adjustment options including a luminance-based Edge Sharpen filter, a Color tool that adjusts the hue, saturation and luminance of specific color ranges within an image, individual image adjustment settings can now be saved as presets that can be automatically applied through a menu command, and more.
The Loupe magnifier now sports a set of onscreen controls, 1600x magnification, and the ability to be detached from the cursor while making adjustments.
Aperture 1.5 will be available this week, and is priced at US$299. The update is free for current users.