It’s out!

Erik posts his first impressions, as does Fraser.

Me?

Let’s review the wishlist.

Improved performance.

You betcha.

RAW import API.

No. And while RAW support keeps improving, Apple’s pace of updates still leaves much to be desired.

Adjustments API.

Yes! Bring on third-party noise reduction plug-ins.

Local editing.

Sooorta. There’s a “local contrast” feature I haven’t played around with yet, and the Retouch Brush (which looks quite powerful in the demo; haven’t tried) falls in the same category. It isn’t quite what I was hoping for, however.

HDRI.

Nope.

Customizable full-screen toolbar.

Nuh-uh.

A metadata HUD for full-screen mode.

Thanks to the new all-in-one HUD, yes!

Much better keyboard-based toggling between metadata input and UI keyboard shortcuts.

Much as I can tell, this hasn’t really improved. If anything, it’s gotten worse. With the Retouch HUD open, using two-finger scroll anywhere on the full-sized image won’t pan it — it’ll drag one of the HUD’s sliders instead. This makes for some really strange results.

Much more background processing, such as of exports.

Yes!

Admittedly, I haven’t actually played around with it much. I don’t have too many halfway recent photos to test it on anyway, and I also lack time — both to take them and to edit them. That said, many of my wishlist items were fulfilled, and the worry of quite a few people that Aperture was effectively dead has, as of today, been proven unfounded. The competition between Photoshop Lightroom and Aperture continues to be exciting to watch — even more so with the price having dropped again, from $499 to $299 to now $199.

And so, I look forward to the day I can go on a trip and take tons and tons meaningful photos, come home and import, organize, post-process and publish them.