LR/Enfuse is a Lightroom plug-in that provides a convenient interface onto the open source Enfuse application, which provides excellent blending of multiple exposures of the same scene into one final image.

Neat. Now if the same could be done with Aperture, especially now that Aperture has an image editing API.

In recent months, a lot of new image editors have appeared on the Mac platform. New APIs from Apple such as Core Image have allowed small, indie developers to create quite sophisticated image editing tools.

I've seen a few reviews of these applications, but the reviews mostly concentrate on user interface concerns. I'd like to do something different here; Instead of simply looking at their UI, I'd like to look at how these applications handle tasks I typically do. In this review, I'll look at three different tasks:

1. Stitching a few shots to create a panorama image
2. Adding a fancy title to a picture
3. Creating a simple pixel image

I will not look at fixing levels, exposure and the like, since iPhoto does a pretty good job at that, and I think most people will use these editors in conjunction with iPhoto or even Aperture or Lightroom, using them to do tasks that involve layers and selections and pixel-level operations, features which iPhoto, Aperture and Lightroom don't provide.

As I'm sure you know by now, Aperture 2 shipped today. I'm playing with the trial right now, and it appears to be quite impressive. I have a few thoughts already:

The speed argument is over. Perhaps, though, I should say that it has just begun. Nobody argued that Aperture 1.5 struggled for performance whilst Lightroom does not. Aperture 2 certainly now appears to bear serious comparison with Lightroom 1.3 on performance.

...

There’s an image adjustment API in Aperture 2. If someone can persuade Imagenomics to port Noiseware Pro to Aperture, I will be a very, very happy man.

The API is huge. It would be pretty sweet if pixelmator could hook into this.