I was fortunate enough to attend the Aperture 2 World Tour Event in Winnipeg, Canada yesterday at the Park Theatre. Having never used Aperture before (I’m not much of a photog) I was really curious to see what the software could do for a recreational photographer like myself. I wasn’t disappointed.

The seminar started slightly after 1:30 PM CST, and from there it was all info. Starting with an overview of what professional photographers were looking for and what recreational photographers were looking for, the presenter got down to what Aperture 2 can do and how to use it best.

New in Aperture 2 are a bunch of very useful features. Even to someone like me that hasn’t used the software before, as I watched the features being demonstrated, everything made sense.

First was the aggregation of the inspector elements. Now, all projects, metadata and adjustments are compiled into one handy area within the software. This makes it easy for you to access all of the projects and adjustments while making the most of your screen space.

Next, I appreciated how you could easily set the key photo for a project in the projects view. Simply click into a project and ctrl-click or hit the spacebar to set the key photo. Now, whenever you are browsing your projects in projects view, that photo appears as the thumbnail. This helps in making the project more recognizable at a glance.

The speed of Aperture 2 was impressive as well. At one point in the demo, the presenter opened up a project full of over 150,000 photos. In less than 30 seconds the project was ready, and he began leafing through them with lightning speed. Now, he was on a Mac Pro with 6GB of memory… but he assured us that most current versions of iMac and MacBook Pro’s would achieve the same speed and performance. I’d like to test that out for myself.

Lastly I was probably most impressed with the power of the editing tools and filters that could be applied to your images. For professional photographers I could see this software being a godsend. Applying color filters and effects was as easy as one click, and you can even work with multiple versions of the image at the same time, on one screen so that you can easily compare before and afters. You can even use a slider to divide the image in 2, and compare an effect on one side of the image, while the original remains the same on the other.

Nearing the end of the presentation we were pointed towards the Aperture website where it was noted we could find all kinds of video tutorials (around 50 or so) to get started. I checked them out a bit and indeed, the tutorials are very slick. If I pick up a copy I’ll be hitting up the site again for sure. Aperture 2 is currently selling for $199 in both the US and Canadian Apple Stores… and a free trial is available.

All-in-all I was very impressed with the presentation. There was NO hard selling of the product at all. Simply a 30 second blurb and slide about the price of Aperture 2 near the end of the presentation. The presentation was 99% walk through and solid content, with a touch of humor. Two thumbs up to Apple and all of the staff involved with the presentation. Great job!