Apple is showing off Aperture 1.1 at PMA this week. MacWorld has a good article detailing some of the new features.
Better RAW decoding, sharpening, and noise reduction algorithms are the ones that I’m most interested in. I’ve been using Aperture for several projects the past couple of months. In the studio, the results are not bad. In shooting conditions with good light, Aperture’s results are perfectly acceptable. Where the program breaks down is in high ISO, low-light environments. Aperture’s 1.0/1.0.1’s noise reduction sucks.
There’s also a report from InsideAperture that has additional details. Rob Galbraith has positive initial thoughts on Aperture 1.1’s RAW conversion results:
The real news of v1.1 is something we knew Apple was beavering away on, but we didn’t expect to see results this soon: RAW file decoding that at first blush appears to have none of the improperly sharpened and somewhat smeared look of Aperture conversions today. Instead, what we saw when we got in close to the monitor was Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II photos that had the finely detailed, photographically natural look we’ve seen in our own EOS-1Ds Mark II workflow in which Canon’s Digital Photo Professional 2.0.3 is the converter and converted files are optimally sharpened in Photoshop to compensate for the softening effect of the camera’s optical low-pass filter.
tow.com 