With the release of Aperture 3.3, Apple ties its professional photo organizer and editor more closely with iPhoto ’11 via a new unified library. You can now access the same images in both Aperture and iPhoto without having to import and export photos manually, and the two apps share Faces, Places, slideshows, and albums. Aperture 3.3 is also optimized for the new MacBook Pro with Retina Display (see “New MacBook Pro Features Retina Display, Flash Memory,” 11 June 2012). The update also brings a number of new features, including support for AVCHD video, Skin Tone and Natural Gray modes added to the White Balance tool, an improved Highlights & Shadows tool, and an Auto Enhance button added to the Adjustments panel. The user interface has been tweaked, adding a new manual option to customize the sort order in the Projects view via drag-and-drop; displaying Facebook, Flickr, and MobileMe albums as thumbnails when accounts are selected in the source list; and modifying some terminology (“Original” instead of “Master” and “Info” instead of “Metadata”). Note that Aperture 3.3 now requires Mac OS X 10.7.4 — these changes aren’t available to users running 10.6 Snow Leopard. ($79.99 new in the Mac App Store, free update, 528 MB)