Slashdot Mirror
Apple Unveils New Pro Products
porcupine8 writes "As many had speculated, today Apple unveiled upgrades to their PowerBook and Power Mac lines (although no PowerBook G5). They also introduced a new professional photography application known as Aperture, rounding out their software lineup for creative professionals. Can't wait to find out what they announce next week!"
"Although, no PowerBook G5."
Were you asleep during the Intel announcement?
Everyone who actually thinks there will be G5 PowerBooks at this point, please stand up.
Crickets?
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
An interesting surprise is the prerequisites. Based on http://www.apple.com/aperture/specs.html , Aperture requires a state-of-the-art mac:
Recommended System
* Dual 2GHz Power Mac G5 or faster
* 2GB of RAM
* One of the following graphics cards:
o ATI Radeon X800 XT Mac Edition
o ATI Radeon 9800 XT or 9800 Pro
o NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL or 6800 GT DDL
o NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT
o NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500
* 5GB of disk space for application, templates, and tutorial
* DVD drive for installation
Probably they'll eventually offer a "light" version of Aperture, like they did with Final Cut and Logic Audio, other "Pro" software.
Animoog.org
A product in the same price-class as Photoshop CS, but not the same feature-class... I wonder how that'll fair in the market...
It is similar to Googles Picassa but on steroids.
:: Final Cut Pro : iMovie
More accurately:
Aperture : Google's Picasa
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
Some time ago Adobe announced they would no longer target the Mac first. I think you'll find this is Apple responding to a slap in the face from Adobe.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
It looks to use CoreImage for it's image processing, which would be cool, as that would mean it uses the GPU for image processing. The demo shows some very responsive image processing. My goddammed photoshop CS1 RAW import may take a day just to generate thumbnails from RAW files. I am so upgrading.
If this is just an organization and editing program, then how is this any different than iPhoto?
RAW workflow. Apple is calling this "the first of its kind" in that it can work directly on RAW images, but that's not true. I'm not sure if the parent poster really knew what he was talking about or not, but from looking through the features this has on Apple's web site, it does seem that Picasa 2.1 does pretty much the exact same things, and Picasa is free.
(There are probably things that Apple doesn't mention that people like me would consider pretty important, but I can only go by what's on their web site right now. I'm interested to learn more, as a real Photoshop-level app that can work straight on RAW files might be enough to get me to finally switch to Mac.)
It is highly desirable to work directly on RAW files, which as Apple says is "non-destructive", i.e. all of your original sensor data is still there. This is not the case when working with RAW files in Photoshop, which have to be rasterized even before they're actually opened. You can make basic adjustments in Adobe Camera RAW before the file is opened but to do real retouching, you have to rasterize and open in Photoshop itself.
Picasa will let you do editing and retouching on the RAW file, then export it after you've edited. But Picasa's tools are pretty basic. Apple might offer more, but under their "all the tools you need" sidebar on the web site, they just list the same stuff Picasa does and that even Adobe Camera RAW will mostly do. The real questions for me are:
a) does Aperture support layers?
b) does Aperture have a clone tool/healing brush/patch tool? These are the tools I use most often for actual retouching.
c) does Aperture support 16 bit images? (My guess is it would pretty much have to in order to truly support RAW, but I don't think they specifically say it does anywhere.)
If the answers to all of these questions are "yes", I'm tempted. If the answers to any one out of the three are "no", then it's really a worthless app if you've got Picasa, and especially if you've already got a combination of Picasa and Photoshop. (So you can use Picasa for images that need only light retouching, and Photoshop for the heavy stuff that Aperture wouldn't be suited for either.)
Of course, both Apple and Adobe will probably improve their products to compete with each other as time goes on. I would love to see true RAW support in Photoshop itself and I would love to see more features in Aperture. Adobe has had no real serious competition in pro image editing for a good while up to now.
Has anyone else noticed that there is a software company called Aperture which makes a product called Aperture?
Didn't they have enough hassles with Apple Records?
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
...Looks great - the tour is stunning, and the metaphor is a breath of fresh air. A loupe - a light table - the ability to see thumbnails and versions on the table while you work. Heads up displays that give you back your window. They've obviously talked to a lot pf photographers, many of whom are likely sick of the tunnel vision interface of just about every app, PS included - that makes them stop acting like a photographer. I'm in the same boat. I've recently gone back to my professional 35mm SLR outfit that cost me a whopping $600 back in the day, and does what I want, and can make archival 11x14 prints that blow you away.
Most affordable digital cameras a great for taking a picture of something that is rock solid and in no danger of moving and is under optimal lighting conditions. After two weddings as a guest just trying to shoot candids, I realize that there's very little art in using a current digital camera, that it mostly involves holding this small brick between you and something and trusting it to make a series of decisions you might not agree with all while making sure you just heard the right beep, saw the right LED and heard the right little ticky thingy. And I'm a geek.
I've decided to retire my series of cameras (3, 4, 5 MP - they were all supposed to be so much better than the last one...) or donate them or something, and hunker down until something on the order of the EOS and this level of image handling gets reasonable. By hunker down I mean shoot with real film and a flash that goes more than 10 feet and something like decent response time. All of which I have in a 20 year old Pentax outfit. yes, I know it's ten times the volume and weight when outfitted with a TTL flash and zoom and winder. Yes, I know that if I pay thru the nose now for the EOS and a G5 and Aperture I'll save all that money on film - but film is a dribbling expense. And yes I know the COLA on a $600 camera from the 1980s is probably on the order of an EOS today, but I can still get a comparable new 35mm setup for the same $600 today.
And honest to god - as with cell phones - it's not like I was wasting away and spent every hour before digital cameras wanting to take a picture and every five minutes wishing I could be making a phone call back in the era "BC" (before cellphones). (Ooooh! Then there's taking pictures with my phone! Or should I be calling people on my camera?! Wait, wait - if I could only email from my toaster...!)
For many instances, digital cameras are quick, cheap, and OK. Honestly, 99% of them should be compared to compact point and click cameras for actual performance - but the hype of their early days has failed to solidify
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
No self-respecting workstation went without it
As an experiment, for the last couple of months, I've left a process running at home, and one at work, that simply has a 128 MB buffer, filled with a simple data pattern. Every 60 seconds, it checks the buffer, to see if any of the data has changed. Because it is accessing it like this, it stays resident.
Result: no errors.
Based on the expected RAM error rates I was able to find by Googling, I expected to see several errors by now. However, all the published data I could find was a few years old, and presumably RAM has been made more resistant to error. Whatever the reason, experiment seems to say that ECC is not as necessary as some think.
Dell does not do the same QA that Apple does with the displays, so though some may be from the same manufacturer the consistency is far different. Spend an hour digging around forums and consumer reports for repair records and the like, this becomes rather evident.
Also: the perks on the Dell displays, particularly the USB ports and the like are notoriously faulty. At one ~500-machine Dell installation with which I'm intimately familiar, far less than half of the Dell flat-panel monitors (don't know model #s offhand, unfortunately) have USB ports and media readers which work as advertised. Far less. They're just trash.
That said, I bought a Samsung display rather than an Apple. Lower cost, but far better quality than the Dells.
Although what you say may be true, your test is flawed with regard to SDRAM refresh. Try make it verify the memory once every day instead.
Jeff
ipv6 is my vpn