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Apple's Aperture Reviewed
phaedo00 writes "Ars Technica has done an in-depth review of Apple's Aperture. Reviewer Dave Girard gives it a once over and walks away with a sour taste in his mouth. From the review: 'It is also disappointing to see form beat out function here, but hopefully this will be Apple's software equivalent of the G4 Cube. They have only themselves to blame: they set themselves up for a big fall by attempting to dig themselves a chunk of the pro market by purporting to have the lossless holy grail of imaging. The trouble with that is they obviously didn't have the engineering or expertise in RAW processing to pull it off or, if they did, they chose not to include it because of speed constraints due to Core Image.'"
Don't worry. Apple will smooth out these problems in the next version which will be a free upgrade to all Aperture users. Rome wasn't built in a day, right?
I'm not Seth Finkelstein. I still speak the truth.
While I'm sure the software has its flaws... shoot its a 1.0 release. What 1.0 software doesn't have some flaws.... but am I the only one that read his review and thought that he entered the review process trying to find points ANY POINTS he could harp on?
And although I don't have a DSLR, or even a camera that shoots raw images, I find it to be a valuable app in terms of form and basic function with my Canon A95.
His technical concerns are legitimate, and Apple will need to work on those issues. However, in terms of organization and workflow, this program is incredible. I cannot forsee this application going anywhere but up in the coming months and years. I enjoy it, and look forward to updates for bugs and other issues mentioned in the article.
Cue raft of posts from Mac users who 'would never need it anyway' and 'iPhoto does everything they want'.
Yes it might, but there are those among us called professionals and we need real tools.
honestly, for most folks who do amateur or high-brow amateur, they're gettin' along just fine with the free stuff that came with their computer...or photoshop lite type software...what confuses me is this: apple wants to get to the serious amateurs as well as the pro's - but since the nearmidformat cameras have fallen in price dramatically (many below the cost of this software), then why on earth charge so much for the software itself? that's like begging to alienate the potential buyers below the pro level...really, this should be priced on par with 'high end' do-it-yourself home printer kits (great ones from 200-300, most below 200, but supplies are expensive)...apple would be more well served by creating a new secondary market for digital images and video stored or manipulated with their software (think: open source flash, but apple - and creative commons and share style networks for video clips, images (from aperture) and so on...) just a thought.
enjoy life, and Gmail.pro
Is this reviewer biased? The entire tone of the article is to nail Apple. An honest review does pull out the plus side of things (even if the pluses are small, few, and far between) along with the minuses.
Evolution or ID?
Until there's Picase for Mac or Aperture for Windows, I'm not sure your complaint that the two tools seem to do the same thing makes any sense. Is someone going to provide me with a free Windows machine and pay me for the inconvenience of running Windows instead of OS X if I use Picasa?
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
I smell... bias.
Guess I can stop searching for torrents of it.
find it to be a valuable app in terms of form and basic function with my Canon A95.
You're using a $500 software product with a $300 camera? There's something wrong here.
Damien
I have teh GIMP
I am doing raw photo processing / editing with GIMP and simple command-line conversion program. I don`t need dual G4, 4GB of RAM, radeon 9xxx and a $500 program... Better spend this money on your camera :)
Expensive ink cartridges -is- the major reason why printers can be cheap. There's no real equivalent to software, unless you're expecting to be able to gouge them for support, or pushing them into also buying related premium services from you. And even if Apple wanted to do the latter, there's no shortage of image hosting / printing sites right now.
One might also wonder -- is there a bit of psychology involved? Will people automatically dismiss it as a rival to Photoshop if it were vastly cheaper?
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Your a&b points have to deal with finding an app to replace Photoshop which Aperture is not ment for. You use Apeture to import, sort, minor tweaks and print/publish. If you want to do editing of the image then you export it to Photoshop. The answer to your question c is yes. What their touting as a "first of its kind" is the how they work with the RAW file. With apeture you get all the corrections you've done with your image without creating a new file or destroying the original RAW/jpg. If the RAW converter was actually working properly then it would be a great tool but as for now its only useful for the non-professional crowd. Hopefully by 1.5 or 2.0 they'll have fixed some of the major problems that the ars technia article talks about.
Is someone going to provide me with a free Windows machine and pay me for the inconvenience of running Windows instead of OS X if I use Picasa?
For the price of Aperture, you could buy a Windows machine and run all the free apps you want on it...
Look! They are learning to detect sarcasm. Perhaps there is some hope for them after all.
Raw IS a raster format.
I am what you might call a serious amateur photographer. For the past few years I have used a full version of Photoshop CS (on Mac) for my processing. On a lark, I pre-ordered Aperture. I think that it is not a refined as photoshop, but I am not sure it is meant to be. Photoshop is a scalpel in a swiss army knife, and Aperture is more of a chef's knife by itself. I definitely think that Aperture has a MUCH shorter learning curve and is more intuitive. It does not get in your way. While I (again) am no expert, I believe that the images I have processed with Aperture have the same final quality as Photoshop. Plus, it loads about 2x faster than photoshop.
My
I am a heavy user of iPhoto but my "shoebox" of photos is getting a little too big for it. At ~29,000 iPhoto is usable but is starting to choke a little. Aperture seems to be perfectly able to handle libraries over 100,000 with no problems but I am not a Pro photog and $500 for Aperture is a little much since all I want is a cataloging app. Anyone have a suggestion on the an iPhoto alternative that will import my iPhoto library?
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I'm glad he mentions font size issues. I'm using Windows XP, and am constantly running into font size issues. Programs ignore my settings or pay attention to part of them, and also dont allocate enough room for the chosen font size. This is rediculous. Visual Studio 2005 is a big offender as well.
as anyone else. Their products should be viewed just as anyone else's software.
The common joke with Apple products is always to wait for version 2.
Hold them accountable, maybe they will change.
Its like Frontrow, for me its useless as its not a PVR. Yet try and present this argument and you get flamed.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Note that while I'm not a professional photographer, I work with high-end digital and scanned images as a commercial retoucher and formerly as art director for a fashion magazine...
A pro photographer is paid for his "eye"/ability to capture an image that is so desirable, someone wants to pay for it.
so I understand the needs of a professional digital photographer.
I spent some time working at an OEM, so I got a little tiny window into their workflow. Much of the value of an Aperature is in importing and managing on a large scale for review and basic selection.
Maybe the better article choice would have been to collect feedback from pros instead of assuming he "knows" all about it?
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Obviously you failed to read the article. Aperture imports raw data very poorly. The results look much worse than Camera Raw in Photoshop. Aperture is sold as high-fidelity imaging but actually it's much worse than existing products.
<apple> Math is hard.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
Photoshop is the darkroom.
Aperature is the light table.
If you don't understand this, you're not the target market.
Bullshit. This is a fair article. Apple's software is superior but it's hardware isn't. The G4 is dead and the graphics cards in the PowerBooks are TWO YEARS OLD!!!
This is a fair review. He gives them a lot of credit for some things but not on its core functions. What he is saying is this piece of software is not up to Apple's own HIGH standards.
By the way tell us Pages is a good piece of software and you should be banned from Slashdot
How Aperture differs from iPhoto:
1. Capacity. I currently have an iPhoto library which is getting close to 5000 images. On my 1.3 ghz Powerbook, starting the program is painful, and was getting more so quickly due to the fact that I recently started shooting in RAW format. Aperture (supposedly) can support much larger image libraries, and is geared towards a RAW based workflow.
2. Metadata. Ever tried keywording images in iPhoto? It is a massive pain in the ass. The only interface for assigning keywords is a multiple-checkbox window that requires a free 3rd-party plugin to make it remotely useful. (Kudos to that developer, by the way). Aperture fixes this by making keyword entry much easier, although according to the review, it badly breaks the EXIF keywords.
To answer another one of your questions: This thing don't got layers. But it's not really intended as an image editing application. Aperture is supposed to be used in conjunction with other editing software, like photoshop. It's supposed to help you keep your images and your million or so versions of them better organized: if you're familiar with Adobe Bridge, it's a bit like that. It's a good thing that it's not a full fledged image editing application, though: reviewer notes that a lot of the most frequently used editing tools that are in the program are lacking (noise reduction and sharpening, for example).
Anyway: feh, seems to be the overall impression of the reviewer, and feh would have to be my verdict too until some of the oversights he notes are addressed. In the meantime, I highly recommend that you check out iView Media Pro, which seems to be less buggy, but just as featureful, and costs less than half as much.
There are demo versions of this availible at a few different places. The last link includes a bug-fix that allows the software to be run on older Apple machines.
>> If this is just an organization and editing program, then how is this any different than iPhoto? >
a) No layers. No non-global adjustments at all except for b)
b) yes
c) yes
>> then it's really a worthless app if you've got Picasa
Well I don't have Picasa (I'm on Mac) however, even if I did, I prefer Aperture because of the features I listed above.
I have encountered a few bugs. None of them major although I was surprised to see them.
PowerLevel.com - A next generation marketplace for virtual items and services
>If this is just an organization and editing program, then how is this any different than iPhoto?
For one thing, I'd expect that Apple's online print service will actually process orders of studio-quality photos if the order is sent through Aperture. Apple makes it very difficult to order prints from iPhoto if they look like they came from a professional photographer -- Apple's print service assumes you're violating the photographer's copyright. (Granted that most pros would not work through Apple's online service.)
For photos that don't look amateur, Apple's print service wants you to sign a copyright form to indeminfying them and affirm that you in fact have the right to reproduce the photo being ordered. The process is not very efficient -- they lost the form I faxed them twice after I ordered some headshots of my wife taken by a friend (who's a pro and gave me the files). It took me more than a month to get them to send me the pictures I ordered.
nearmidformat !? I can only assume you think pictures taken with sub $500 digital cameras look almost as good as a typical medium format camera. That is complete hogwash.
Very few pro-level cameras approach the quality of even a mid range medium format traditional camera. Modern films and paper capture an amazing amount of detail and color and the dynamic range of digital does not even approach that of professional low contrast film/paper.
DYI Home digital printing sucks!!! Most ink jet inks fade within a few months. The best option for home printing is Dye Sublimation and than you are stuck with post card size prints unless you want to spend a few thousand dollars. You are better off taking your digital images to a lab and having them print your image on traditional color paper.
On the flip side you you buy a used medium format setup for $1,000 and set up your own color darkroom in your bathroom for $250. Traditional color printing and development is not as hard as some might want you to believe and the enlargements will blow your mind! Much better than anything you can get from digital today especially at the price point.
Digital photography is fun and all but the quality just does not yet match medium format.
si, y muchas seguro! (if looking at it from the "cucaracha(roach) == bug" angle of course
-nando
The article is critical of apple for sacrificing function for form. This has long been apples way of doing things.
I'm not sure its a valid reason to be critical though, apple users expect this tradeoff, and prefer it. They pay for Apple products becuase they are idiot-proof, and either don't know or don't care that they perhaps do not have all the functions of other products.
This obviously doesn't apply to all apple products, the new OSX is a wonderful piece of work, finding ways to make it very accessible yet maintain the power of a *nix based operating system was not an easy task.
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
Sorry about this partial double post. It didn't take some of my comments because of my use of triangle brackets.
"If this is just an organization and editing program, then how is this any different than iPhoto?"
extremely fast and effective application of keywords
effective use of dual display
stacking (ie: grouping) of like images manually or automatically based on timestamp
smart web galleries
new book layouts and higher quality book prints
innovate "loupe" magnifying tool
very slick interface
adjustments HUD many times more powerful
virtual lighttable for composing layouts
non-destructive editing from beginning to end or to photoshop
compare and select tools
"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.)"
a) No layers. No non-global adjustments at all except for b)
b) yes
c) yes
"then it's really a worthless app if you've got Picasa"
Well I don't have Picasa (I'm on Mac) however, even if I did, I prefer Aperture because of the features I listed above.
I have encountered a few bugs. None of them major although I was surprised to see them.
PowerLevel.com - A next generation marketplace for virtual items and services
Good god, the first thing to enter my head: an Apple-themed Goatse. Oy.
BytesTemplar.com
a) does Aperture support layers?
not in the sense that photoshop does. what exactly are you looking for here? this isn't a photoshop replacement, by any stretch of the imagination.
b) does Aperture have a clone tool/healing brush/patch tool? These are the tools I use most often for actual retouching.
it does. there is a simple spot/patch tool in the toolbar (check here). there is also a simple red-eye reduction tool that appears to work a bit better than the iPhoto equivalent.
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.)
your guess would be right.
--
i've posted a mini-review over at macnn, but i haven't tested the raw conversion to look for the same issues that the ars reviewer found. overall application speed is something that apple addresses quickly, in my experience. i wouldn't be surprised to see a point upgrade for this app in a month or two.
Way to ruin my lunch.
What's wrong with Pages?
Not true. Click the little key icon on the bottom left, and now you can drag images to buttons with the keywords on them.
Note that this is even more of a pain in the ass than the multiple-checkbox window, particularly if you use more keywords than there is room for in the panel that displays the buttons.
But at least it's another interface. And if you're only assigning one keyword to a whole bunch of photos, it works fairly well.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Can anyone else verify Girard's gripes with the GUI type?
"They try and make it less illegible by bolding up the fonts but it's really fuzzy and on my 22" monitor at 1600x1200, I'm constantly squinting to read things (and I have near-perfect vision). Maybe things look better on the twin 30" LCD setups that you see in all of Apple's user profiles [Kevin Bacon dork-cred references omitted]
I think Apple is assuming that everyone is running on larger monitors now but they forgot about that resolution thing that also increases, nulling any increase in physical scale."
If that's accurate criticism, I can probably trust the rest of his review, including believing that failure to properly manipulate RAW formats is Aperture's defect, not Girard's. Otherwise, his whole review is discredited. Apple certainly didn't "forget" their displays have fixed resolutions at given physical sizes. Who's got Aperture running on a 22" 1600x1200 monitor?
--
make install -not war
I need to preface this by saying that no application is perfect for everyone. Different people have different workflows, different post-processing needs, and different priorities. I'm not saying Aperture is perfect for everyone. Nor should anyone else say Aperture is useless. It may be useless to them, but not to everyone. I shoot mostly fashion and advertising type work. I'm a pretty serious amateur, in that I have good gear, and I'm very serious about photography, but I have a day job doing something else (security architecture, which I also love). I shoot only RAW as it gives me way more latitude if I want to adjust the exposure after the fact to change or increase a look (i.e. I want to make things darker and moodier, or I want to blow things out a little). My post-processing requirements are usually the following (in order of frequency): Exposure, white point, saturation, sharpening, levels, blemish fixing. On very rare occasion I'll need to do something beyond that. My pre-Aperture workflow looked a lot like this: Copy files from CF card. Due to my camera putting them in different folders based on the sequence, I had to write an automator script to pull out just the image files from all the folders and put them in a new folder on my desktop. This works, but takes a little while, and is something I had to write myself. Create a folder for my project "Sarah-DarkWear hoodie". Create the following folders inside that: "raws", "all-jpeg", "best-psd", "best-jpeg". Move all the RAWs from my automator action's results folder into the raws folder. Open up Adobe CS2 Bridge. View the files. Try to pick the best ones. I can't emphasize enough how laborious and time consuming this task is. Out of 200 shots, about 20 are really good, and about 5 are worth using (in a portfolio or ad or whatever). Bridge has no way to compare two pictures other than switching back and forth between them. You also can't see the pictures at 100% so figuring out sharpness or focus is pretty impossible unless you open them up in Photoshop. Which requires a multi-dialog process and a conversion time. Once I get my 20 good ones, batch convert them all to PSDs using an action I wrote. This takes a while. The PSDs go into the "best-psds" folder. They each take up about 40-70 MB of space vs. 3-6 MB for each RAW file. Make the levels, saturation, sharpness adjustments as needed with each file. Using another action I wrote, batch convert the best PSDs to full rez jpegs with my copyright notice on them. As this action involves opening a 70 MB file, creating a new layer for my copyright, setting it up, converting to srgb, converting to 8bit, saving as jpeg, this takes a while. Several seconds each file on my dual 2.5 with 2.5 GB ram. Using another action I wrote, batch covert all the RAWs to small rez jpegs with my copyright notice on them. These are for the model if it's a tfcd shoot, or for my records, or whatever. This takes a good long while. Now my 1 GB of raws are about 2.3 GB of raws, jpegs, psds. Open up iView Media pro and update it's index so that all my new files are in it. Done. With Aperture, I put my card in the reader. Aperture pops up and asks if I'd like to import these images. I pick a destination, specify the metadata and keywords for this shoot, and it loads them all in. I turn on auto-stack. I make a few manual stacking adjustments. I start picking the best shoots. Aperture has excellent compare modes, including 2-up, 3-up, more-up, full rez zoom, a loupe tool for instantly checking focus at full resolution, a 0-5 star rating system, a quick-select key for picking an image as five star, a quick-reject key for an image I know is junk. Within in a stack I can promote, demote, and pick the stack "pick" very quickly and easily. I can do this with just the keyboard. I can easily compare any pictures next to each other. I can go full screen with drops off all the unneeded junk and keeps the various window and toolbar colors for interfering with my vision on my color calibrated display. Picking t
Most Apple consumers are those in the photography, video, and graphic artists fields. They REQUIRE function over form because they are paid to use these products. Its their livelyhood. What good is an application that looks good if it doesn't do as advertised or lacks features necessary to copmlete the job?
Apple messed up by trying to create a professional package that utilizes oversimplification to make it easy to use. Pro users are not the type of people that are impressed by a dumbing down of their profession. Aperture is iPhoto with RAW image support trying to mask itself as a pro-level tool.
Look, Adobe prefers function over form, if you have never used Photoshop good luck even trying to draw a square in the application and do simple things. Photoshop isn't designed for computer dummies, its designed as a professional tool for people that earn a living manipulating images and graphics. If Adobe turned Photoshop into MS Paint, there would be a professional boycott and outrage of their product.
True, graphic and design professionals want an easy to use computer, but NOT dumbed down applications. Apple appeals to them because they don't have to worry about how to setup and use their computer, they just install the tools they need and worry about getting the job done. If Apple insists on dumbing down their pro apps, they will lose their bread and butter market, those professionals that buy the expensive G5's who are largely the only reason why Apple exists today.
Mostly, Apple never really succeeds with first releases of their applications, hopefully they will realize that if professionals want to use Aperature as a pro-tool, in the next version they will focus on rock solid RAW support along with more robust and feature rich tools rather then superfluous fancy eye candy.
For now, Aperature is an expensive solution for those prosumers that dabble in photography as a passtime and don't want to learn how to use complicated solutions like Photoshop. But then, these people really don't need to delve into a photo and fix even the most minute details, so I fail to see what market Apple was targetting here.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
With regards to "capacity", you should note that Aperture won't even install on your 1.3 GHz Powerbook. Aperture CAN support huge RAW libraries, but the hardware requirements of Aperture are so high that I wonder if the increased capacity is simply due to the kickass hardware you have to have simply to use the program.
I haven't heard of anyone comparing Aperture's performance with huge libraries vs. iPhoto's performance with those same libraries on Aperture-able hardware. Frankly, I'm curious; I avoid iPhoto in part because of its performance limitations.
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.
I don't understand what does "working directly on RAW files" mean.
RAW files are raw sensor data. To make any sense out of it you need to at least demosaic first (as well as assign gamma, color temp, etc.). Until you demosaic there is no image you can reasonably work with in an editing program.
Photoshop does this explicitly: first you convert your RAW file to something (either an internal Photoshop format, or a TIFF, or something else) and then you work on the converted image. You can tweak quite a few parameters in the conversion process. This is non-destructive in the sense that your original RAW file is still there and you can re-convert (with the same or other conversion parameters) at any time you want.
Aperture, it seems, does the same thing only non-explicitly -- it converts the RAW file into its own internal format and lets you edit the image. This does *not* mean working directly with RAW images -- you just hid away from the user the conversion step. And I doubt very much that if I, say, make some Curves contrast adjustments Aperture will re-mosaic the image and re-create the Bayer pattern RAW file with my contrast adjustments.
So I am inclined to treat "working directly with RAW images" as nothing but Apple marketspeak with a dose of Steve Jobs' reality distortion field thrown in.
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
I was hoping that people here on Slashdot with anything to say about Aperture might have read some of the articles and conjecture released about it before holding forth here...or maybe even TFA.
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.)
Aperture is not an image-editing program. It is a workflow and organization tool with a few editing features, but it is not and is not marketed as a replacement for Photoshop. Aperture is not remotely meant to supplant Photoshop (or Picasa, for that matter) for professional photographers, but as anyone who shoots hundreds or even thousands of photographs a day professionally will tell you, Aperture does fill a pretty big hole in the market.
There isn't currently software that does what Aperture does - the light table layout, stacking, the rich data tagging and database structure.
Whether it does this well or not is the point of the Ars review, and clearly Apple has a lot of work to do on their version 1.0 product.
If your primary questions about Aperture are whether or not it supports layers, "does it do this Photoshop feature" etc, then you may not understand the point of the product. That's partially Apple's fault and partially the fact that most people don't understand how professional photographers using digital tools actually work.
From my experience as a professional photographer and from working in the digital imaging and printing industry, the outsider's view is that professional photographers do a bunch of shooting, some healing brush magic, playing with sliders, and then hit print. This ignores the massive amounts of data, the client's need for proofing, the organization and requirements to differentiate two vitually identical needles in a haystack of exposures.
Aperture was created in part to address the shortcomings of products which only address the 1990s world of digital photography. Now that digital cameras and imaging tools have grown beyond curiosities and exploded into the mainstream of professionals and amateurs alike, those professionals need better tools to organize and present the data. They'll still use Photoshop to edit their images, because that's not what Aperture is for.
To paraphrase what James Agee said of Walt Disney's "Victory through Air Power," I hope that Dave Girard knows what he is talking about, for I suspect that an awful lot of people who read this article are going to think that he does.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Apeture is not meant to be a replacement for Photoshop, but rather as a professional solution to image cataloging, sorting, and archiving.
Many of the professional photographers I know that have been trying Apeture over the past few days, have been extremely pleased with the results and bought Apeture with the intention of using it along WITH Photoshop, not instead of it.
Your critique sounds like a generalized complaint against any Apple Pro application that someone who has never used them, would make.
Below is a link to an interview with Apple Aperture Product Manager Joe Schorr, which I read over a month ago, and it answers most of your questions (and most of the other Slashdot readers questions):
CreativePro.com
In Apple's defense, one has to say that good photographers usually don't need to do big adjustments to their images--the images come out nearly perfectly from the camera. Browsing and management are more important.
However, even taking that into account, it sounds like they still got some pretty basic things wrong. Pity, because the world really does need an alternative to Photoshop.
Pages is a good piece of software and you should be banned from Slashdot.
Hey, just telling you what you wanted to hear.
That brings up another issue, though, which is that the system reqs for the program are obviously skewed so that Powerbook users can run it. Under their Minimum System Requirements:
When I read that I automatically translate it to, "whichever of these three product lines cost the most." 'Cause that's how they know you're a pro, see.
I just installed it today so I don't know a lot about it yet but I'll go over what I've seen so far.
Before Aperture, I was using iPhoto to organize my photos. It was ok but slow with large files and really not meant for a large library. While I haven't imported my whole iPhoto library over yet, it seems a lot faster loading up photos and such. When I insert my card, a preview comes up showing me a thumbnail of the pictures on my card.... before I import them. I thought that was cool and useful because I can now select what I want right off the card. It was quick but I also only had a handful of pictures on the card.
I've been shooting in fine JPEG mode lately because of the faster workflow so I can't really comment on the quality of the RAW files. However the editing adjustments you can make are limited and you will still probably need a program such as photoshop.
My favorite feature so far is the loop. I know it's just a zoom but it's quick (just hit `) and it's pretty smooth moving it around.
So far I'm kindof impressed but I don't really think it's $500 impressive especially because you still need something like photoshop in addition to it.
The bad:
The UI is confusing and takes some getting used to because it doesn't conform to apple's GUI standards. (just like Final Cut Pro)
You can edit levels, whitebalance and exposure but the only one I like even a little is the whitebalance. All the others, i'd prefer to just use photoshop.
It's pricetag.... $500?!?!? for this?!?!?
File Vault looks promising but I would have really liked to see would be a way to backup the main photo to cd/dvd/tape and keep a thumbnail locally and have it keep track of which cd/dvd/tape it was on so you didn't need massive ammounts of hard drive space which many of us don't have. Sure, I'd love to have a multi-terrabyte disk array but I can't afford that. Of course with the high price tag of the software, I don't think i'm their main target which is a shame because I think this would be perfect for the prosumer market.
So basically I'd say don't buy it unless the price drops dramatically.
For those who are wondering "How is this different from iPhoto, Photoshop, Picassa, etc.?" check out these 5 videos from Apple.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Photoshop does this explicitly: first you convert your RAW file to something (either an internal Photoshop format, or a TIFF, or something else) and then you work on the converted image. You can tweak quite a few parameters in the conversion process. This is non-destructive in the sense that your original RAW file is still there and you can re-convert (with the same or other conversion parameters) at any time you want.
From TFA, it sounds like the conversion from RAW happens every time you make an edit, with all previous edits being applied to the file. The converted file degrades slightly with each edit; this just makes it so all edits are applied directly to the info from the RAW file instead of to the existing converted file.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
The results do look much worse then PS, but could that because the import does less processing of the image? Simply put, how can you compare the two? Do you want the import to process the picture? How much?
This comment is guaranteed*
*not guaranteed
Why would the reviewer hope this is "Apple's software equivalent of the G4 Cube"? Why not hope it gets *better*?
That said, it's quite different from the Cube. The Cube was overpriced to begin with ($200 *more* than a comparably-specced, and expandable, G4 tower) and had no hope for success other than the price to be dropped. Software, on the other hand, can be improved and expanded in many directions. If Aperture is as bad as he says (and I'm sure for many it isn't) it can be improved. The Cube, on the other hand, had nothing to offer except "Ooh! Pretty! Small!" and unless Apple would have pushed it in the home-media-hub direction, there's not much that could have been done with a product like that.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I'm pretty sure that this is exactly what Aperture is doing.
I don't think so. That's technically difficult and mind-bogglingly stupid.
Have any sources to back up your opinion?
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
It has to do with the amount of light entering your eye. With a white background there is more light entering your eye, so your iris is more closed. This allows your lens to do a better job if focusing the light on the retina (as in photography, smaller apertures give sharper images and more depth of field).
If this is just an organization and editing program, then how is this any different than iPhoto?
Try storing 50,000 RAW images in iPhoto, and you'll understand.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I bought Keynote 1,0, despite not doing a huge number of presentations. For some presentations, it is MUCH better than PowerPoint, but for others, I use Powerpoint. It was $100, which isn't a major expenditure for my small company ( 10 employees). I then bought iWork to get the updated Keynote. Against, at $80, not a huge amount if it saves me 2-3 hours over the course of a year, and is a worthwhile tool.
In addition, I got to play with Pages, and while it isn't currently "there yet" it has some neat features. I played with it to see if it was viable, because I'm looking for an affordable solution for people that don't NEED Office, but it would be nice to have something better than TextEdit. So for a few bucks, I determined that it is one release from being usable, and I can use that to plan my roadmap. Instead of waiting on Open Office, or playing with Abiword, I decided that for most of my people, we'll limp along with TextEdit for now (limited Office installations) and adopted iWork. Those of us that need Excel/Word will have Office + iWork, but iWork 2.0 will likely be part of our standard office setup.
However, by releasing Keynote 1.0, I was able to buy it and decide if this was the direction I wanted to take. Then when the "better version" comes out in a year, I can decide if I am ready to buy 10 copies or not... same-thing with essentially bundling Pages 1.0 with Keynote 2.0 as a preview.
It is no secret that the 1.0 versions are a bit rough, but sometimes it is worth evaluating if switching software takes you a year to decide on. In the end, we get to preview where the App is going, and Apple gets us to cover the development costs. For me, it's often a win/win. For others, it isn't, so they shouldn't buy the 1.0 version.
A viable review should be able to determine 1) if the App in its current state is worthwhile, and 2) if it is moving in that direction, is it worth keeping an eye on. Software purchases aren't about "moral justice" (are they entitled to my money), but rather, does the current value of the software + my ability to see where it is going warrant the expenditure of my money. For some, the decision is yes, for others no, and for a third group it is, go play with it at the Apple store and then buy 2.0... all of which is enhanced by Apple choosing to release early, release often.
Alex
What does it matter if the results look like that.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
You're right, despite the crap being doled out as responses. Perhaps if you'd asked why someone would grab a (puportedly) high end image program to deal with images shot with a (very) amatuer level camera. If you're so concered that you need the maximum image quality for archival purposes that you need a specialzed RAW software package, you darned well better start where the image is captured. Top quality glass and a big, low-noise, high pixel count CCD is a good place to start.
There will always be better algorithms and processing as time goes by - the RAW data will never get more accurate than that which you capture initially.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
So, instead of comparing it to Photoshop, how does it stack up against 'real world' photo organisation software such as Extensis Portfolio, etc.?
(insert "if your time is worth nothing" disclaimer here.)
He reviewed it as an image editor, not as a workflow tool.
Aperture is what you need if you're shooting a thousand images a day. It's not a replacement for Photoshop, and its image editing capbilities are all targeted to easy batch application.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Due to some strange quantum effects you have managed to phrase a post exactly like this one. http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=165792&c id=13829841 You may want to report to the Physics Department, because they surely would like to examine this phenomena. Jokes a side, don't steal or atleast credit the original author.
John Carmack fan, browsing at +5 since 1999.
And all "editing" on RAW files that doesn't end up saving out another file format is non-destructive - using Adobe Camera Raw or almost any other RAW conversion program. The conversion parameters simply get stored in the metadata, are used to update the preview, and then wait for actual use if/when you want to convert the file or use it in a smart object.
That means that today, using smart objects in Photoshop CS2, you can do quite extensive composition, blending, even healing (to new layers) without ever having to convert the original data that came from the camera.
> cat ~/.signature | grep -v bullshit
>
What about Portfolio? Extensis Portfolio has been a pretty big player in the professional world of asset management for a while now. It looks to me that it will do everything Aperature will do, without the v1.0 bug or the price. Not to mention for Coporate enviroments, Portfolio has the Server product which adds a workgroup/workflow piece that Aperature doesn't even address.
I would say that Aperature is the Portfolio for home "pro-sumers" (hate that term), but that wouldn't make any sense given the cost difference!
DAMN YOU OCTODOG! DAMN YOU TO HELL!
Photoshop is the darkroom.
Aperature is the light table.
If you don't understand this, you're not the target market.
Thank you for your perfect, masterful, everybody-else-might-as-well-shut-the-fuck-up-now summary of what Aperture is for and why comparisons to various photo editing programs are worse than meaningless.
If only yours was the first response, it would have saved us all from endless conversations bickering about layer editing, plug-ins, and other irrelevant bullshit.
This thread is over. "mocsh" for t3h win!
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
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.)
No, yes, yes.
But, you're missing the point. Adobe Camera RAW and Picassa don't help you pick the 60 images you want to send your editor out of the 500 that you shot that day. Aperture is a workflow tool. It breaks new ground, and does things that other apps don't do!
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The source is Apple's explanation of what it is doing.
What it allows Apple to do is go back to the RAW data and not rely solely on the rasterized data. For example, RAW rasterization relies on someone/something deciding what white balance to use. Once you've chosen a white balance, you lose some information in the rasterization process. With Aperture, if you change the white balance, the program can go back to the RAW data and recalculate the rasterization with the new white balance, and then re-apply whatever filters you've applied to the image.
Its really a slick idea, the only problem seems to be that their algorithms suck. And that's no small problem
Parent post is nothing but a copy and paste of this comment . Please mod appropriately.
I find it to be a valuable app in terms of form and basic function with my Canon A95.
... get a clue next time before pretending to understand, will you?
You're using a $500 software product with a $300 camera? There's something wrong here.
So I'm really trying to figure out what your point is here.
ok, spelling it out for all the slow-thinkers who hit the GP with WTF? posts: if your photos are so precious that you need a RAW workflow tool to process them then you either have a pretty darn good source for those RAW pictures (read: a pro-level camera) or you have no idea what you're doing. Besides, A95 only shoots JPEG so WTF is the use for a RAW workflow tool in that? you're already at 8-bit lossy to begin with and Aperture won't make your image any better endowed.
so
I'm guessing part of the reason was that the article didn't yet exist the first time that comment was posted. This poster appears to have simply plagiarized in order to gain karma and promote his website, and may not actually care about the subject or any replies to the post.
So basically I'd say don't buy it unless the price drops dramatically.
Or, unlike the person above, you actually understand what the software is for... *sigh*
Ha wow. Good catch.
The source is Apple's explanation of what it is doing.
What it allows Apple to do is go back to the RAW data and not rely solely on the rasterized data. For example, RAW rasterization relies on someone/something deciding what white balance to use. Once you've chosen a white balance, you lose some information in the rasterization process. With Aperture, if you change the white balance, the program can go back to the RAW data and recalculate the rasterization with the new white balance, and then re-apply whatever filters you've applied to the image.
What aengblom claimed was that Aperture actually re-mosaics and writes to disk a recreated Bayern pattern file. I am still quite sure that doesn't happen.
As to recalculating from RAW, I can do this now in Photoshop, no? Just convert with a new white balance and then apply the saved edit history. If that's all what Aperture does I stand by my statement that "working directly with RAW files" is nothing more than marketspeak.
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
I thought it seemed strangely familiar, but this guy actually found the original.
When you're charging 500 bucks you don't get to blame being version 1.0 for anything. If you want to release a crappy early version, do it as a free beta.
Anyways, the point being is that you're not going to get the amount of images from a $300 camera that this software was used for.
So I am inclined to treat "working directly with RAW images" as nothing but Apple marketspeak with a dose of Steve Jobs' reality distortion field thrown in.
You are mistaken.
Aperture doesn't convert the RAW data as photoshop does when it imports a RAW image. The backing store for what you see on the display IS the RAW data. To get to the display, it goes through a CoreImage pipeline, which is a series of one or more filters that run on the GPU. The result of that mapping is not saved, it is computed by the GPU on the fly.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
...while commenting on the cost of the camera vs. the cost of the tool there is a problem with what Aperture is being 'marketed as' vs. what you can do with it with the camera mentioned.
Aperture is a 'workflow' program. Designed to help in getting a RAW image out of a camera, do basic processing, and hand it off to an image editor.
The problem with the camera mentioned in my limited knowledge of the product is that it produces no RAW/NEF image, only a JPG.
What would you workflow on it? Nothing that another raster program like Photoshop Elements or something else can do, because the RAW processing is handled by insert-chip-with-fancy-marketspeak-name-here instead of an external tool like Aperture/iView Media Pro/Bibble/Capture One/Adobe Camera RAW.
So using your analogy that would be like building a clean room and then using it to install your favorite OS of choice.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
right - agreed. but i'm talking about 8-10megapixel formats that have fallen way below 1000 bucks and where people who print at home are generally going no larger than 4x6 inches, in which case they are seeing a near pro level resolution - even if it's blown up a bit farther...not poster quality by any stretch of the imagination, but very solid for a home pro-am user...
enjoy life, and Gmail.pro
Is this reviewer biased? The entire tone of the article is to n^Hhail Apple. An honest review does pull out the plus^Wminus side of things (even if the pluses^Wminuses are small, few, and far between) along with the minuses^Wpluses.
That's what I always feel the urge to say in other Apple threads, but decide not to.
Boy, are you ever uninformed.
What Apple has done is to figure out how to implement the conversion from RAW to 8-bit linear as a series of Cg operations that can be executed by a graphics card that supports pixel shading. That means that the conversion from RAW to 8-bit linear happens in hardware, in real time. There is no explicit software conversion from RAW to 8-bin linear, and no converted data is written to disk except for caching and when the operator explicitly exports an image.
What Aperture does is allow the operator to apply operations to a real-time on-screen rendering of a RAW image file on disk. Each operation is added to the Cg pipeline and executed by the graphics card. As far as the CPU is concerned, there is the RAW image data on disk, and then there's the set of CoreImage units that are applied to it.
So in other words, yeah, you really are operating on the RAW image data, and Apple really is the first one to figure out how to make it happen. In fact, their product is so different, you don't even understand WHAT it does, much less how it does it.
(Pause to look up names)
How about these:
Fujifilm StudioMaster Pro
MediaboardONE
RawShooter Essentials
Kodak ProShots
SmartPath
I'm sure many of these don't do everything that Aperture does, but pro photographers haven't been doing everything manually on an actual light table for quite some time. Is this the first application that consolidates this particular set of functions, whereas before, an interdependent suite of applications was required? Anyway, Apple didn't invent digital workflow management, and they didn't perfect it (I gather from the comments so far).
Language students: Don't try to learn English here. This ain't it.
Picasa is iPhoto for Windows.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
I'm a reasonably heavy DSLR user who shoots on a Nikon D2H. I have shot for fashion and dance shows where I leave with over 1500 RAW photos (I attach my camera directly to a Powerbook which has a 250GB firewire drive attached). I've tried using iPhoto for managing my photos, as most of the professional workflow programs with databases are thousands of dollars to say hello. iPhoto essentially falls over and dies with those kind of numbers. iPhoto also doesn't actually handle RAW images, it converts them over to JPEG using a rather mediocre converter.
I used to use Photoshop CS for "developing" my raw images, but most of its capabilities are focused around working with the photo once you've imported it as a PSD, and not around manipulating the photo itself. Along with many other photographers I've discovered CaptureOne is incredibly useful for non destructive processing of RAW images, as well as doing a wonderful job on noise reduction, color noise, banding, white balance, exposure, and levels.
I was hoping Aperture could replace CaptureOne and iPhoto for me, while allowing me to contine to use Photoshop when I wanted to edit a photo rather than just process a RAW image. As far as I can tell, this is dead on what Apple intended Aperture for.
To start off, I imported 3 iPhoto libraries with a total of 45,000 images into Aperture. To my surprise, it also imported all album and roll data with it (I was expecting to end up with a flat photo space) as well as importing all NEFs and the jpegs iPhoto had created automatically as different versions of the same photo. It's clear that the upgrade path from iPhoto to Aperture was well thought out.
Aperture seems to be very good at handling a large image database. I now have 45,000 photos in a single Aperture library, and am not using more than 450MB of ram opening a window with all images in it (scrolling of course).
Aperture also claimed to be able to handle many of the non destructive RAW workflow duties I'd handled before with Capture One. That's a bit more of a mixed bag. The white balancing loupe doesn't work nearly as well as Capture One's and occasionally creates psychadelic white balances in the process. The sharpening and noise reduction algorithms are nowhere near as good as Capture One's, and color noise reduction seems to be almost non existant on high exposure shots. Before someone points out that this is what Photoshop or some other tool is for, Aperture only exports PSDs or TIFFs to other applications so it has to handle all RAW processing itself.
If Apple can figure out how to handle RAW images better, Aperature could really become an incredible product. As it is, the workflow management, versioning, and just plain dealing with tons of images seem to be really nice.
Would you do it for some scoobie crack?
Photographers need a way ingest photos, edit the take, organize and archive, and finally to edit the individual photo for its intended publishing vehicle (art print, magazine, book, Web, etc).
Separate tools, that work well, already exist for those needs. Photo Mechanic for ingesting and editing the take (and yes, it does a "light table/contact page" view). Extensis for organizing and archiving. Photoshop for image editing.
Apple emphasizes both the "take" editing and the lossless image editing--which to most photographers are two separate steps that don't need to be combined in one program.
I want tools to do the jobs I need to do. Is it a take sorter/editer? Is it a organizer/archiver? Is it an image editer? From the marketing it looks to me like it tries to do a bit of all three--which typically leads to an incomplete or poor job at all three. No thanks.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Aperture doesn't convert the RAW data as photoshop does when it imports a RAW image. The backing store for what you see on the display IS the RAW data. To get to the display, it goes through a CoreImage pipeline, which is a series of one or more filters that run on the GPU. The result of that mapping is not saved, it is computed by the GPU on the fly.
:-)
What do you mean, "doesn't convert"? RAW data is a pre-gamma pre-white-balance collection of 12-bit greyscale values in a Bayer pattern. You seem to think conversion happens only when something gets written to disk. So Aperture convers in memory using the graphic card's cycles, that doesn't mean that conversion does not happen at all
What you are saying is that Aperture converts RAW files on-the-fly. Yes, and? Run Photoshop ACR and watch the image on the screen change as you twiddle the parameters...
I understand what the difference between Aperture and Photoshop is in that if mid-way through my edits I decide that I really would like a different white balance, in Aperture I would just apply it, and in Photoshop I would need to re-convert the file in ACR, a separate step. But that's a difference in an extra step in the workflow, not the difference between working with RAW files and working with something else.
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
And they are a lot less expensive--Photo Mechanic is lightning fast and it's $150.
AND unlike Aperture, it does not bother with half-assed editing tools...what light box have you ever used that had filters and sharpening on it?
If it's a light table, it's an over-priced and over-featured light table.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
It looks to me that it will do everything Aperature will do...
You're not looking hard enough. Portfolio doesn't have anything like Aperture's nondestructive image processing. You'd need Photoshop for that. Aperture is more like a cross between Portfolio and Photoshop.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
Piece of shit wrapped in shiny plastic.
While Apple makes some nice products, very often form takes precedence over the function.
Now Apple zealots mod me down.
You can buy a full PC for less money than it takes to purchase Aperture. The point is that a $500 Mac program should do more than a free PC program; it would look very bad for the Mac platform if it didn't.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
If it's not an image editor, why the editing features--filters, sharpen, etc.
The fact is, it's the bastard son of a image management and an image manipulation tool. I'd rather have two separate tools that do each job well.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
There have only been a couple stories on Aperture and already I'm sick of the blind parroting of this line. It is not correct.
If Aperture is not for editing, why does it include 13 image manipulation functions? Why does Apple say (on the Aperture homepage):
There are already several programs for proofing "hundreds of frames in a relatively short period of time." My favorite is Photo Mechanic, others like iView, others like Bibble, others like Extensis, etc.
Please learn about the software before you admonish others. Apple intends this one program to take the place of ingesting, organizing, archiving, and image manipulating tools already on the market. It is not just a proofer, so don't lecture people that it is.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
No, you claimed that's what Aperture does not do, and its pretty clear that aengbloom did not quite understand exactly what you were implying, since his response was that Aperture effectively re-imports the RAW file every time, which is different from writing out a new RAW file to disk.
No, Aperture does not recreate a RAW file with your changes.
And no, Aperture does not do anything that can't be done in Photoshop, using many more steps. In Photoshop you can always start over from the RAW file. But isn't Aperture's process a lot easier?
Here's the Aperture process for changing white balance:
1) Bring up the pallet.
2) Move the slider.
The image is recalculated on the fly from the original RAW file, including all other filters and adjustments that have been made.
Photoshop can get the same result, but its more steps. Also in Photoshop there would be a difference between adjustments that get made in Camera Raw and adjustment that get made in Photoshop itself. Its much less easy to go back and forth between those two types of adjustments in Photoshop.
So working directly with RAW files is far from "nothing more than marketspeak".
Aperture is meant to replace both Lighttable _and_ darkroom. After all, that's where all the workflow enhancements come from: that you only have to use 1 application instead of two.
or is there a prevalent willingness on the part of the market to accept bad software and write it off as a "1.0" or other dot-zero hardship?
What happened to concepts like human factors, real testing to ensure that the software really works, and oh, I don't know, pride in workmanship?
This is a fair review. He gives them a lot of credit for some things but not on its core functions. What he is saying is this piece of software is not up to Apple's own HIGH standards.
The problem is that the Ars article, the Slashdot submission, and at least 9 out of 10 of the Slashdot comments don't understand what the software is designed to do. Aperture may well suck, but I won't take that on the word of someone who has completely misunderstood the target user. If you don't understand what a light table is then you have no business commenting on the usefulness of this app.
how about this... there is no color prefs in the app. no colorspace! and its a "pro" app. count 1 for photoshop
Digital photography is fun and all but the quality just does not yet match medium format.
I know a few Canon 1Ds Mark II users who would take issue with that statement.
Granted, that's a camera with a MSRP of $8,000.
Damn, why do I never have mod points when I want them? Great point.
use camerabit's photo mechanic to transfer to your computer and select photos. http://www.camerabits.com/
Use iMatch (nothing to do with apple) to store and create database for your photos http://www.photools.com/im0002.php You'd be amazed by the list of features and how powerful the program is while using very little resources.
Finally, use Photoshop for any sort of editing.
I do photojournalism ($$$K in digital equipment) and fine art photography (traditional dark room) for a living. I supposed that's "professional" level.
Aperture can kiss my ass.
For me the deal breaker is the lack of CYMK support. I can't understand how they can charge $500 for a photo editing program without it. This seems less like a full-fledged photo editor than a cut down version that you'd get bundled free with a graphics tablet or digital camera.
See my comment #14188966. I'm sick of this same bullshit being spewed over and over and I'm not going to retype the entire thing, but consider it said to you, too.
i am a soviet space shuttle
I use Pages as a simple word processor for writing my college essays on. With the inspector thing on it gives me all the formating options I need and presents them faster then Word. Whats wrong with Pages again?
Two tears in a bucket. Motherfuck it.
Well I guess I stand corrected. The article stated that a Radeon 9600 was required, and I didn't realize the newer PBs had such a card available (the "Mobility" version apparently). I see the 12"ers like me are still left in the cold though. Aperture's certainly geared towards the high-end G5s and I like to see it demo'd on a Powerbook. Something tells me it wouldn't be pretty, especially considering the performance concerns that the article raised on their G5 test machine.
Apparently it's not vi/emacs...
My only real problem with it is that it ended up costing extra, you only get a demo version with your new powerbook... (unless they've changed that...)
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
Read his post again. They're claiming that Apeture is the first of its kind - which, if there is another application that does the same thing, is simply false.
I am trolling
First: If the guy has trouble reading Apple's 9point dialoges and menus, he should be reviewing photo apps.
Second: It appears he only used one camera, A Canon cybershot S6
That is all wrong; first you have to have many cameras from many manufacturers to test RAW importing, and preferably from higher end , or at least mid level cameras, like Nikon D50-D70 and Canon EOS20D
Why: evey camera and app have their own way of reading RAW files. People who use Canons use Photoshop, because it is better than the Canon app, while Nikon people would not dream of using anything but Nikon's program because Photoshop and Nikom RAW files dont mix.
Third: Aperture is not Photoshop, dammit...
Aperture isn't meant to replace Photoshop. It's designed to complement it. It's an organizer, RAW tweaker, and workflow app. Photoshop works alongside it for the more heavy-duty stuff. Aperture even includes an "external editor" setting, which I set to use Photoshop CS2. It's an apples-and-oranges kind of situation.
i am a soviet space shuttle
WTF is the use for a RAW workflow tool in that? you're already at 8-bit lossy to begin with and Aperture won't make your image any better endowed.
Simple: Aperture isn't a RAW workflow tool.
It's a digital imaging workflow tool. The fact that it can deal with RAW images directly, with versioning and all that jazz, is merely but one of the benefits of the tool as a whole.
More important to a lot of us in photography-land is the fact that there's now something much more resembling a light table than what the industry has offered up to this point. Aperture is an excellent tool for editing: you can rapidly move through an entire shoot or multiple shoots, arrange photos into spreads and stacks, and separate the wheat from the chaff. This is a comparatively ugly process in other products like iView, Portfolio, and iPhoto.
Many pros, particularly sports shooters, work in JPEG because they can cram many more pictures into the same space and the "quality" issue is largely moot to their print target. Sure, they're not taking full advantage of every feature Aperture has to offer, but they're getting their money's worth out of the features that matter to them.
If an amateur with a consumer-level camera takes enough pictures that they feel Aperture will help them stay organized, it's their $500 to spend. It may well be the best money they spend all year. Would it really make a difference in the suitability of Aperture if he purchased a Canon 20D and left it in green square (full automatic) mode, just to say he had a "better camera"?
When was the last time that MS (or Adobe, for that matter) EVER had a 1.0 release as amazing as Aperature???
Also, it's quite amusing to read the negative opinions by those who have obviously never even used Aperature. No that's what I call credibility.
Karma Schmarma
Just came back from Apple's Aperture seminar, and was able to play with it for about an hour afterwards. Yes, It has a patching tool (not cloning, more like a healing brush, the one that doesn't clone à la Photoshop CS2). Yes, it works with layers in a sense that it can import Photoshop files (.psd).
Being a what you'd call an "imaging professional" I'll pass on this release, though. Overall my impressions somewhat coincide with Arstechica's.
I dunno but it sounds like apple's imagemagic to me.
... Standards and Practices !
For Linux users, qiv will cruise yer photo dir, I just dump the SD-Card to a dir, and it lets you very quickly see what's worth keeping. It dumps rejects into a sub dir and is damn fast.
PenGun
Do What Now ???
a) does Aperture support layers?
a) does Photoshop support stacks?
I'll never have a fan get noisy or stuck. THERE ARE NO FANS.
I suppose the speakers were a mistake, and a flash-memory "disk" would have been nice in place of a damn rotating platter, but seriously... the Cube kicks ass. It even had a digital display connector back in an era when you just didn't get that on a PC.
I'm not about to "upgrade" to something that sounds like a Boeing 747 on a takeoff run. Moving parts fail.
I had never really understood who the target market for Aperture was, or what they would be doing with it that would make it worth $500. Now I do.
You know Steve didn't give me lips!
---
Your Pal,
Aperture
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
I totally agree that Aperture is not an image editing program and is meant as a workflow program. That said, Photoshop doesn't exactly target the pro photography market directly. Photoshop has become more of a graphic design tool with digital darkroom functions built-in, but the interface is setup much more for graphic designers. Photographers, unless they're doing collage's or massive manipulations (which basically falls in the category of graphic design, for practical concern), have little to no need for layers, filters (except for sharpenning), lighting effects, blending options, or about 3/4 of the tools. The options that are most useful to photographers are adjustment layers (with layer mask), burn/dodge tools, healing tool, and unsharp masking.
I love Adobe's products, especially photoshop. I, myself, am a graphic designer, so it works perfectly for my needs. But I work along with a lot of photographers, and do a lot of digital darkroom work as well. The other day, I had to go through a plethora of RAW files and convert them to jpeg for web use. In Photoshop, it's a nightmare, with having to record actions. It's slow, it's inconvenient, and inflexable. That said, it WOULD be very nice, for once, to be able to do some basic editting on RAW photos, directly, without changing the image data. I've been screaming for a program to introduce a means of spot-toning as a non-destructive function—something like a "healing adjustment layer"—and the same for sharpenning and burning/doging.
Since most photographers don't need 3/4 of the functions in Photoshop, and Aperture is already a convenient workflow/RAW converter, I do hope they consider adding in the few editting functions that photographers do regularly use. Yes, Aperture is not meant as an editing tool, but if you could have you're editing software right inside your workflow/RAW converter, that would be extremely convenient. Let's face it, switching back and forth between two programs is tedious and irritating. And professional photographers, like the ones I work with, in doing commercial work, don't really have the time to be constantly juggling files around multipul applications all the time. There is an obvious need for a program that does both editing and organization, which is why Adobe has been putting so much energy, as of late, into their image browser. So Aperture is an organization program with some limited editing functions (well, RAW file options), and Photoshop is an image editor with a limited organization system. Whoever can bridge the gap eligently, first, will take the market, I garentee. It's going to be very dificult for Adobe, who is having to play, primarily, to the graphic design market, and who is already so entrenched in their interface design, to be able to bridge the gap cleanly. That said, Apple has a long way to go before their software replaces photoshop's editing functionality for photography, and currently it seems that it goes against their philosophy.
I am not one to like "all-in-one" applications, which combine unrelated functions. But in this case, the two functions will always be used together: if you're going to edit photography, you're going to need to convert/organize it, and many times you're going to be doing both at the same time. So this is one instance where combining multipul functions really makes a lot of sense.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
...but I thought he said he was using a D2H? ;)
*rimshot*
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
What you are saying is that Aperture converts RAW files on-the-fly.
NO.
In Aperture, you have the RAW data in RAM, and display it through a CoreImage pipeline. In Photoshop, you pass the RAW data through a rasterization step, that loses the original data, and you then edit the result of that rasterization.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I saw those quicktime preview videos on the day they released Aperture...
I totally agree with the reviewer that this piece of software is "form over function"
You seem to have got some wierd answers there - I've been using Aperture pretty heavily for the past three days. Here are some more informative answers:
a) does Aperture support layers?
I think people get this backwards, They say there are no layers, and while sort of true the effect you have is that you ONLY have layers. Specifically Adjustment layers, to use Photoshop terminology.
Any adjustments made in Aperture are always applied in a chain to the master image. So if you crop and rotate, then decide you want to change anything else you did like color or patching you can change those as you wish. In Photoshop after the RAW conversion takes place you are done with RAW color adjustments, no so in Aperture.
b) does Aperture have a clone tool/healing brush/patch tool? These are the tools I use most often for actual retouching.
Yes and it's better than you think - again because these adjustments do not end in a finsihed raster but are applied to a source image every time, after you spot-correct a sky with dust spots you can apply that same patch job to any number of ther pictures.
The Spot tool is like healing brush, patch is like clone - nots that you can only operate on a spot at a time though, there is no drag-clone as Photoshp has. But that's why the Photoshop export is there.
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.)
Aperture ONLY works in 16-bit land. Load an 8-bit image, it's treated as 16-bit. Export a PSD or TIFF to an external editor - it's sent out as a 16-bit version. You can down-convert and save back but Aperture always thinks in 16-bit.
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.)
Aperture is an amazing app and the review really gave it short shirft. Nor was it as technical as an Ars Technica review should be. Where are details on the directory structure that makes up an Aperture library?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you don't know how to spell a word, how about looking it up?
I'm losing my mind. And don't even start me on lose/loose.
Pages IS a good piece of software if you are using it for certain things. It is light and fast and has a nice set of outlining tools, great for when all you need is to outline your professor's lecture fast. I also like the fact that I DO NOT have to keep telling the software not to correct every little word that I write in its editor, not everybody wants 1st to have a superscript for example. For me Pages is the best application for writing out my memos during pre-writing and the first draft and even into the second draft. I use Word as my editing software, perfect for catching basic grammar and word choice mistakes. This might sound a little like overkill but it works great especially when you are writing legal memos that will be picked apart, and when you have to write in a certain way that is not supported by Word's Auto Correct. So before you state an opinion like anyone who likes Pages should be banned from Slashdot remember Apple's former motto and Think different. Some people might be able to find a particular purpose in a piece of software that makes it a crucial part of their workflow. Aperture might serve that purpose for professional digital photographers.
FIrst of all, I've been using the program for just about four days now - but pretty heavily during that time. I like the app quite a lot, and some people do not seem to be understanding some aspects of the app well.
This review in particular was I thought not very good from an Ars Technica standpoint, whom I hold to a higher standard as they are supposed to provide very detailed technical interviews. I'll state my issues as we go along.
First of all, on importing. The Importing dialogue is a little hard to use - but then I wouldn't know because you can just drag images or folders (or folder trees) in from the Finder. Why anyone would not do this is a mystery to me as it's so easy - I think it's unfair to ding the import dialogue box without mentioning the far more common method of import.
Now on to the package structure. This seems to get people really up in arms, because they think it's just like iPhoto yes noting could be further from the truth and I think Ars should be ashamed of themselves for having such a skimpy section here.
You don't like it, fine. But do not say it's "Icky" - lay out the whole package structure in gory detail including all the sub parts, then tell me what you do not like.
Personally I like it a LOT. The problem Apple has is they have to support versions. You can't really do this nicely laid out over an existing directory, so they have chosen to take your directory structure as it stands and make it a bit deeper with a directory for every file. This holds the RAW master, and XML files describing versions along with extra metadata associated with the master (like keywords).
All of the files you imported are wrapped up in a "Project", which is all of these image directories (along with directories for things like books and light tables) wrapped up in a package. The set of all packages along with a central DB is wrapped in turn in another package, and that package is your API library.
The review describes this confusingly as a "single file" with a photo captioned "It's not a single file, it's a bundle" and doesn't seem to like it. But why do they not take time to mention the nice partitioning of files - I can for instance move any project out of aperture, and move other projects from other Aperture libraries into a different Aperture library and everything Just Works. More on import where it just notes it's found a new project and asks to rebuild the central database; if you remove a package Aperture thinks it's still there until you remove the shell or rebuild the database.
On rebuilding database. The great thing about Aperture is that it does NOT use one centralized file. It has a centralized database for speed, but this is based on those individual XML files held with each RAW. Thus if the central database has issues, it can just be rebuilt from all the separate distributed files. Rather than 'Icky" I find this kind of "elegant", and worth a little bother of having your files live inside a somewhat managed directory structure.
On EXIF stripping this is a BUG and not a design feature. What happens is that currently if you edit your file in an external editor, the EXIF data is dropped FROM THAT VERSION - never from the master or other versions created from the master. If you never edit externally you will not loose EXIF.
Now that's a pretty major bug to be sure but it does not affect all images, and is not something you should ding a program for if it's not a design choice.
On Levels I don't think the author understands the full power of the tool as you can drag both top an bottom arrows to achieve different effects and I think similar results to the curve tool.
Now lets talk about what was NOT talked about. How about Versions? You wouldn't even know what they were reading that review. Simply put you can create any number of versions from a master and have different adjustments applied to each one. You can have one cropped differently than another. And thanks to Lift & Stamp you can make s
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
First, Apple must be rich, there's a whole bunch of slashdotters that have *bought* and reviewed Aperture already!!... YAY!
/. have trouble with it, you can allways Provide Aperture Feedback to Apple (under the apple menu) so the guys at Cupertino can improve your app!
Second, yes, it's a 1.0 Apple App. This means it's a great idea, but not so well done, it WILL improve. It's much like Keynote, a "cute 1.0 buggy app" that replaced powerpoint and that now, on it's 2.0 version, really kicks ass.
Aperture has the incredible potential for any pro or addicted amateur to sort out amongst hundreds or thousands of photos, to compare them, tag them and use very basic tools to improve minor details. And it works with RAW files (though in a buggy way, it seems).
The pro's are known to shoot thousands of photos per day and I can say (not being a pro though) that sorting out 10 great photos out of 500 "snapshots" was, until Aperture, a real pain.
So, the strength of Aperture is not on it's RAW conversion capabilities nor on it's editing tools (allways remember that Aperture is NOT a Photoshop relacement). Aperture strength is in making it easy to sort out and compare thousands of images... fast and easy on a single app. And this is why I say Apple has "done it again", it's expensive, but if you're a pro that must "be done with it" in 2 hours, you'll not what to spend thouse 2 hours sorting, you'll what to spend 5 minutes with Aperture and deliver your photos faster than anyone else.
Give Aperture some time, it's already one heck of an 1.0 app, but it's still as buggy as any new app. Believe me that in a few months Aperture will be THE app for sorting and tagging and that pro photographers will almost forget about photoshop (most of them don't even need to edit their photos if they're good enough, like photojournalists).
Oh, and if all you paying Aperture custumers here in
Now, I've only tried to do this once in both keynote and powerpoint, late at night, for a presentation that was taking place the next morning, and it was after smoking a shitload of herb, so it is quite possible that I was just completely clueless and that I could have easily put my videos and graphics into a presentation. (Really, though, if there is an easy way to do this, somebody clue me in. I realize I could just RTFM but that isn't nearly as fun as talking out my ass on slashdot...)
No. 1.0 versions are to test the marketplace and receive feedback so developers know where to go with subsequent versions.
Reviewer Dave Girard gives it a once over and walks away with a sour taste in his mouth.
In other news: Snape Kills Dumbledore, Wash Killed by Giant Spike, Next Uwe Boll Move Sucks.
Lowmag.net
Ok, first off if you buy any new product at its release and its a 1.0 and you expect it to be flawless, your an idiot. Second, the "review" sounds more like a political company bashing in the style it was written. Stick to the facts and keep out the "flare and biased" writing style. Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, I don't care who you are writing about, keep it clinical if you wish for me to think of it as a review. Write like this and its FUD with window dressing.
Third, time has proven that when ANY new version of ANY new software from ANY company comes out the first ones get a copy to try the latest and greatest and almost always run into problems. (Think GM as a finalaized Beta for public use). If you are smart you would wait. See if any bugs or glitches are reported then make the decision to either buy and use with the know bugs or to wait for "bug fixes" to be released. Here is something to think about ADOBE CS 2 has had some glitches when it first released. They already have released bug fixes and they are in version 9 of Photoshop, ver 12 of illustrator, ver 4 of Indesign, etc....
LOL if you are one of the ones that buys anything "brand new" and expect it to be flawless please post what company you work for or own so I can know who I will NOT do business with.
IDIOTS
Aperature [sic] was NOT intended to replace Photoshop. Aperature's job is to streamline the digital workflow.
Aperture isn't supposed to replace Photoshop in general, but it is supposed to replace it for the specific set of tasks that Apple implemented in Aperture.
Profesionals are looking for workflow automation it would be worth much more than $500 if post shoot time could be cust by even 20%
Quite right. On a busy day, I may take a few thousand photographs in a day and photography isn't even my main job; sorting through those is a major chore. A tool like Aperture would be great for dealing with that, and I was willing to put down the cash for a G5 and Aperture. But if a workflow tool doesn't have top notch RAW conversions and adjustments, and if it isn't lightning fast for annotations, it just isn't worth it, and Aperture falls short in all those areas. That's why I'm sticking with homegrown tools for workflow and adjustment for now.
In Aperture, you have the RAW data in RAM, and display it through a CoreImage pipeline.
.crw and .cr2. More, demosaicing is a non-trivial conversion -- you need to guess and difference between good guessing and bad guessing can be quite noticeable in the final image.
Care to show a source for this statement?
Each major manufacturer (Canon, Nikon, etc.) has their own proprietary RAW format, some more than one -- e.g. Canon has
Also, how is data in RAM updated? Are you saying that when I make, e.g. a contrast correction to the image, Aperture throws away the white balance information, converts back to linear gamma, re-mosaics the image back to the Bayer pattern, pulls missing 4 bits out of its ass, and updates the 12-bit greyscale values in RAM..?
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
I don't have a problem with a review containing negative data, as long as that data is accurate and there is enough data in the entirety to present an accurate view of the product.
But that does not mean the product does not hold some good and useful features, or that the reviewer is indeed misguided in places. I have mailed him a number of items that are problems and in fact and one item (claim that Aperture could not edit multiple items simulaneously) was already removed from the review as a direct result, with more possibly to come.
Point out where anything I said was a positive spin on anything for Apple, like for instance pointing out that EXIF data is always dropped on external edits (a truly breathtakingly horrible bug to have shipping). I am just saying that Ars should have done a far more in-depth review on the features and probably should not be outright innacurate about problems that are really bugs and not design issues. If you have no problem with reviews that contain outright inaccurcies so long as they put Apple in a bad light, how in any way are superiour to Apple supporters?
You are right that Apple PR gets paid to promote the product and I do not. That is why I strive for accuracy so that people truly understand what they are getting, because I am not interested in marketing I am interested in people understanding what they will get. Saying the product does not export EXIF is breathtakingly wrong. Not saying anything about Versions which make the product worth using for a lot of people even despite the bugs is also wrong. The whole point of a review is to enable people to understand what they would be buying if they aquire the product - looked at only in that light the review is HORRIBLE, not because it's negative to Apple but because in places it is simply wrong, it omits descriptions of major features, does not really talk about behavious and in short does NOT describe the experience most users will have with the product.
My interest in promoting the product is in helping fellow Photographers, because Aperture even now can be a huge time-saver. My top pet peeve is inefficiency and it just galls be to think that some people that may have benefited from use of Aperture might be scared away because of an inaccurate review.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Okay, I assumed people would RTFA I linked to, but that was assuming too much. So, here is the interview with the relevant information:
As extensive as it is, the Apple site skips over several important points about the application and the market. For the real dirt, I interviewed the product manager, Joe Schorr. Keep on reading to find out how Aperture compares to Photoshop, whether you can really run the app on a PowerBook, why it costs almost $500, and more.
Terri Stone: Will Aperture replace Photoshop?
Joe Schorr: Depending on your workflow, there may be a need to use tools that go beyond Aperture. One of the things pros do is launch Photoshop, so we integrate with Photoshop.
Aperture was developed with photographers looking over our shoulders, literally. They picked apart our workflow, and we analyzed what they really do and touch.
We found out overwhelmingly that they all use Photoshop, but only a fraction of it. It became easy for us to develop our list of adjustments. We focused on an essential set. With that essential list, we covered well over 90 percent of what photographers do in Photoshop.
We think Photoshop is an incomparable tool for other things, such as compositing or making someone's nose thinner. Once you use Aperture to open an image in Photoshop and change it, the Photoshop version of the image lives in the stack. We manage all the versions you create with Photoshop.
Our job is getting you from 1,200 pictures to 60. Take wedding photographers. That whittling-down process is where they spend a lot of time. They told us that the single biggest bottleneck is photo editing. Not image editing, but selecting which images to focus on. So that's where we put the horsepower in Aperture -- in photo editing.
TS: Did Canon and Nikon help Apple develop your Raw parsers? Or did Apple have to figure out how to parse Canon and Nikon Raw images on its own?
JS: The Raw conversion code is OS-based. Of course, we talk to different camera vendors, but this is all code that we've written. The OS resources going into making Raw a first-class citizen are enormous. As the OS evolves, our Raw support automatically evolves, too. When you get software updates, any given update can contain aw updates. So one morning Aperture suddenly supports new formats.
People should understand that Raw is not a universal format. It varies from camera to camera. Our Web site has an up-to-date list of which Raw formats we support. We've specially optimized and fine-tuned the Raw decoder for the cameras used most by pros: the top Nikons and the Canons, for instance.
Now that we've announced Aperture, it's opened the way for us to have discussions with camera vendors and ask to be told of future development. There's intellectual property associated with way they do things. It's difficult to make it a lot of easier for the user.
TS: So Apple's Raw parsers are built into the OS, and that's where Aperture gets the information to generate previews for Raw images?
JS: Let's say you have a Canon 20D. If you took a Raw file from it today and double-clicked, the Mac opens the file in Preview. You can see the Raw file, but you can't do anything to it. There are no tools in Preview to take advantage of what you can do with that Raw file.
The benefit of Raw is that you can reprocess. In Aperture, we've given you the decoder to open the file and the tools to take advantage of it.
Let me also draw the distinction between Aperture and iPhoto. You can see a Raw image in iPhoto, but let's say you make an adjustment to the file, like changing contrast. In iPhoto, you now have an 8-bit JPEG. You've said goodbye to Raw.
So the iPhoto choices are that you work in the world of JPEG, or you go back to Raw and lose all the adjustments you've done in iPhoto. It's a binary decision.
Aperture never makes that conversion from Raw to JPEG. You crop it, you throw away pixels, and the original Raw image is
Is there any sign that Apple used some of the guts of Shake which has always supported 16 bit and shares some other features with Aperture?
Given Aperture hasn't been reviewed terribly highly, it seems version one's role in life is to serve as an expensive tech demo.
The Canon 1Ds doesn't approach medium format film in absolute terms. It's a nice camera, but it's out of its league when you start comparing it to medium format, film or digital.
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It might approach medium format if a photographer wasn't using it to it's full ability, and doing a better job maximizing the digital's capabilities, but this is really an operator-training issue and not an equipment one.
If you want to read a good professional assessment of film versus digital equivalent megapixels, read this:
http://clarkvision.com/imagedetail/film.vs.digita
A 35mm film frame, shot on Fuji Velvia, is considered to be equivalent to somewhere between 10 and 16 MP. So the Canon is quite possibly the first digital camera that actually approaches the limit of what 35mm film can do at its best -- but even then I take issue, since each pixel in the digital frame records one color, and then the software interpolates the missing values for the other two colors on each pixel (unless you have a camera with the Foveon sensor).
However for medium format film still has a clear advantage. Even Ektachrome -- which has something of a reputation for being grainy at times -- is going to give you somewhere in the neighborhood of 18MP; Velvia is way above that (granted the error does start to get large). To get a digital that can compete with medium-format film, you're well out of the 1Ds range and looking more at things like the 22MP Mamiya ZD. (Feel free to tell me how much that one costs -- the press release doesn't even mention a price.)
Digital definitely has gotten APS film beat, and it's closing in on what quality advantage 35mm still holds. But Medium format is still superior, and 4x5 and the larger medium-format pano formats have no competition at all. If you want really high quality digital at the upper end of the spectrum, you're better to shoot film and then scan it, either on a flatbed or a drum scanner, to get your file.
I'm not some film-photo Luddite -- I use a digital myself because I think the loss in quality is worth the gain in convenience. However I think it's important to objectively assess the difference in quality, and realize that for the price, film still has its advantages.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Apple Software is "Not For Geeks", dudes! It's for mums and dads, for people who just want to survive the digital revolution. Aperture is not for geeks, Keynote is not for geeks, nor is any other of Apple's software. Aperture is just the follower of iPhoto. For that, Aperture surely "looks professional", it has "professional appeal" - it does not have to convey the hard performance required of professional setups, such as open-source plug-in options, such as restricting graphical interface overhead to a minimum, or such as having the option of switching the whole image collection "online" with one flick - such software would also have to be programmed with a different mindset.
Real geeks go about their choice of cameras, CCD chips, camera RAW formats, and software, in an entirely different way. They will process images one way, and publish them another way, and keep a low footprint on cost and unnecessary hype. They will pursue the Open Source. Real geeks are just happy with an Unsharp Mask, Layers, Histograms, Batch Rename, and Curves. They'll make sure they use their resources optimally. And about all these factors, you never know with "Aperture".
So please, review Aperture as the beautiful toy it is!
Also, how is data in RAM updated?
It isn't, at least not in the way that you're thinking of. What's updated, is the parameters of the CoreImage units that the RAW data is going through on its way to the display.
Are you saying that when I make, e.g. a contrast correction to the image, Aperture throws away the white balance information, converts back to linear gamma, re-mosaics the image back to the Bayer pattern, pulls missing 4 bits out of its ass, and updates the 12-bit greyscale values in RAM..?
No, you're thinking in terms of how it might have been done before CoreImage existed. Read and learn.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
So I am inclined to treat "working directly with RAW images" as nothing but Apple marketspeak with a dose of Steve Jobs' reality distortion field thrown in.
By this reasoning a text editor doesn't allow you to edit text because it shows you glyphs instead of the raw binary values in the file.
Any image editor does something like this:
Image Data --> Image Meta Data --> Magic --> Image on Screen
In Photoshop the "Image Data" part is an array of pixels, each represented by 8-bit or 16-bit integer RGB (or other color space). Between you and those pixels, at minimum, is a bunch of color space meta data and a bunch of other magic to make the pixels on your computer's screen appear to be resemble the color you first thought of. In Aperture the "Image Data" part is the RAW image file. The meta data includes color space stuff, yada yada.
And your example:
And I doubt very much that if I, say, make some Curves contrast adjustments Aperture will re-mosaic the image and re-create the Bayer pattern RAW file with my contrast adjustments.
This is exactly what Aperture is doing. Aperture's architecture doesn't require it to keep an intermediate representation of the data for performance purposes. This is precisely its advantage over Photoshop (at every level).
Not marketing hype -- just a perfectly reasonable description of what's going on.
Put your hand up if you own a DSLR and/or take a lot of RAW photos. Keep your hand up if you understand that Aperture is about workflow. Still got your hand up? Good. Now keep it up if you understand that Aperture is not supposed to be an image editor competitor for Photoshop. OK excellent! Now we have a whole bunch of people with their hands in the air who actually understand what this software is for.
The rest of you........piss off and find something to do where you can add some value!