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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.'"
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.
While all 1.0 software falls short of users' and developers' hopes, not every 1.0 release comes with a kajillion-dollar marketing effort. While I agree there seems to be a conceit (as in preconception, not as in snobbery) to the review, I think s/he's responding to the hubris and arrogance of Apple's ad blitz roll-out of a program that, while potentially interesting, isn't ready. More curious: what did they gain by depriving their developers of the time between announce and Macworld? Certainly, they did enough in 2005 to warrant delaying launch until they'd solved at least a few of the issues brought up in the review. Hopefully this will help more users, even the Jobs-ian faithful, see behind the curtain. Though I'm a mac guy myself, I understand and accept that Apple is willing to say anything to sell more boxen.
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
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.
He does several times. For instance, "Once you've set some ratings and keywords, sorting through the items is very elegant and well thought out. If there's one thing Apple knows how to do, it's help you find things easily."
Did people even read the review? Or did they just immediately cry bias because he had some negative things to say about Apple's UI.
Ya know its kinda off topic, but we should expect more from a 1.0 release. Everyone says well its version 1.0 of XXXXXX, expect problems. I disagree with that. To me 1.0 means it should be free of flaws... maybe light on the features but free on flaws.
You are all a bunch of idots.
Did you read the review? He likes a lot of things about this program, but his major gripe is that the RAW display is not up to par with the FREE RAW plugin for photoshop. His point is well made - if this doesn't produce the best image quality - what's the point of the app in its current state?
I can say for a fact that DVD Studio Pro and Final Cut were both crap at their release, and a ton of money was spent to market each. Both applications were even bastardize from other venders, and Apple managed to boob them up. Now, they are top notch and the best values on the market. Apple has a history of mediocre 1.0 releases, and I am sure Aperature is the same. I will bet that over the next few years, this will become a good app., you just have to live through the growing pains.
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
Photoshop is the darkroom.
Aperature is the light table.
If you don't understand this, you're not the target market.
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...
Apple has a history of mediocre 1.0 releases, and I am sure Aperature is the same. I will bet that over the next few years, this will become a good app.
So they're trying to do what by releasing mediocre 1.0 releases? Take your money in advance of giving you a good product?
Do you at least get free upgrades to whatever point the apps start being good (2.x maybe)?
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.
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.
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.
Now here we have an article that's critical of Apple. That doesn't happen often. Let's see what the dittoheads do.
While all 1.0 software falls short of users' and developers' hopes, not every 1.0 release comes with a kajillion-dollar marketing effort.
and neither did Aperture!
It was mentioned at a conference. Once conference. It got some hype on the web, and slightly less press hype in print.
There have been zero TV ads.
Zero radio ads.
Zero print ads.
In other words, apart from a couple of press releases which cost them basically nothing, there has been no marketing for Aperture whatsoever.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
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.
Its like Frontrow, for me its useless as its not a PVR. Yet try and present this argument and you get flamed.
Isn't that a little bit like saying Photoshop is useless for you because it can't run spreadsheets?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Aperature was NOT intended to replace Photoshop. Aperature's job is to streamline the digital workflow. This is a "Big Deal" for people who shoot hundreds of images a day. Just ty it. Download 200+ images every day, day after day. Just previewing those images and ranking them for quality, deciding which to keep and with to toss, doing minor crops and color corections take _hours_ Profesionals are looking for workflow automation it would be worth much more than $500 if post shoot time could be cust by even 20%
Aperature WAS intended in integrate with Photoshop. You can set up Aperature so that Photoshop is the default image editor and I figure that almost _everyone_ does this.
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
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?
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.
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
His point is well made - if this doesn't produce the best image quality - what's the point of the app in its current state?
No, his so-called "point" shows that he doesn't understand what Adobe is doing when it imports a RAW image. What you see in Aperture is the RAW data, only going through the minimum processing to make it displayable. Photoshop is performing a conversion and enhancement step that Aperture doesn't do, because the target customers told Apple that they want to work with RAW images directly.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
You're really not getting it. Aperture isn't "dumbing down" anything. It's a tool for quickly and efficiently moving images through a production process.
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.
Oh, for Christ's sake. It's not an image editor!
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
...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.
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.
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?
Point to a piece of software that has no flaws.
TeX
If you can find a flaw, it's worth $327.68 but there hasn't been one reported since 1994 or 1995.
Free Mac Mini. Yes, I'm
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