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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.'"
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.
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.
10.0 Was never meant to be a consumer release, as such. It was mostly out there so that developers (without the Apple developers deal) could develop their stuff and early adopters could give it a run for its money. That's why it wasn't installed by default on computers that came with it. In many ways, it was a beta, and many people understood this. IIRC, it was even compiled with debugging turned on, and that's why it was so slow compared to 10.1, 10.2! To most people, it was essentially a technology preview, and I think that was Apple's plan from the very beginning. They needed to get something out there, to get the ball rolling. I think it worked!
Hopefully Arperture will get better, and maybe they'll do the same.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
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?
Also, there's a fairly complete list of both pros and cons at the end.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
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.
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.
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.
Photoshop is the darkroom.
Aperature is the light table.
If you don't understand this, you're not the target market.
GNU ls?
I'm sure someone will be along soon with a buglist for it....
>> 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
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)?
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.
This is not "blind" conversion of course, I am converting all pictures with 4 or more presets and then I choose the best. It is fast and easy method. But this GIMP plugin is very promising, I am just checking this now :)
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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."
I thought OS X Beta was the beta.
I drank what? -- Socrates
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.
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.
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?
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?
Another Apple innovation "stolen" by Microsoft?
The Farewell Tour II
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 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