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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.
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 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
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.
So I'm really trying to figure out what your point is here. If I have two tools I use in my work, and one costs twice what the other does, are you really saying that makes no sense? A few weeks ago, I used like $100 worth of precision tools to take apart an iBook, but I put the parts I got out in a $2 mini-muffin tin. Was there something wrong there?
The closest I can get to a useful argument here is (I think) your opinion that a $300 camera can't generate pictures "good enough" for a $500 editing program, but that isn't a slam-dunk these days, especially if the software saves you a lot of time no matter how much you camera costs *and* your time is worth something. Another possibility is that you're pointing out that most casual users probably don't use most of the features from the $500 piece of software, and would be better off using something cheaper and spending the other money on something else. Now, that would be my opinion most of the time, but I don't see that it has much to do with how fancy your camera is...
Babar
You don't edit in Aperature.
It's for proofing hundreds of frames in a relatively short period of time. Of course most of us (the reviewer included), don't routinely shoot 500 or 1000 frames in a day, and then need to get the best 10 to an editor two hours later.
Ars and Slashdot's reviews of Aperture are about as insightful as a Blind Spot review of Solaris 10.
No you are thinking backwards. He is using a $500 software product to manage $10,000 worth of images. The fact that those images where shot with an inexpensive camera does not mater.
I use a Canon A95 also. But for example a couple weeks ago I spent two days of my time and $2,000 worth of SCUBA equipment and waterproof housing and pay for a charter boat to take me to the back side of an island of the California coast. I shoot for three hours and get about 200 images. What did those images cost me? The $300 I paid for the camera is meaningless in that calculation.
Let's say I go in vacation to Hawaii and take the famly or I take the camera with me to my daughter's Halloween party and so on and so on. OK I've actually done all that and have 2500 images all shot wuith the $300 A95. and now I'm thinking of how I'm going to scan a few thousand slides and negatives I shoot with 35mm and 120 size film. What are these images worth? The cost of the equipment they were shot with? The cost of the time effort and money spent shooting them? IIf so then they are wortth FAR more then the cost of a $500 software aplication AND the Quad Core Power Mac.
If you are a profesional it's easy to know tha value of your images: It's whatever a client is willing to pay you for them. The cost of your time and your equipment does not even come into the calaculation. If you images are paying the rent and you areliving a midle class lifestyle then a few years worth of image are worth a LOT more then a Quad Core Powwer Mac and a RAID disk system and the $500 cost of Aperature would be in the noise.
All that said I'm seriouly looking to buy a DSLR soon. My A95 is just to darn slow and the image quality is not up to 35mm film standards and I think the new Nikon D200 will do better. OK it's a $2K camera but it will shoot tens of thosands of images in it's lifetime - A nickle a shot maybe.
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.
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."
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?