Apple 'Aperture'

[tradescant]

Wondering what folks think of this new piece of phot-editing software from Apple?

http://www.apple.com/uk/aperture/

[castledude]

Concept looks good but the implementation is a little questionable.

Requirements:

Dual 2GHz Power Mac G5 or faster
2GB of RAM
One of the following graphics cards:
ATI Radeon X800 XT Mac Edition
ATI Radeon 9800 XT or 9800 Pro
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL or 6800 GT DDL
NVIDIA GeForce 6600 LE or 6600
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT
NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500
...
Price $499

Kinda leaves out the PowerBook market. And organization (which it seems to be it's main forte) is something you want to do on the road and be able to present to a customer (IMHO).

The editing does not seem to be that powerful. For that price I would expect something at least as powerful as Elements and RAW processing as powerful as Bibble.

A for innovation in the organizer, C for implementation. Maybe Version 2.0 will be better.

[tradescant]

Mustsay I hadn't got as far as looking at the requirments. I agree - not too many of use ( I imagine) have that kind of hardware set-up.

[lmyles]

But aren't those only the recommended requirements, not the minimum ones.

Minimum System Requirements
One of the following Macintosh computers:
Power Mac G5 with a 1.8 gigahertz (GHz) or faster PowerPC G5 processor
17- or 20-inch iMac G5 with a 1.8 GHz or faster PowerPC G5 processor
15- or 17-inch PowerBook G4 with a 1.25 GHz or faster PowerPC G4 processor

Hope this helps.


<a href="http://www.myles-smythe.com">visit my website</a>

[joseju]

I run off a Powerbook G3, so I will probably be upgrading anyway. I just moved so I did not see that they released this program until Friday. When I saw it, I just got so excited.

A few years ago Apple bought a company called Caffeine Soft. They made some great application. One was called Pixel Enhance. It was a one click enhancement tool which was integrated into iPhoto. Another was called Curator. This was basically a image browser with the ability to export html pages. This was an extremely fast browser (back in those days which are ancient in the technology world). I think they might have integrated this into iPhoto since the release after the buy out of Caffeine Soft was a lot faster. The third application they made was Tiffany. This was their high end photo editing software (you also had to pay if you wanted this one). From reading the description and from other users, you could do some things that would be hard to do in Photoshop. I long doubted that Apple bought this company just for the one click enhancement one could do with Pixel Enhance. Looks like this is what they did with the technology that they got when they bought out the company. Question is what will they do next?

Claims are that this is not meant to be competition for Photoshop. Currently this program can't do a fraction of what Photoshop can, but is that the direction they are going? They already put on some competition for Adobe with Final Cut Pro and Motion in the Pro Video world. Are they now looking at taking the Pro Photo world? Well, if they do try and take on Adobe Photoshop, they got a long way to go.

Ok, just my thoughts on the program, kick ass. I so want a copy for my self, but look at the price. Before this I was looking at buying a copy of Capture One LE (about $50). But for $500 I can buy the Pro Version on Capture One. (Capture One probably being their main competition and the fact that apple has express versions of some of their Pro Apps leads me to believe they will release an express version of Aperture as well). I sure hope someone will come out with a good detailed comparison of the two applications. I love to shoot RAW but I have the post. Both of these application are sure to make working in RAW a lot easier.

Anyway, I look forward to being able to get a copy of my own, if not this version, then a future one.[/list]

[emily]

Has anyone tried aperture yet?

-Emily

[creationsbylaura]

I don't think it's been released yet, has it? I thought it was scheduled for more toward the end of November to be released. (I could be wrong! ...hasn't been the first time.)

[cincyimages]

Yikes, I guess I won't be getting it for my 1.5 GHZ Mac Mini.

[vanderstouw]

i have tried it, and it isn't out yet...

it is a great concept (if you have enough horses under the hood)....

it has a few problems (highlighted in a very negative review about it)

a lot of the features are very small (meaning hard to click on easily)
their concept of speedy usage are a little overrated... but it isn't that slow to be fair.

the big problem, which they claim they corrected in the 1.01 version of it. is that the processing algorythm is not very good. i haven't used the 1.01 version of it, just the 1.0 version... and i can definitely see the problems...

phase one's C1 Pro (or C1 Light) is way better in that regard...

and i like phase one's general management better...

aperture has a lot of great features though... it is a shame you can't merge the two together....

you have to remember, it is designed and priced for professionals. they didn't make it for the consumer market... not everyone can blow 10k on a quad system with 4gig of ram and 2 30' flat panel displays to really make aperture rock the way it should.

i did like a lot of things about it though... with color handling, you could change (as in photoshop, but remember this is for raw files) shadow, midtone and highlight color all seperately, and a lot better than in photoshop IMHO.

it is very flexible, too... it will end up being a fabulous program in the long run... it has great meta functions... it erases the need for using programs like extensis' portfolio...

but the bad algorythm is enough to steer me away personally, even if it was the best handling program in the world, if the algorythm sucks, i wouldn't get it.

[jdepould]

check out adobe lighroom beta, requirements aren't as high. it's still a little buggy, but it isn't too bad, and it's free right now.

[jeffreytomasi]

Just got my new MacBook Pro with Aperture pre-installed. Have only been playing with it for a couple of days, and I haven't used any similar applications (apart from iPhoto) for comparison, but my first impressions are good.

It's quite fast-- notably faster than Adobe Camera RAW or Canon DPP for RAW conversion, though Aperture is Universal Binary, and the others are PPC Binaries running through Rosetta at this point. Also very fast browsing though my library and searching.

RAW conversion looks pretty nice. Apparently the 1.0 version was horrible (and I can verify it since they still left the 1.0 algorithm available-- it's awful), but Apple seems to have sorted most of this out. You can still see a bit of mosaicing if you pixel hunt, especially if you have made some harsh adjustments. I'll want to go to Canon DPP or ACR for shots I really want to take care with, but Aperture should be pretty tolerable in most cases. I only wish the noise reduction worked better-- the chroma blur reduction is OK, but it leaves a fair bit of luminance noise and you'd still have to go into Noise Ninja to clean up higher ISO shots.

The Adjustments available are no where near what you have in Photoshop, but that's not really the point of the app (though I suspect Apple will be adding to the battery over time anyway-- would be nice to have some distortion controls-- barrel, pincushion, perspective, etc., and the current spot/patch tool is a bit clunky and could be improved.) I don't nomally do a ton of touchup work, so Aperture will be fine for most shots, where I just need to adjust levels, color balance, sharpen, etc. Aperture will save a lot of hard disk (and time!) by not having to convert everything to PSD or TIFF, and the versioning concept with non-destructive edits is great too-- all the adjustments are light-weight on-the-fly overlays directly on top of the RAW file, so you no longer need to hesitate before trying out a bunch of different treatments, and then you can stack them up and sort for easy organisation.

The Loupe struck me as a bit gimmicky at first, but is very cool, and actually quite useful when you want to check out some detail or general sharpness without opening the whole image (it works directly on thumbnails!)

Integration with Photoshop, when you do need to go there, is "OK"... You can choose Photoshop as your external editor, and then Aperture will convert to PSD or TIFF and open directly in Photoshop (this is a bit slow, but may be due to the Photoshop PPC Binary/Rosetta issue), and then when you save it goes directly into your Aperture Library as a new version. Doesn't seem like you can really mix adjustments from the two apps, but not sure how that would work anyway... If you really want to go Photoshop all the way, then you can export the RAW file, convert and edit in Photoshop, and then save and re-import the PSD/TIFF into Aperture. But at that point it's getting inefficient and you're defeating much of the point of Aperture. Still I could see doing that in special circumstances.

Still haven't quite gotten my head around the whole Library concept. It wigs me out a bit to have a single massive tens-of-GB file (really a package) sitting there which is relatively uninspectable. But I guess if you want the efficient versioning scheme and searching there's no other way of doing it. I suspect once I mentally give up control of file management, and just "trust" the app to do everything, it'll be fine.

Haven't really played with the Light Table or the other layout stuff. Light Table seems potentially useful, but I probably won't be making many books and what not. Won't really use the web stuff either, since I'm on PBase!

There are a few GUI glitches-- like the browser sometimes loses your place and scrolls back to the top when your shuffling within a stack and such. Have also occasionally seen parts of my pictures turn black, and I have to resize the pane slightly or similar to get it back. Not a big deal, but a little annoying... I expect these to continue to get ironed out, too.

All in all seems like a decent workflow and asset management tool-- a lot better than iPhoto, to be sure. Not a fault of Aperture, per se, but I'll be happier in general when Adobe gets its act together and releases a Photoshop Universal Binary-- though apparently that won't happen until they do CS3 next year or some such.

One other tricky point that's not on Aperture, per se. The display on my MBP is very vibrant (and this is even the supposedly not-as-vibrant matte version.) This is great since it really makes photos "pop", but can make it tricky deciding how much contrast and saturation you want in an image. I have already seen how bland things can look on the PC monitors I use at work compared with what I saw at home on the MBP. And I just know that if I try to make prints, they won't come out so nice either. So it seems like it will be tricky to find settings which look good on "normal" monitors or in prints that don't just blow out all the colours on the MBP. If only everything were as vivid as the MBP! :)

Aperture's not cheap, but cheaper than it used to be (they dropped the price by $200 after version 1.0 was so crap), and if you have a Mac, you're probably used to paying the Apple "premium"...

A few recent shots processed only through Aperture: