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Apple's Aperture Reviewed
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Dec 05, 2005 01:06 PM
from the coming-into-focus-now dept.
from the coming-into-focus-now dept.
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.'"
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Apple Dumps Most of Aperture Dev. Team 305 comments
SuperMog2002 writes "An article over at Think Secret is reporting that Apple has fired much of the Aperture development team. The Shake and Motion team was assigned to work on Aperture's image processing pipeline for version 1.1. Apple has also dropped the price of Aperture from $499 to $299, and is offering those who purchased the program at $499 a $200 Apple store coupon." From the article: "Perhaps the greatest hope for Aperture's future is that the application's problems are said to be so extensive that any version 2.0 would require major portions of code to be entirely rewritten. With that in mind, the bell may not yet be tolling for Aperture; an entirely new engineering team could salvage the software and bring it up to Apple's usual standards."
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I enjoy the app (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Something's wrong here (Score:4, Insightful)
You're using a $500 software product with a $300 camera? There's something wrong here.
Damien
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Re:Something's wrong here (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Something's wrong here (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
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Re:Something's wrong here (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Something's wrong here (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not the original poster, but I don't see anything in his/her message to indicate that the software was pirated. On what do you base this allegation? On the fact that the camera being used cost less than the software? What kind of "evidence" is that? (other than totally unrelated, as other people have already pointed out).
I don't get the "in thing" among both ordinary posters and corporations in assuming that everyone
The problem is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyways, the point being is that you're not going to get the amount of images from a $300 camera that this
Actually... (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Something's wrong here (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Ignore the WTF posts (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I own it and have used it (Score:5, Informative)
Aperture Light Anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)
To quote somebody more intelligent than me... (Score:5, Insightful)
Aperature is the light table.
If you don't understand this, you're not the target market.
Re:To quote somebody more intelligent than me... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Aperture is really pretty amazing (Score:5, Informative)
Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
He's completely missed the point. (Score:5, Insightful)
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
My Aperture experience (Score:5, Informative)
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 [phaseone.com] 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.
Some issues with review - export more from Ars (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:Version 1 (Score:2)
Re:Version 1 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Version 1 (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:My Thoughts (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:My Thoughts (Score:5, Informative)
<apple> Math is hard.
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Re:My Thoughts (Score:4, Informative)
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 [mac.com]). 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 [macnn.com], 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.
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Re:My Thoughts (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't understand what does "working directly on RAW files" mean.
RAW files are
Re:My Thoughts (Score:3, Informative)
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 th
Re:My Thoughts (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:My Thoughts (Score:3, Interesting)
What about Portfolio [extensis.com]? 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 t
Quantum Phenomenon (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:My Thoughts (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:My Thoughts (Score:3, Insightful)
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 iPh
Re:Finding flaws with a magnifying glass (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Finding flaws with a magnifying glass (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Finding flaws with a magnifying glass (Score:3, Insightful)
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)?
Valuable to experiment with (Score:4, Insightful)
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
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Re:Finding flaws with a magnifying glass (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Finding flaws with a magnifying glass (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Finding flaws with a magnifying glass (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sure someone will be along soon with a buglist for it....
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Re:Finding flaws with a magnifying glass (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Apple deserves the same treatment (Score:3, Insightful)
Isn't that a little bit like saying Photoshop is useless for you because it can't run spreadsheets?
Re:Biased? and Negative (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Biased? and Negative (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Biased? and Negative (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Biased? and Negative (Score:5, Informative)
Also, there's a fairly complete list of both pros and cons at the end.
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Re:Biased? and Negative (Score:4, Insightful)
Now here we have an article that's critical of Apple. That doesn't happen often. Let's see what the dittoheads do.
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Re:price:500. 400 dollars? what do they want 300 f (Score:2)
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?
Re:in Apple's defense (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Expect a trade off? (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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Re:I am not a Photo Pro, but I play one on TV.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Given than Aperature is a workflow product more than an image manipulation product, a photo retoucher and art director should have an excellent idea of what a commercial photographer needs Aperature to do. Both deal with large numbers of images, are concerned about image quality, relevance, building libraries, searching by metadata, color data, or thumbnai