Apple Unveils New Pro Products 590
porcupine8 writes "As many had speculated, today Apple unveiled upgrades to their PowerBook and Power Mac lines (although no PowerBook G5). They also introduced a new professional photography application known as Aperture, rounding out their software lineup for creative professionals. Can't wait to find out what they announce next week!"
Powerbook Resolution (Score:5, Insightful)
The time to buy is now for PowerMac G5 (Score:4, Insightful)
Next Week (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm, (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:my take on the new PowerMacs (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm, (Score:5, Insightful)
PhaseOne's Capture One [phaseone.com]
Re:my take on the new PowerMacs (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Aperture info (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm, (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd say, badly (and you probably meant "fare", not "fair"). Cut the price to under $100 and things may change.
God knows, Photoshop needs competition, but this isn't it (at least yet). Aperture is in the Photoshop Elements class for photo editing purposes, but it also seems to have useful database/organisation features.
It may turn out to be a decent tool for "serious amateurs"
photoshop is dead (Score:2, Insightful)
With Aperture, Apple has spent a long time analyzing photographer's workflow, and design the app on top of it. It has just what is needed for pros, a clean workflow that includes:
- easy import of raw images
- easy way to see / search metadata
- non destructive editing
- project management
- easy backup of negatives (raw files)
- differentiation between masters (raw) and versions (treated images)
- easy export and soft color spoofing
- easy backup on masters and collections
I can't wait o get my hands on this one...
p.s.: Aperture is to iPhoto somewhat like Solaris is to windows 95...
Re:my take on the new PowerMacs (Score:4, Insightful)
No self-respecting workstation went without it (same with the graphics cards), and finally, Apple has true workstations available, not just high end desktops priced like workstations.
Re:Aperture info (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Loving the Dual Core Hype (Score:4, Insightful)
Depends, and less likely than you think. A lot more Mac software seems to be multi processor aware than Windows software. H.264 is dog-slow to encode but the Apple H.264 encoder used by the Quicktime encoder is MP-aware, with this, the speed will nearly double.
no thanks, I'll wait... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Needs this ("Teh Snappy" (tm)) (Score:3, Insightful)
2.5 duals came out. You could sense a different that the 2.0s were
reasonably quick but the 2.5s' actually had snap.
And with each new version of OS X, the interface speed increased.
That is until Tiger where you can sense the window resizing/opening
was faster than that of Panther but other things were slower and the
beach ball returned for a lot of people.
I talk to many people with 2.5 duals who say that Panther under 2.5
dual was the fastest Mac OS X machine they experienced.
And if you had a better video card (i.e. ATI X800 versus ATI Radeons
below the 9600 XT) you would experience better performance. And a
faster drive also added "snap".
When 10.43 comes out, I'm hoping some of the speed has been restored.
But yeah, it does seem that to equal the old single user Mac OS
cooperative multitasking interface speed, you would need a nine
gigahertz quad cpu, quad core cpu.
Just a thought.
Re:aperture.... (Score:3, Insightful)
From the looks of it, Aperture is far more thought-out than Elements is. (Which, I guess, could also mean that half of the features are useless for those of us who are not professional photographers - it's a very niche product, and it's almost by definition not a direct Photoshop competitor.)
Automatic backup to a secondary drive, good metadata handling - which goes hand in hand with things like the "Smart Web Gallery" feature to automatically rebuild the pages where new photos come in that fit a special criteria, automatic stacking of batches of images (taken within x minutes of each other). However, I think that the biggest thing here is that Apple gets to use Core Image to do some fun stuff - you can make several versions of the same image by adding effects and doing things like cloning and patching, which all just adds up to an incremental 'recipe' of the changes and a lot of saved hard drive space (which I guess would add up if you were to make a lot of toy alternate RAW images).
Obviously I haven't tried it, and I'm not a professional photographer, but from having watched the tours, there seems to be an awful lot of "extra miles" that Apple have taken in a lot of the features, which I think will be what sets it apart from Elements more than the stereotypical "artists buy Apple" factor.
Re:Details (Score:3, Insightful)
As someone who's quite likely to buy the 17" model, I can say that the increase in resolution was more important to me than the 0.2ghz increase in speed some people had anticipated. And the price decrease was certainly welcome.
Aperture [apple.com] looks fantastic, but I think they'd sell a lot more copies at $299 than $499. Ouch! I think it's comparable in complexity and sophistication to Motion, which also sells for $299, so I'm really disappointed by the price. Also, it lacks layers, although it does support non-destructive editing, so it can't serve as a substitute for Photoshop, although I'm quite sure that I'll prefer it to Photoshop for the things it can do. Since I work for an educational institution, I can and most likely will buy it at the $249 educational price, but as a hobby photographer I couldn't just ify $499, while I was able to justify $299 for Motion just fine.
D
Still overpriced (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Aperture info (Score:3, Insightful)
I think maybe Apple's own iPhoto [apple.com] might be a better comparison. It blows both right out of the water, though.
It doesnt look like it will compete with Photoshop though at this stage. It is more of a basic organization and editing program.
I am not a professional photographer, but I think it's more than competitive with Photoshop for that market already. Dispite the name, Photoshop isn't especially tailored for photographer's workflows. Aperture is, and I can definitely see people who don't need Photoshop's other editing capabilities making the switch. Just as they did with their last new pro product, Motion, they've created something that doesn't quite resemble anything else out there.
It looks pretty slick but has some fairly hefty system requirements.
I find the reason why to be really interesting. Instead of making duplicate copies for your edited photos (as you would with most tools), Aperture just stores the CoreImage filter settings for each version, and re-applies them to the original when you view them. It just saves "the diffs". But instead of having to actively re-render the filters each time you want to make a change, as you would with Photoshop, you can just adjust the filter's settings in realtime (or close enough to realtime). In other words, CoreImage is the shit, and it requires some decent hardware to run at a respectable rate.
Re:Aperture is to Photoshop what FC is to AE (Score:3, Insightful)
While it may not replace Photoshop in terms of some specific features and purpose, the very things you've listed in your excellent analysis are the things that will make this a Photoshop "injurer". Right now, PS serves two crowds: digital artists and digital photographers. Adobe is going to find themselves losing market share if they don't pick up the pace on PS real quick, thanks to Aperture. Since Canon released Digital Photo Pro, I've been using PS less and less, though DPP falls short in many areas. Aperture sounds like the best combination of Picasa, DPP (or Phase One C1), and Photoshop's digital photography features.
If the two programs continue as they are now, there will always be a place for both Aperture and PS, but PS won't be the king of all digital imagery, only digital art. It will lose the photography world to Apple.
Re:Loving the Dual Core Hype (Score:4, Insightful)
mod the parent down! Re:photoshop is dead (Score:3, Insightful)
I can assure you that Photoshop is not equivalent to Aperture. I would instead, say that Adobe Bridge is (which is a part of Adobe Photoshop CS2).
Many of the features present in Aperture are available in Photoshop's bridge (easy import of RAW, non-destructive editing, RAW processing). One of the great benefits of Aperture entering the market is healthy competion.
I will not, with what I have seen, replace photoshop with Aperture. Will I be happy using Aperture? Probably yes. Will I pay for it? US$500 is a lot of money for those extra features, and I will probably not buy it. But then again, I don't think that pro-am photographers are the intended market. We are more worried about buying glass than buying software to do our hobby.
Unless Aperture seriously competes with photoshop, it will end as a fringe application similar to Impress (who only Apple drones buy). There is already talk on the f-spot mailing list about Apereture features, so you might see them in a free software application soon.
Re:Details (Score:3, Insightful)
As of yesterday, Apple offered two versions of the PowerBook series (at least the 15" and 12" or 17" too IIRC). The cheaper versions were at 1.5Ghz while the more expensive version was at 1.67Ghz.
In other words, they simply dropped the cheaper, only-barely slower versions.
Re:No PowerBook G5 (Score:5, Insightful)
i'm looking for a machine to last me for probably two to three years. it's likely i won't switch to the intel platform until the second generation and i bet a lot of other pros are waiting it out as well. ppc is a known quantity and familiarity and predicability are very important when you rely on your computer and third party apps to make a living. so i'll stick on ppc until i KNOW that all the issues are worked out on intel. a quad 2.5 machine is the perfect machine to tide me over until macintel gen 2.
This is not a slap in the face of adobe. (Score:3, Insightful)
This has everything to do with companies like Bibble Labs [bibblelabs.com], Phase One [phaseone.com], iView Multimedia [iview-multimedia.com] who all make 'raw workflow' software.
For those of you who are new, or don't care, or don't use RAW workflow it's about the post processing that most enthusiast, semi-pro, and pros doin once the pictures are taken and before they're edited in Photoshop (if needed).
Photoshop has something included that has been showing up in the last few versions, they call it adobe camera raw [adobe.com] but it is rasterized out of camera RAW and then you edit it like you would any other image.
What Aperture, and the others let you do is 'pre-process' your image to do lossless corrections to things such as white balance, color cast, cropping, etc. If you make any of these types of changes inside photoshop once you import in the RAW file you are doing it with data loss.
This is a step before photoshop, not a slap in the face and replacement.
This is condiments to the burger. The burger is much more filling than just the condiments, but the condiments aren't all that by itself
QuadG5 power user questions... (Score:2, Insightful)
BUT.. this top end Quad G5 configuration has me astonished, especially the +$1650 nVidia Quadro FX 4500. I was thinking of investing in a nice 30in Cinema Display and a QuadG5, for applications like FCP, Maya, Shake, and Motion. But I wonder if it's really worth spending that kind of money on a video card, I mean jeez, that card alone is almost as much as a basic dualcore-2Ghz G5 CPU! Is this card going to really give a performance boost to make it worth that kind of money? It's not like I'm going to do the fancy tricks this card is capable of, like stereographic LCD glasses, dual 30in screens, etc.
The other big question is quad processor support. I recall seeing the "Use X processors" option in the Maya prefs, but it wouldn't accept any number higher than 2 (of course, since there were only 2 processors). I guess I'll have to call Alias (or is it now Autodesk?) to ask them if Maya will support 4 processors in the G5, and if it's worth it to get the FX 4500 video card. I know that Apple will support quad processors in their own apps like FCP, but I wonder if third party apps will be updated to quad when they're already forced to deal with the MacIntel transition.
Another issue is the amount of space for expansion in the new CPUs. There are a few aftermarket kits to toss in up to 4 additional hard drives, in the space up front between the grille and the CPU area. But now it looks like there is much less space available, no room to squeeze in a nice 4 drive RAID. Damn. I was going to stick in 4 300Gb drives and a SATA RAID card, but now it looks like this will be impossible. I guess we will have to wait and see what some clever engineer can figure out how to squeeze into that space. Darn it, I want that option NOW, not later when they figure out how to do it. Oh well, you can't have it all.
Then there's the final issue: heat dissipation. I wonder how much heat these suckers kick out, especially with extra hard drives. My office is already baking from the hot exhaust of my dual-1Ghz MDD with 4 drives, I bet a similar quadG5 config really will kick out the heat and suck up the power. It's 60 degrees outside but I'm still running the air conditioning because without it, my CPU heats my tiny office up to about 90 degrees even under moderately light CPU use.
Re:my take on the new PowerMacs (Score:3, Insightful)
I think Apple can do better by creating a space for the graphics card's fan. I still don't understand why mobo manufacturers continue to include a slot where in most cases people have video card fans that render that slot useless.
Cooling? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:my take on the new PowerMacs (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:mod the parent down! Re:photoshop is dead (Score:3, Insightful)
What I meant is this: today most pro photographers I know will shoot about 100+ shots a day for a job, and very often 200 to 300. He then must upload them to the computer, where he must do a lot of "organizing", like selecting best shots, making sequences and organizing proofs for his client. From what I've seen in Apple's Aperture, the software is superb in doing just that. Take the loupe tool for example, it looks very intuitive and fast to use, making things like checking focus and small details a breeze. Sure, when setting up your own exhibit with the 20 perfect prints, Photoshop it to hell, else, the at daily task of deliverying many shots to a client asap, Photoshop sucks...
Keep in mind that for a pro photographer, US$500,00 for a tool that will save him hours in his work flow is a no brainer.
Also, Aperture seems to be optimized to hell (that's why you have very restrictive system requirements), meaning it's performance should be very good, doinaling a lot on the gpu. That alone can make many people switch.
It's like the iPod. All if it's features were somewhat available or are now in other mp3 players, it's the combination of many design / interface features that made it a killer gadget. Check slashdot's thread the day the iPod shipped, most people were saying "bah, x player is similar and cheaper" and look at what happened.
As for having Aperture's feature in free software, I really hope it does come true, but I am not holding my breath. Just look at GIMP, which is supposed to be Photoshop like...
p.s.: Adobe Bridge and Capture One Pro's interface suck compared to Aperture's....