Apple's Aperture Reviewed 383
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.'"
Re:Version 1 (Score:2, Informative)
Hopefully Arperture will get better, and maybe they'll do the same.
Re:Biased? and Negative (Score:5, Informative)
Also, there's a fairly complete list of both pros and cons at the end.
I own it and have used it (Score:5, Informative)
Re:My Thoughts (Score:5, Informative)
<apple> Math is hard.
Re:My Thoughts (Score:2, Informative)
1. Capacity. I currently have an iPhoto library which is getting close to 5000 images. On my 1.3 ghz Powerbook, starting the program is painful, and was getting more so quickly due to the fact that I recently started shooting in RAW format. Aperture (supposedly) can support much larger image libraries, and is geared towards a RAW based workflow.
2. Metadata. Ever tried keywording images in iPhoto? It is a massive pain in the ass. The only interface for assigning keywords is a multiple-checkbox window that requires a free 3rd-party plugin to make it remotely useful [mac.com]. (Kudos to that developer, by the way). Aperture fixes this by making keyword entry much easier, although according to the review, it badly breaks the EXIF keywords.
To answer another one of your questions: This thing don't got layers. But it's not really intended as an image editing application. Aperture is supposed to be used in conjunction with other editing software, like photoshop. It's supposed to help you keep your images and your million or so versions of them better organized: if you're familiar with Adobe Bridge, it's a bit like that. It's a good thing that it's not a full fledged image editing application, though: reviewer notes that a lot of the most frequently used editing tools that are in the program are lacking (noise reduction and sharpening, for example).
Anyway: feh, seems to be the overall impression of the reviewer, and feh would have to be my verdict too until some of the oversights he notes are addressed. In the meantime, I highly recommend that you check out iView Media Pro [iview-multimedia.com], which seems to be less buggy, but just as featureful, and costs less than half as much.
Re:My Thoughts (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Aperture Light Anyone? (Score:2, Informative)
K
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.
Re:Aperture Light Anyone? (Score:1, Informative)
Aperture is really pretty amazing (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I am not a Photo Pro, but I play one on TV.. (Score:2, Informative)
Sounds to me like he is qualified to speak about a digital image processing application. He doesn't have to have the "eye" to tell if an image is technically of high quality.
Oh...And as an art director you have to be able to recognize quality photographs (not speaking of the technical quality here) or you suck.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Aperture Light Anyone? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Apple (Score:1, Informative)
Apple doesn't at all 'sacrifice function for form'. The concept here is "form follows function" and that is a basic principle of good design, however many or few functions you are trying to implement. Apple does design form for function.
So there's no 'tradeoff' between form and function at all. Apple users get form following function (instead of, like some companies', ugly apps where new functions are "bolted on" - there the form doesn't follow function and such apps are confusing and hard to understand. But it's not because they have more functions. It's because their functions aren't integrated into the design, ie the form.)
Some apps have fewer functions but that isn't a sacrifice made for the sake of form! It's a decision to make a simpler app with fewer bells-and-whistles for basic needs, that is less expensive. Often they also make pro apps which have more options and functions. But in *both* Apple strives to have good design, in which form follows function. It's true it might be harder to have form follow function for more complex apps, but that's a different issue. But for sure the less-expensive apps for Apple also have good form.
I think you get this (given your point about OS X) but anyway I hope this helps....
Re:Aperture is really pretty amazing (Score:2, Informative)
So in fact, I am the same person who posted this on both forums.
You may or may not be a troll, but you are at least underinformed. I appreciate that you were looking out for potential plagiarism though! Had I been plagiarized, that would have been annoying.
Regards,
Devon
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