Got off the phone with Apple Customer Service and they gave me a tracking number!!
Ship date
Nov 28, 2005
Estimated delivery
Nov 30, 2005
I just saw a retail box in an Apple store in Palo Alto. Nobody in the store knew anything about it yet and it wasn't installed on any of the computers there (they said it just arrived). But, it is in stock now.
I just saw a retail box in an Apple store in Palo Alto. Nobody in the store knew anything about it yet and it wasn't installed on any of the computers there (they said it just arrived). But, it is in stock now.
There will be many reviews showing up in the next few days, I think. My box shows up tomorrow according to UPS. My co-worker said, "So you'll be leaving early again tomorrow?" (I left early last Wednesday when my Quad showed up.)
I've seen a few early reviews but none of them really talk about the parts of Aperture I am most interested in. I've seen some sample conversions though and it looks like Apple did a good job.
Aperture review (including how to make a multi-disc Library)
I got my copy of Aperture today and spent all evening playing with it. I was writing down various discoveries with an eye towards a comprehensive review, but eventually I figured I might as well put down what I've got and keep updating the review over the next few weeks.
Apple Aperture
I just received my copy of the new Apple program Aperture. I need to get some sleep so it will have to continue tomorrow, but this program is fast and very intuitive. I think it will be a very logical piece to the workflow and catalogue of all the shots digital photography causes you to take
The program comes with a fairly comprehensive tutorial disk and I am about half way through it. Hard to watch and not just dive into the buttons. I am very impressed with its features and speed. Probably one of the most important aspects of the program is that is automatically saves a "master" file for every shot. Every manipulation you do is saved as a new file without touching the master.
Also appears to be quite a few "batch" type operations to save time. Comparison features and "stacking" to put photos in a sequence together with complete ability to manipulate their positions, values and ratings.
I was not expecting it until the end of December and it showed up yesterday, so if you ordered it you may get an early Christmas present.
So anyone here that actually has their hands on Aperature wanna weigh in on how fair the ars review is? Andy?
(Just from personal experience with things Ars has reviewed, I've always found my impression of things highly agrees with what their reviews say... regardless if I read the review before or after forming my own opinion.)
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Aperture Vs RawShooter comparison
Has anybody done/seen a side by side comparsion of Aperture vs Raw Shooter I use Raw shooter and love it but i'd also love to know what I'm missing through not having Aperture. I can't see how I could justify the price difference. Can anybody justify to me why I should change to Aperture?
So anyone here that actually has their hands on Aperature wanna weigh in on how fair the ars review is? Andy?
(Just from personal experience with things Ars has reviewed, I've always found my impression of things highly agrees with what their reviews say... regardless if I read the review before or after forming my own opinion.)
Ill give my 2 cents.
To keep it short ill just use his "cons" list and add my feedback about what he is viewing as a con with a short my opinion section at the end. (if you make it that far)
Cons
Tiny fonts and reverse type throughout the interface are hard on the eyes This is not an issue for me, I really don't spend much time reading the menus (there isn't that much to read) and when i see them it doesn't seem to cause any strain.
Column view only for import and no file extensions in import pane Again a non issue for me, my files where very organized before i imported them to aperture so the import was a snap.
Cannot edit base EXIF and IPTC data There isn't much i edit here (lat and longitude) but it is annoying that i cant edit it. So this is a con imo.
Poor RAW conversion This is a problem, Big con here
Strips EXIF data on file export This is another Con
Extremely slow batch metadata editing Since my import of files into aperture i have done a ton of metadata editing. It is not slow at all for me. I have changed metadata on 400+ files in a batch and couldn't get the system to slow down.
No DNG export Sucks, but if your "master" was a dng then it comes back out as one.
Has only the most basic sharpening and noise reduction tools I haven't worked with these tools enough to comment on them.
The loupe tool doesn't tell you what zoom ratio you're at im not real sure why this is listed as a con. The loupe tool only does 100% 200% and 400% i don't really need the loupe to tell me. But others might have a problem with this.
No curves adjustment
Buggy 8-bit TIFF export Sucks, this is a CON for sure
The spot tool is very basic compared to the spot heal in Photoshop I like apertures spot tool, and i really like the fact that i don't have to load CS2 to use it.
No per-pixel RGB information Never used a feature like this. But im not "pro"
Inaccurate histogram CON
Many outstanding bugs I looked at the bug list and he pretty much says the 8bit tiff and histogram cons are bugs so i wont comment any further on that. The only other thing i see listed is problems with thumbnails. I haven't had any problems with thumbs rebuilding right after i make a change to the file(s).
Price for the performance
Ok my opinion time!
Aperture was touted as the end all of work flow software for photographers. Do i think it is? No.... The ability of aperture to manage images is far beyond anything i have seen on the PC or Mac. Once an image is in Aperture you have the ability to add it to multiple albums, edit it, rate it, add keywords bla bla. The thing that sets it apart is no matter how many edited copy's or albums its in there is still only one file with delta level changes stored in the database. You can open an image in an external editor and when you save it the image will be brought back into aperture as a revision (im sure once you do this it becomes another file in the database and not a delta change of the master file) of the "master" file. So ImO its worth the 500 bucks just for the document revision portion if you could get the files out of the application As its sits right now its not really worth buying. I would wait untill the export features are fixed and im sure they will be.
Returning Aperture
OK this may not be terribly fair but...
I tried Aperture six times in the past week. Went along with their demos, adn tutes. It is NOT intuitive at all. I can't find anything in here than I can do or need that is better than Adobe Bridge/CS2. In fact, I found the workflow for basic RAW exposure corrections, and then color/contrast etc, to be extremely gawky.
Oh, and the fonts are tiny (and I have 20/20 vision, no glasses or contacts).
I've just gotten off the phone with Apple, after a little chat with the customer service manager, I've got an RMA and am returning the software for full refund.
Once an image is in Aperture you have the ability to add it to multiple albums, edit it, rate it, add keywords bla bla. The thing that sets it apart is no matter how many edited copy's or albums its in there is still only one file with delta level changes stored in the database.
But that doesn't set Aperture apart. I am doing the same thing in Adobe Camera Raw. I make my changes in Camera Raw and the changes are saved as metadata in either the Camera Raw database or in the XMP sidecar file, leaving the original raw file untouched. If I want to try a different set of adjustments, I can keep multiple copies of the tiny XMP file for that image, and the Raw file is still untouched. That's the way it has to work, since Raw files are read-only. To say that Aperture has an advantage because it doesn't alter Raw originals is like saying that my car has an advantage because it has four wheels.
It looks like multiple versions of one image are handled more easily in Aperture, though.
You can edit and rate in Camera Raw, and you can use Adobe Bridge to do pretty good bulk rating, add keywords and IPTC data, and add the image to a "collection" without copying the file, basically you can do many of the things you said were so "unique" about Aperture. (Though the full power is only available in Photoshop CS2; running Camera Raw inside Photoshop Elements only supports some of that.)
Also, from the reviews I've read, the metadata portability to other apps seems to work better in apps other than Aperture.
Aperture's other advantages seem to be in workflow and in the range of changes you can make without having to create a converted copy. If you want to remove a spot defect in Camera Raw, it can't do it; you have to make a copy by converting it into a Photoshop file first and then use spot removal. It looks like Aperture as a spot removal tool and applies the change upon conversion so a separate huge file isn't needed. However, I have also read that the spot removal tool isn't as good as Photoshop's.
But that doesn't set Aperture apart. I am doing the same thing in Adobe Camera Raw. I make my changes in Camera Raw and the changes are saved as metadata in either the Camera Raw database or in the XMP sidecar file, leaving the original raw file untouched. If I want to try a different set of adjustments, I can keep multiple copies of the tiny XMP file for that image, and the Raw file is still untouched. That's the way it has to work, since Raw files are read-only. To say that Aperture has an advantage because it doesn't alter Raw originals is like saying that my car has an advantage because it has four wheels.
I never said it has an advantage because it doesn't edit the original files, i said it has an advantage because it does all the legwork of keeping multiple versions of edits for you. "The thing that sets it apart is no matter how many edited copy's or albums its in there is still only one file with delta level changes stored in the database" Camera Raw/Adobe Bridge is where i spent most of my time before aperture and while you can copy the sidecar files its still a manual process. My point was that aperture is doing all of this for you so you don't have to copy your side car files ;-) and the whole point is to reduce the amount of time it takes to post-process.
You can edit and rate in Camera Raw, and you can use Adobe Bridge to do pretty good bulk rating, add keywords and IPTC data, and add the image to a "collection" without copying the file, basically you can do many of the things you said were so "unique" about Aperture. (Though the full power is only available in Photoshop CS2; running Camera Raw inside Photoshop Elements only supports some of that.)
I agree with most of what you said here, and i also think that bridge has some advantages when it comes to metadata editing. But when it comes down to photo management imo aperture beats it hands down and speed.... i cant even compare the two.
Also, from the reviews I've read, the metadata portability to other apps seems to work better in apps other than Aperture.
100% agree with you.
I also want to point out that if you have other tools that you edit with aperture will use them to edit and the file will be returned to the "database" automatically. If the spot tool isn't working for you, click open external editor and use PS CS2 spot tool. The file is returned and becomes a "version" of the master.
I tried Aperture six times in the past week. Went along with their demos, adn tutes. It is NOT intuitive at all. I can't find anything in here than I can do or need that is better than Adobe Bridge/CS2. In fact, I found the workflow for basic RAW exposure corrections, and then color/contrast etc, to be extremely gawky.
Oh, and the fonts are tiny (and I have 20/20 vision, no glasses or contacts).
I've just gotten off the phone with Apple, after a little chat with the customer service manager, I've got an RMA and am returning the software for full refund.
Aperture - I hardly knew ya!
What a shame...if they wanted to do a public beta (like MS) they should not have raised expectations so high. It's one thing to do it with iPhoto/consumer grade stuff, but quite another to do it with a pro tool.
Thanks guys, that's the kind of real world results I was looking for.
While I sit with tweaker in the 'owns apple stock' camp... I'm gunna sit with lynnesite on this one in the 'waitin' for 2.0' camp before I make a purchase decision.
SmugMug Sorcerer - Engineering Team Champion for Commerce, Finance, Security, and Data Support http://wall-art.smugmug.com/
Yeah, integration with smugmug would be great. For now though, before being able to drag and drop, we'd have to export first to a folder. I don't think there's a way right now to upload easily - except for .mac ... I don't really like the way the file structure is set up - makes it really difficult to access your images outside of aperture (can't easily reference originals in folders as with IP)...Also, does anyone know if you can transfer machine authorization if you switch machines? I heard they might offer a five-machine license later (I think I'm going to wait for that)...Overall, totally amazing program! Looking forward to using it - and that loupe!
I tried Aperture six times in the past week. Went along with their demos, adn tutes. It is NOT intuitive at all. I can't find anything in here than I can do or need that is better than Adobe Bridge/CS2. In fact, I found the workflow for basic RAW exposure corrections, and then color/contrast etc, to be extremely gawky.
I don't find Aperture to be much different than the Adobe tools (or anything else for that matter) in terms of the UI for managing manipulations except in that it's missing a few (eg Curves) and some of them are highly inferior (eg Sharpening). Some of the interface took me awhile to discover (like, "where the @$^ is Sharpening?"), and a few things seem poorly thought out (like when adding keywords it's easy to miss "9" and start typing things that mess with either the UI or the image since there's no clear feedback as to whether or not you hit the "9"), but mostly it's same-old-same-old.
I will say that I don't like the "inspector" adjusters since the window is too small and it's not resizable. Use the HUD.
If that's what you bought Aperture for, you made a mistake. Nobody expected Apple to exceed the quality of Photoshop (CS2 at least, I was not particularly fond of CS's raw import tool) and, really, what can you do to improve the UI of the Exposure slider? (Apple did make one non-obvious improvement; the value input fields are actually a kind of slider. Try dragging inside one.)
If Aperture was going to be a win in the adjustment area it was going to be because it gives you those same capabilities *plus* other stuff that Bridge, Capture One, and the like are really bad at.
It's in these areas that they did a rather nice job.
Aperture is far better than anything else I've used at letting me rip through a large number of images to pick which are the keepers. Since that is where I spend almost all my time, except on the handful of images I do real editing on, it would be nice if I could use it for rendering RAW files for print or edit (and, depending on the image, sometimes I can) but this is clearly not a strength right now. While many of its manipulations are not really production quality they are good enough to give me a quick idea of whether or not an image can be manipulated into what I really want.
This is awfully important if you're doing shoots that produce a large set of images but where you only want to keep a much smaller subset. A wedding is a great example, since you typically want to pull out a few really superb images for the album out of a whole day of sustained shooting, but I just got back from the Galapagos and had something like three hundred pictures of tortoises. Trying to pick two or three from three hundred is not easy using Bridge or Capture One, but Aperture's stack system and compare modes make this a snap - group similar images into stacks and pick the one you like out of that group. Rate the images in terms of quality so you can pull the best image stacks right out of the morass. From the much-reduced set of "best" images - probably down to only a handful at this point - you can pick the ones with the feel or subject you want. Since it has various side-by-side comparison modes it is pretty easy to pick one versus another or one out of a series.
What would normally take me many hours was accomplished in an evening after dinner, while almost completely unconscious from lack of sleep from the flight home, and I had time left over to tag everything and sort it into types of shots that might interest particular audiences. All the while I'm still learning Aperture's interface.
Aperture also provides a big improvement in terms of archive management versus what I did before (basically shell scripts and clever directory names) but it's not as good as pro-level archival tools like iView. Then again, there was a big hole between "need a huge archive management tool" and "nothing" that Aperture does at least a fair job of filling (modulus irritating stuff like not spanning multiple drives or providing the offline search capability that would have made that limitation more tolerable).
By the way, it looks to me like most of the poor quality people have noticed is the result of a less-sophisticated bayer mask interpolator, over-sharpening, and overeager contrast enhancement on import. I believe Apple can go a long way towards making people happy if all they do is detune the sharpening and contrast enhancement on import; that should be trivial to accomplish. In particular that would kill off the nasty spotting effect.
It may be that detuning sharpening will also improve performance on noisy images but I doubt that it's as bad as it is solely a result of sharpening. I think the bayer mask interpolator is too simplistic and needs some noise rejection capability. (Notice how the nasty looking stuff is predominantly green; well, so is the sensor count. Hmm.) It's not surprising they got that wrong, it's not that easy to do well. I bet they had a bunch of terrific images as their testbed whereas many of us have to shoot with high-noise cameras or at high-ISO levels. It's a glaring hole in the tool, but not one that can't be plugged in a reasonable amount of time.
By the way, one of the other things I noticed that is at least easy to correct is that when you export an image it maps it to sRGB. That's great if you're pushing the image out to the web but it sucks if you're trying to print it. The export dialog lets you change that setting, though. Also, the JPEG quality level is 10 by default which produces huge images with little quality improvement over, say, 8. I detuned that; if I'm pushing JPEG it's going on the web and size is more important than high fidelity.
Anyway Aperture has worked its way into my workflow. While I have to be pretty careful about using it for quickly producing print-ready images, as I did with reckless abandon with C1, the time I gain by the improvement in image selection more than makes up for the difference. I'm willing to give Apple a pass on not getting quality perfection on the first attempt; I think a lot of you have forgotten how long it took the other tools to get good at this. I mean, Photoshop is on its third major revision of raw management tools and in my opinion CS2 is the first to do a really good job. How many years span the raw plug-in to Bridge?
The true test is going to be how hard Apple tries to fix this. Given the history of some of their other tools I think there's cause for optimism.
At this point I've done a bunch of work with it and have discovered all kinds of things, but the most interesting thing for a bunch of you is going to be examples of output comparing Aperture with several other tools. Right now I only have examples with a noisy image, because that's where Aperture really falls down, but I'm going to put up examples where Aperture does a reasonable job too. You'd never know it from a lot of the reviews but it does a pretty reasonable job much of the time. Problem is that it does a crappy job enough of the time that you can't trust it.
For a number of examples of Aperture output you can check out my set of photos from my recent trip to the Galapagos:
for another comparison since it both shows places Aperture does well (check out the drops on the flower) and where it is sub-par (notice how noisy the leaves to the lower right are).
In doing the first comparison I learned something else. I have been much more pleased with the RAW processing of Photoshop CS2 versus CS, enough that I had been thinking of it as roughly equivalent to Capture One although I hadn't done a real comparison (I have only done minimal work with CS2 to date). Now I have and Capture One still beats it soundly, plus nobody else has C1's processing queue. Aperture is odd in that its import is nonmodal but export is modal; I can't see why they didn't make both nonmodal unless they didn't think people were going to do bulk conversions.
Anyway I hope someone finds the review useful. I've submitted almost all of the complaints to Apple in the hope that they can clean it up for v2.
Comments
http://homepage.mac.com/foamx/Aperture%20vs%20C1/index.html
and a mini review with screenshots is here
http://www.jennandlucien.net/lucien/archives/2005/11/aperture_mini_r.html
I just saw a retail box in an Apple store in Palo Alto. Nobody in the store knew anything about it yet and it wasn't installed on any of the computers there (they said it just arrived). But, it is in stock now.
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There will be many reviews showing up in the next few days, I think. My box shows up tomorrow according to UPS. My co-worker said, "So you'll be leaving early again tomorrow?" (I left early last Wednesday when my Quad showed up.)
I've seen a few early reviews but none of them really talk about the parts of Aperture I am most interested in. I've seen some sample conversions though and it looks like Apple did a good job.
jim
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I got my copy of Aperture today and spent all evening playing with it. I was writing down various discoveries with an eye towards a comprehensive review, but eventually I figured I might as well put down what I've got and keep updating the review over the next few weeks.
To that end:
http://www.frostbytes.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/ApertureReview
Perhaps the most interesting thing in the review is that I discovered a fairly simple way to work around the single-disk Library limitation.
jimf@frostbytes.com
I just received my copy of the new Apple program Aperture. I need to get some sleep so it will have to continue tomorrow, but this program is fast and very intuitive. I think it will be a very logical piece to the workflow and catalogue of all the shots digital photography causes you to take
The program comes with a fairly comprehensive tutorial disk and I am about half way through it. Hard to watch and not just dive into the buttons. I am very impressed with its features and speed. Probably one of the most important aspects of the program is that is automatically saves a "master" file for every shot. Every manipulation you do is saved as a new file without touching the master.
Also appears to be quite a few "batch" type operations to save time. Comparison features and "stacking" to put photos in a sequence together with complete ability to manipulate their positions, values and ratings.
I was not expecting it until the end of December and it showed up yesterday, so if you ordered it you may get an early Christmas present.
Deacon
I merged your thread with this already existing Aperture thread.
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I also saw it for $417, if you are a NAPP member and use your discount, software/hardware vendor.
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/aperture.ars/1
I love Ars Technica reviews.
Wow. I didn't even know it was possible to have a wackload of images!
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(Just from personal experience with things Ars has reviewed, I've always found my impression of things highly agrees with what their reviews say... regardless if I read the review before or after forming my own opinion.)
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Has anybody done/seen a side by side comparsion of Aperture vs Raw Shooter I use Raw shooter and love it but i'd also love to know what I'm missing through not having Aperture. I can't see how I could justify the price difference. Can anybody justify to me why I should change to Aperture?
To keep it short ill just use his "cons" list and add my feedback about what he is viewing as a con with a short my opinion section at the end. (if you make it that far)
Cons
- Tiny fonts and reverse type throughout the interface are hard on the eyes This is not an issue for me, I really don't spend much time reading the menus (there isn't that much to read) and when i see them it doesn't seem to cause any strain.
- Column view only for import and no file extensions in import pane Again a non issue for me, my files where very organized before i imported them to aperture so the import was a snap.
- Cannot edit base EXIF and IPTC data There isn't much i edit here (lat and longitude) but it is annoying that i cant edit it. So this is a con imo.
- Poor RAW conversion This is a problem, Big con here
- Strips EXIF data on file export This is another Con
- Extremely slow batch metadata editing Since my import of files into aperture i have done a ton of metadata editing. It is not slow at all for me. I have changed metadata on 400+ files in a batch and couldn't get the system to slow down.
- No DNG export Sucks, but if your "master" was a dng then it comes back out as one.
- Has only the most basic sharpening and noise reduction tools I haven't worked with these tools enough to comment on them.
- The loupe tool doesn't tell you what zoom ratio you're at
im not real sure why this is listed as a con. The loupe tool only does 100% 200% and 400% i don't really need the loupe to tell me. But others might have a problem with this.
- No curves adjustment
- Buggy 8-bit TIFF export Sucks, this is a CON for sure
- The spot tool is very basic compared to the spot heal in Photoshop I like apertures spot tool, and i really like the fact that i don't have to load CS2 to use it.
- No per-pixel RGB information Never used a feature like this. But im not "pro"
- Inaccurate histogram CON
- Many outstanding bugs I looked at the bug list and he pretty much says the 8bit tiff and histogram cons are bugs so i wont comment any further on that. The only other thing i see listed is problems with thumbnails. I haven't had any problems with thumbs rebuilding right after i make a change to the file(s).
- Price for the performance
Ok my opinion time!Aperture was touted as the end all of work flow software for photographers. Do i think it is? No.... The ability of aperture to manage images is far beyond anything i have seen on the PC or Mac. Once an image is in Aperture you have the ability to add it to multiple albums, edit it, rate it, add keywords bla bla. The thing that sets it apart is no matter how many edited copy's or albums its in there is still only one file with delta level changes stored in the database. You can open an image in an external editor and when you save it the image will be brought back into aperture as a revision (im sure once you do this it becomes another file in the database and not a delta change of the master file) of the "master" file. So ImO its worth the 500 bucks just for the document revision portion if you could get the files out of the application
Hope this helps.
OK this may not be terribly fair but...
I tried Aperture six times in the past week. Went along with their demos, adn tutes. It is NOT intuitive at all. I can't find anything in here than I can do or need that is better than Adobe Bridge/CS2. In fact, I found the workflow for basic RAW exposure corrections, and then color/contrast etc, to be extremely gawky.
Oh, and the fonts are tiny (and I have 20/20 vision, no glasses or contacts).
I've just gotten off the phone with Apple, after a little chat with the customer service manager, I've got an RMA and am returning the software for full refund.
Aperture - I hardly knew ya!
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But that doesn't set Aperture apart. I am doing the same thing in Adobe Camera Raw. I make my changes in Camera Raw and the changes are saved as metadata in either the Camera Raw database or in the XMP sidecar file, leaving the original raw file untouched. If I want to try a different set of adjustments, I can keep multiple copies of the tiny XMP file for that image, and the Raw file is still untouched. That's the way it has to work, since Raw files are read-only. To say that Aperture has an advantage because it doesn't alter Raw originals is like saying that my car has an advantage because it has four wheels.
It looks like multiple versions of one image are handled more easily in Aperture, though.
You can edit and rate in Camera Raw, and you can use Adobe Bridge to do pretty good bulk rating, add keywords and IPTC data, and add the image to a "collection" without copying the file, basically you can do many of the things you said were so "unique" about Aperture. (Though the full power is only available in Photoshop CS2; running Camera Raw inside Photoshop Elements only supports some of that.)
Also, from the reviews I've read, the metadata portability to other apps seems to work better in apps other than Aperture.
Aperture's other advantages seem to be in workflow and in the range of changes you can make without having to create a converted copy. If you want to remove a spot defect in Camera Raw, it can't do it; you have to make a copy by converting it into a Photoshop file first and then use spot removal. It looks like Aperture as a spot removal tool and applies the change upon conversion so a separate huge file isn't needed. However, I have also read that the spot removal tool isn't as good as Photoshop's.
I agree with most of what you said here, and i also think that bridge has some advantages when it comes to metadata editing. But when it comes down to photo management imo aperture beats it hands down and speed.... i cant even compare the two.
100% agree with you.
I also want to point out that if you have other tools that you edit with aperture will use them to edit and the file will be returned to the "database" automatically. If the spot tool isn't working for you, click open external editor and use PS CS2 spot tool. The file is returned and becomes a "version" of the master.
Can you tell i own apple stock?
What a shame...if they wanted to do a public beta (like MS) they should not have raised expectations so high. It's one thing to do it with iPhoto/consumer grade stuff, but quite another to do it with a pro tool.
I'll wait for 2.0...
Galleries here Upcoming Ranch/Horse Workshop
While I sit with tweaker in the 'owns apple stock' camp... I'm gunna sit with lynnesite on this one in the 'waitin' for 2.0' camp before I make a purchase decision.
http://wall-art.smugmug.com/
I don't find Aperture to be much different than the Adobe tools (or anything else for that matter) in terms of the UI for managing manipulations except in that it's missing a few (eg Curves) and some of them are highly inferior (eg Sharpening). Some of the interface took me awhile to discover (like, "where the @$^ is Sharpening?"), and a few things seem poorly thought out (like when adding keywords it's easy to miss "9" and start typing things that mess with either the UI or the image since there's no clear feedback as to whether or not you hit the "9"), but mostly it's same-old-same-old.
I will say that I don't like the "inspector" adjusters since the window is too small and it's not resizable. Use the HUD.
If that's what you bought Aperture for, you made a mistake. Nobody expected Apple to exceed the quality of Photoshop (CS2 at least, I was not particularly fond of CS's raw import tool) and, really, what can you do to improve the UI of the Exposure slider? (Apple did make one non-obvious improvement; the value input fields are actually a kind of slider. Try dragging inside one.)
If Aperture was going to be a win in the adjustment area it was going to be because it gives you those same capabilities *plus* other stuff that Bridge, Capture One, and the like are really bad at.
It's in these areas that they did a rather nice job.
Aperture is far better than anything else I've used at letting me rip through a large number of images to pick which are the keepers. Since that is where I spend almost all my time, except on the handful of images I do real editing on, it would be nice if I could use it for rendering RAW files for print or edit (and, depending on the image, sometimes I can) but this is clearly not a strength right now. While many of its manipulations are not really production quality they are good enough to give me a quick idea of whether or not an image can be manipulated into what I really want.
This is awfully important if you're doing shoots that produce a large set of images but where you only want to keep a much smaller subset. A wedding is a great example, since you typically want to pull out a few really superb images for the album out of a whole day of sustained shooting, but I just got back from the Galapagos and had something like three hundred pictures of tortoises. Trying to pick two or three from three hundred is not easy using Bridge or Capture One, but Aperture's stack system and compare modes make this a snap - group similar images into stacks and pick the one you like out of that group. Rate the images in terms of quality so you can pull the best image stacks right out of the morass. From the much-reduced set of "best" images - probably down to only a handful at this point - you can pick the ones with the feel or subject you want. Since it has various side-by-side comparison modes it is pretty easy to pick one versus another or one out of a series.
What would normally take me many hours was accomplished in an evening after dinner, while almost completely unconscious from lack of sleep from the flight home, and I had time left over to tag everything and sort it into types of shots that might interest particular audiences. All the while I'm still learning Aperture's interface.
Aperture also provides a big improvement in terms of archive management versus what I did before (basically shell scripts and clever directory names) but it's not as good as pro-level archival tools like iView. Then again, there was a big hole between "need a huge archive management tool" and "nothing" that Aperture does at least a fair job of filling (modulus irritating stuff like not spanning multiple drives or providing the offline search capability that would have made that limitation more tolerable).
By the way, it looks to me like most of the poor quality people have noticed is the result of a less-sophisticated bayer mask interpolator, over-sharpening, and overeager contrast enhancement on import. I believe Apple can go a long way towards making people happy if all they do is detune the sharpening and contrast enhancement on import; that should be trivial to accomplish. In particular that would kill off the nasty spotting effect.
It may be that detuning sharpening will also improve performance on noisy images but I doubt that it's as bad as it is solely a result of sharpening. I think the bayer mask interpolator is too simplistic and needs some noise rejection capability. (Notice how the nasty looking stuff is predominantly green; well, so is the sensor count. Hmm.) It's not surprising they got that wrong, it's not that easy to do well. I bet they had a bunch of terrific images as their testbed whereas many of us have to shoot with high-noise cameras or at high-ISO levels. It's a glaring hole in the tool, but not one that can't be plugged in a reasonable amount of time.
By the way, one of the other things I noticed that is at least easy to correct is that when you export an image it maps it to sRGB. That's great if you're pushing the image out to the web but it sucks if you're trying to print it. The export dialog lets you change that setting, though. Also, the JPEG quality level is 10 by default which produces huge images with little quality improvement over, say, 8. I detuned that; if I'm pushing JPEG it's going on the web and size is more important than high fidelity.
Anyway Aperture has worked its way into my workflow. While I have to be pretty careful about using it for quickly producing print-ready images, as I did with reckless abandon with C1, the time I gain by the improvement in image selection more than makes up for the difference. I'm willing to give Apple a pass on not getting quality perfection on the first attempt; I think a lot of you have forgotten how long it took the other tools to get good at this. I mean, Photoshop is on its third major revision of raw management tools and in my opinion CS2 is the first to do a really good job. How many years span the raw plug-in to Bridge?
The true test is going to be how hard Apple tries to fix this. Given the history of some of their other tools I think there's cause for optimism.
jimf@frostbytes.com
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http://www.frostbytes.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/ApertureReview
At this point I've done a bunch of work with it and have discovered all kinds of things, but the most interesting thing for a bunch of you is going to be examples of output comparing Aperture with several other tools. Right now I only have examples with a noisy image, because that's where Aperture really falls down, but I'm going to put up examples where Aperture does a reasonable job too. You'd never know it from a lot of the reviews but it does a pretty reasonable job much of the time. Problem is that it does a crappy job enough of the time that you can't trust it.
For a number of examples of Aperture output you can check out my set of photos from my recent trip to the Galapagos:
http://www.frostbytes.com/gallery/galapagos
Most of those shots have only simple exposure correction done, with the occasional sharpening. I think I will use this one:
http://www.frostbytes.com/gallery/galapagos-miscellaneous/CRW_7870
for another comparison since it both shows places Aperture does well (check out the drops on the flower) and where it is sub-par (notice how noisy the leaves to the lower right are).
In doing the first comparison I learned something else. I have been much more pleased with the RAW processing of Photoshop CS2 versus CS, enough that I had been thinking of it as roughly equivalent to Capture One although I hadn't done a real comparison (I have only done minimal work with CS2 to date). Now I have and Capture One still beats it soundly, plus nobody else has C1's processing queue. Aperture is odd in that its import is nonmodal but export is modal; I can't see why they didn't make both nonmodal unless they didn't think people were going to do bulk conversions.
Anyway I hope someone finds the review useful. I've submitted almost all of the complaints to Apple in the hope that they can clean it up for v2.
jimf@frostbytes.com
Just installed Patch 1.01 and so far I have noticed
Fixed 8bit tiff export
exif data is no longer stripped on export.
auto-stacking no longer locks up, too.
jim
jimf@frostbytes.com
Michael Reichmann over at LL now has his non-review up. In short, he says it's a work in progress.
Non-review here.
"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky
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