Aperature 1.1, worth it?
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Registered Users Posts: 32 Big grins
I bought the first Aperature program by apple, my opinion is that its neat for organization type deals, but really the new ilife with iphoto handles the same raw picture files as the 500$ program does, and basically the same editing. 1.1 is set at 300$ now, they say they made it faster and a version to play on the new Macs with intel (which i just got) so I debating whether to invest in another program or just stay with the simple iphoto and photoshop.
It's weird that photographers spend years or even a whole lifetime, trying to capture moments that added together, don't even amount to a couple of hours.
James Lalropui Keivomhttp://www.Backwindowproductions.com/bwp
James Lalropui Keivomhttp://www.Backwindowproductions.com/bwp
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gubbs.smugmug.com
The big win for me with Aperture is its image comparison and selection capabilities; iPhoto (and, for that matter, everything else except the Adobe Lightroom beta) is totally lacking in these areas. I find that I can easily and quickly rip through the hundreds of frames I get out of a shoot and cull it down to the handful of money shots. Previously I used Capture One for this process and to say that it was inadequate would be an understatement.
iPhoto does not have a number of Aperture's editing features; while the toolbar is roughly equivalent there is little in iPhoto to compare to the filters, especially in terms of flexibility. Having said that I tend to use Photoshop for this kind of thing, its filters are much more mature, so you're not really missing out on anything in that respect.
Likewise the organization features are substantially better than those in iPhoto. Still, they aren't up to the features of dedicated archive management tools like iView, at least not yet.
As far as I know iPhoto still uses the core image renderer that Aperture used in 1.0. That renderer had a lot of problems. The Aperture 1.1 renderer is vastly improved. I would still say that Photoshop's renderer is a bit higher quality in some regards (especially noisy images, you can see some worst-case comparisons at http://www.frostbytes.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/Aperture11Review) so, again, you've already got a high quality option ... although I'd go insane if I were to try to use Photoshop to bulk convert images.
If you're looking for quality and bulk processing capability Capture One is still the best choice in my opinion, but 1.1 has improved so much and is so much more convenient that I rarely fall back to C1 these days.
Regarding 1.1's supposed speed improvements, if there were any I didn't notice them. I believe Apple was being rather disingenuous in that regard: They're claiming it's faster not because they made it faster but because you can now run it on the Intel-based laptops rather than being limited to the G4-based Powerbooks. The Intel laptops are about four times as fast as the G4 laptops. Thus you get a faster Aperture only if you're coming from a G4 laptop and are willing to dump an additional two or three grand on a MacBook Pro. On my Quad there was no noticable performance difference.
If you're happy with what you've got it's hard to see why you should spend several hundred dollars on Aperture. In my mind if you needed Aperture you'd probably know it. I couldn't give them my credit card number fast enough; Aperture saves me hours per shoot with its image selection capabilities even when I can't use its renderer, and when the renderer and image manipulation features are good enough (most of the time these days) it saves me even more time.
If I were you I would check out Adobe's Lightroom beta, which offers a lot of the benefits of Aperture and is free as long as the beta program lasts. I don't know how the pricing will compare to Aperture, and in my opinion Aperture has the better interface by far, but until Lightroom goes into production it's a nice way to get an idea of whether or not you want to spend the money on such a tool.
jimf@frostbytes.com