New Aperture Software

Pamela

I received a email from apple, advertising the Aperature Software.
Very interesting.
It seems to be a great piece of software.
I could use feed back about this software, or, if anyone has any info that might help me make a decision about purchasing this or Adobe Photoshop.

JohnR

I have it and like it. Others don't like it for whatever reasons.

What mac do you have? And Aperture is (for now) not meant to replace Photoshop, but work alongside it.

Pamela

I have a macbook- with the duo processor.

So that means I still need to get adobe photoshop ?

I dont understand, at the apple website I dont recall them mentioning that.

colourbox

Aperture can't do everything. If you have Aperture, you don't need Photoshop for Raw processing, overall tone and color control, sharpening, some kinds of touchup, and output.

But you will still need Photoshop if you want to combine multiple images into one, do extensive retouching, use advanced techniques for color correction and sharpening, etc.

Aperture does a limited range of very common tasks more efficiently than Photoshop, while Photoshop has a much wider and deeper feature set that you might not need to use every day, but is there for when you need to do more specialized tasks than Aperture can handle.

What you could do is use Aperture and see how often you come up against a task you absolutely can't accomplish in Aperture. Then look around the Web to see how you would do it in Photoshop. If such a task never comes up, you don't need Photoshop.

Pamela

Helpful idea, thankyou

One more question

Do you use Aperature?
If so,
what is the vault feature exactly for?
The way it sounds to me is that you can only store photos in this , and not on a external hard drive. Is this true or do I have the info wrong?

colourbox

I don't use Aperture but the vault feature has changed and is no longer limited to a single "vault." In version 1.5, just released last week, you can now reference photos that are on any volume. Previously, all the photos had to reside in a single vault, currently mounted, and you couldn't store them anywhere else. The change in 1.5 frees that up quite a bit and removes one of my major objections to Aperture. I'm much more open to using it now that I won't have to carry every photo on my laptop.

Someone who actually uses Aperture will hopefully drop in and expand on this. Here is the version 1.5 text from the Aperture page at Apple.com; the second paragraph describes the new flexibility:

With Aperture 1.5, you decide how and where to store your images. Import them into a managed Aperture library and let Aperture take care of keeping track of your images. This option lets you keep all your images in one location and offers a simple backup mechanism via the Vault.

Or store your photographs wherever you’d like — on any number of hard drives, network volumes, CDs, or DVDs, and have Aperture “reference” them. No need to copy the entire collection into a single managed library, simply point to them and let Aperture catalog them in place. You can even reference the images in your iPhoto library, using them in Aperture without having to move or copy them anywhere.

However you store your images, Aperture 1.5 keeps track of all the metadata you add and versions you create. And because your RAW originals don’t have to be online for you to browse or search through them, you can take your entire library with you.

jimf

colourbox wrote:

I don't use Aperture but the vault feature has changed and is no longer limited to a single "vault."

That's not quite right; what you're talking about is your "Library." "Vaults" are backups of your library. You can have multiple vaults for a single library.

You were never limited to a single library, you could always switch between libraries in Preferences, but each library was limited to a single disk. This was a problem because it meant that you couldn't search across more than a single disk.

Even in 1.5 a library is still limited to a single disk, but references allow metadata (basic photo information, tags and image previews) to be stored in the library while image data is stored elsewhere, or even offline. So now you can use Aperture to search across much larger archives, making it a vastly more useful tool for archive management.

I use Aperture quite a lot and am happy to answer any questions you might have.

The first comment I would make is that if you're planning to run it on a MacBook you want to have as much memory as absolutely possible. I use it on a 2G MacBook and it works reasonably well, but it's not snappy. It works nicely, with a few exceptions, on my 4G Quad though. (My understanding is that the image processing pipeline is seeing a major rewrite in v2, due out sometime next year, so the product should be easier to use on such systems as it matures).

If I were to make a recommendation, go download and try out Adobe's Lightroom, still in beta and available for free (for now). There are reasons I prefer Aperture to Lightroom, but the two are pretty similar products and Lightroom will run well on a MacBook whereas it's a tight squeeze for Aperture ... and at the very least you can see if that kind of product meets your needs without spending any money up-front.

Colourbox mentioned that Aperture has a number of simple (and even not-so-simple) adjustments; by and large it has the kinds of adjustments that are done frequently, allowing you to avoid using a more complicated tool such as Photoshop. It even has the ability to print, although I much prefer Photoshop for that purpose.

But in my mind one of the most valuable features of Aperture that is often overlooked is that it is a superb took for winnowing a large collection of images down to the few you really care about. If you shoot a lot then this tool can save you many hours of review.

binghott

i just started using aperture this week. i just upgraded my mac pro to 2gb ram, and it runs aperture very nicely.

prior to switching to mac, i was using breezebrowser and now i recently became accustomed to the canon digital photo professional software, so i'm a bit annoyed to have another program to get comfortable with. i've tried adobe lightroom, but hated it.

i find aperture to be very aesthetically pleasing, but that's obvious as it's a product of apple. i like the adjustments i can make, but i'd rather make them in photoshop. if i needed hundreds of photos to be modified, i'd go with aperture, but i usually need a handful from a set to be processed, and i'd rather bring that into photoshop where i feel more in control. this is probably because i have not yet mastered aperture, i still have a lot to learn.

thebigsky

Could I just ask what you hated about Lightroom?

Charlie

jimf

binghott wrote:

i like the adjustments i can make, but i'd rather make them in photoshop. if i needed hundreds of photos to be modified, i'd go with aperture, but i usually need a handful from a set to be processed, and i'd rather bring that into photoshop where i feel more in control. this is probably because i have not yet mastered aperture, i still have a lot to learn.

That jives with my feeling, too. Aperture's adjustments are pretty basic; for fine control I really prefer Photoshop. But when I need to bulk process a bunch of images, each with minimal adjustments, Aperture is a decent tool for that.

Where Aperture complements Photoshop is when you have a lot of shots and you are trying to figure out which ones you want to keep. Photoshop sucks at image browsing, comparison, and selection. Aperture, in contrast, is terrific for those things.

My workflow is to dump everything into Aperture, rip through the images to stack them, pick the stacks that are interesting, pick the keeper image from each stack, then export those to photoshop for finishing and printing. I can usually take a three to five hundred shot shoot and get down to the half dozen or so really interesting images in less than half an hour. That is a huge improvement over doing it either in Photoshop (ACR) or CaptureOne.

jimf

thebigsky wrote:

Could I just ask what you hated about Lightroom?

I'm interested too, but as I said before I also prefer Aperture to Lightroom -- even though Lightroom is a heck of a lot faster. Lightroom's interface is a lot more modal and the modes do not accurately match the way I like to work, so I end up jumping back and forth between modes (especially "Develop" and "Library") all the time. That slows me down a lot.

I'm not fond of Lightroom's raw processing either, which has the same flaws as ACR, but I am not always happy with Aperture either and will switch to other tools if I'm not happy with the results.

Lightroom's print interface is terrific, the best I've ever seen in any product, but usually I have to export to Photoshop for fine-tuning anyway so I might as well print from there.

Aperture has its interface annoyances too -- like why is export a modal process? Import isn't, and with good reason: It can take a long time so it's nice to be able to let it run in the background. Making selections in Aperture seems gratuitously different from everything else on the planet as well.

The thing that drives me kind of crazy is that almost all of the keyboard shortcuts use the flower key, option key, shift key, or some combination of the three ... with no apparent rhyme or reason as to which modifier keys are required (or not).

But these annoyances don't really get in the way of me using the product effectively, or at least more effectively than the other similar tools I've tried.