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February 2, 2006
Apple Aperture Review
This is not a comprehensive review of Aperture, Apple's latest software for photographers, but some observations from one month of using of the product. Aperture is designed for "professional" photographers, which I am not. I am an amateur photographer, concerned mostly with managing the thousands of photographs I am taking, primarily of food, for my food and cooking weblog. I'm what one would call a "pro-consumer", who has outgrown iPhoto. Note that I am running Aperture on a dual Mac G5, with a 23-inch cinema display.
What I like
- Importing. The speed and organization. With my Lexar compact flash reader, these big fat image files just pour in, and into the specific project folders I want.
- Projects, Folders, and Albums - organization for my thousands of photos.
- The vault - the ability to easily, with one click, back up all my photos onto a separate hard drive.
- The ability to rate photos, with one click adding a star to the file name, making it easy to sort through to find the photographs that I had previously pegged as the best ones.
- The ability to export easily, in different formats and sizes. Sometimes I want to export a small file, sometimes I want the original size. Sometimes jpg, sometimes tiff.
What I should like, in theory
- The ability to have a master file and make edits only to versions, exporting the versions, never altering the master. I say I should like this because I would like to use this feature. Unfortunately, all of my editing is done in Photoshop. The user-interface for the Aperture editing tools is so unintuitive (very Un-Apple) that I don't even bother with them and go straight to Photoshop. To reimport the file into Aperture then I end up with 2 masters, not a master and a version.
What I would love
- Better integration with Photoshop. Actually, any integration with Photoshop. These programs are perfect complements to each other. It would be a dream if they actually shook hands.
What I do not like
- The Zoom tool. It really is annoying. I should be able just to option click something and zoom in on a photo, but instead you have to use this weird magnifying glass tool to see a closeup of only a small section of the photo.
- I can't just drag a file to my desktop or to Photoshop. I have to export it first. You would think that you could set an export preference and then just be able to easily drag the image outside of the Aperture window, but no, you can't. Here's one area where iPhoto trumps Aperture.
- Photo clarity. The photos in Aperture are simply not as clear as when I open them up in Photoshop. I talked to some of the Apple chaps at the Aperture area at MacWorld, and they suggested that Photoshop was applying a sharpening filter to the images on the way in. I've never heard that one, have you? Does saving a file as a jpg sharpen it? I wouldn't think so. Since which photo I choose to use depends a lot on which one is in better focus, I often have to export several shots of the same subject to see them in Photoshop, just to see which one is better. I shouldn't have to do that. Update: Here is the Apple support page that discusses why Sharpness is not apparent at less than 100 percent.
- User interface. Granted, compared to virtually any program for the PC, Aperture is a beauty. Even compared to Adobe Illustrator, it shines in the UI department. But that's not saying much. Of all the Apple programs I've ever used, this one is the most unintuitive. Just getting started with it I had to refer back several times to the documentation, and play lots of tutorials. Even then, some things that you just expect would be easy and obvious, don't work the way you expect them to. It's as if someone other than Apple engineers designed this program. Some parts are brilliantly easy, some just aren't.
- The quality of the books that the program produces, if you use Apple's service. I checked them out at MacWorld and noticed that the pro photographers reviewing them were shaking their heads. The problem? The paper quality is not good enough. An image can be seen through the other side of the paper which affects the quality of images on both sides of a page. Maybe okay for a quick and dirty project mock-up, but annoying to someone wanting to see their photos portrayed as beautifully as possible.
What is truly unconscionable on Apple's part - a Warning to those who are considering purchasing
- What Apple doesn't broadcast is that Aperture will not work with most G5s in use today. You do have to have the MacOS 10.4.3 (Tiger) installed. No biggie. The kicker is that not all the graphics cards that came with your old G5 are supported. And, unless you use the Compatibility Checker in the bottom right-hand corner of this page, or have read the detailed specs, you wouldn't know. One would expect that the program would work with a dual 2 Ghz G5 bought in the summer of '04, but it doesn't. Not without the upgrade of the graphics card, which can easily set you back another $450, bringing the total dollar outlay of this tool to over $900. Word of advice - use the compatibility checker first, before making a decision to buy Aperture, so you know the real cost.
Final Notes
At a retail price of $499 (at Amazon for $459), Aperture is not cheap. I am recommending to any friend considering purchasing to wait. I would expect Apple to sort out some of the more annoying usability issues for version 2.0, and by then, we'll all have a new MacIntel box.
Links:
Aperture review by Charles Bandes
Technorati tags: Aperture, Apple, Photography, Software
Posted by elise on February 2, 2006 to Computers
| Comments (2)
Comments
Elise - thanks for this great rundown. I have been curious about Aperture, but the fact that it doesn't seem to play nice with Photoshop is a biggie in this household.
Jason has been playing with what seems to be Adobe's answer to Aperture -- called Lightroom -- have you seen it? It's a gorgeous application. I don't know what the cost will be when it comes out but it will probably be bundled with CS2.
BTW - I am not super technically adept at the whole Photoshop thing, but the answer about automatic sharpening in Photoshop sounds suspect from what I do know.
Posted by: jen maiser at February 14, 2006 9:46 AM
Photoshop was applying a sharpening filter to the images on the way in. I've never heard that one, have you?
Yes. If you are shooting RAW I am not surprised that you get different results in different software. JPG is unambiguous about how it is supposed to be decoded. RAW is purposely under cooked so folks who like can fiddle with the image that hit the sensor, until they get it how they like it. Most cameras apply heavy processing when saving as a JPG on the card (aside from just compressing it). As an example my Nikon D70s saves a RAW and a JPG; comparing them, the JPG has different smooth and sharp areas and completely different color and contrast; the RAW has no compression artifacts but other than that it is usually inferior in every way to the JPG, unless I take it and baby it and use expensive software (Nikon Capture or Photoshop or Aperture) to make it presentable.
(You can use a rudimentary utility like [http://www.insflug.org/raw/software/tools/dcraw.php3 dcraw] but the output images still require lots of babying; this program just helps pull the actual lossless image out of the proprietary .NEF file.)
Does saving a file as a jpg sharpen it? I wouldn't think so.
Check your camera's secret menus for sharpening settings. This is where it applies them, when saving to a JPG. RAWs, by definition, are unaffected (at least on my Nikon). Aperture should be applying its own sharpening filters but I'm not surprised that they are not the same as the camera or Photoshop's filters.
Since which photo I choose to use depends a lot on which one is in better focus, I often have to export several shots of the same subject to see them in Photoshop, just to see which one is better. I shouldn't have to do that.
RAW being inconsistent again, I imagine. I agree, I wish photo organizer programs worked better with Photoshop!
(By the way, if you are not shooting RAW, then I have no idea why things like sharpeneing are inconsistent; none of this applies, because I would think JPGs are just JPGs, no inconsistent behavior really possible there...)
Posted by: Jared at July 25, 2006 1:24 PM
