Apple’s Aperture…. worth another go?
I’ve been stung a few times in the past, and as the saying goes ‘once is bad judgement, twice is a fool’. This is in relation to buying into a promise that a product will do what it says on the tin, only to find that it doesn’t live up to expectations.
Apple’s version 3 of Aperture has just hit the shelves. When Aperture 1 came out, I was a big fan. I liked the approach, the philosophy behind it, but the performance of the software (the more hardware you throw at it, the more it consumed) along with the number of bugs in it really left me feeling short changed.
Then version 2 was announced I had high hopes that they’d fixed the performance of it. But they hadn’t. They’d covered up some of the cracks with ‘fast preview’ buttons for example, to make it appear that the software was working fast. The only thing was that my CPU was getting hammered all the time – just even by opening it up.
So I did what I didn’t want to do: I moved to lightroom, which I felt at the time (and still do) had poor library features and a clunky interface. But Lightroom is fast, it will work on any piece of hardware and even my old G5 is very happy playing ball with it. So I’ve come to love Lightroom, besides the interface and the poor library features, it does what it says on the tin, and it does it really well.
I feel Apple had a chance back at version 1 of Aperture. Lightroom was still new and a bit wet behind the ears too. But it’s perhaps too late for Apple to convince all those but their existing customers to give Aperture 3 a go.
I’m no longer in the market for a Raw Converter program but I am in the need of a good software library, so I guess my pondering over Aperture is a bit moot. Lightroom and Aperture both have similar issues with dealing with large film-scanned images – they don’t perform well. But this is mostly irrelevant for photographers these days as the number of film shooters is really in the minority now.
I upgraded to Aperture 3 about a week ago. I haven’t had time to do much with it yet but so far there are a few things I like:
It now has proper curves adjustments and chromatic aberration adjustment.
Adjustments have masks now ( they call them brushes ) which have a useful edge detect feature on the brush.
Most adjustments can now have more than one instance so you can, for example, have several curves layers with different masks.
These are all non destructive so I think I will do the round trip to photoshop less often.
A set of adjustments can be defined as a preset and applied together. These can also be applied automatically when importing.
There is also a feature that should make synching my laptop and iMac Aperture libraries easier but I haven’t tried this yet.
The face recognition feature isn’t great. It uses hours of CPU initially
when being set up and although is good at recognising a face, isn’t so clever at matching who it is. I switched it off.
I didn’t notice a performance problem with it but I am running it on a new 27″ iMac so I would expect it to go well on that anyway.
It’s early days yet but I like it so far and think it was a worthwhile upgrade from V2.
Comment by Norman Bews — 22 February, 2010 @ 10:12 pm
I had a good shot at Aperture 3 this week. I’m a pretty happy Lightroom user, and I was interested to see how Apple had implemented the local adjustments features.
I have to say, the performance on my system (2GHz iMac) was not fantastic, and certainly slower than Lightroom. I also don’t particularly like the interface (a very personal thing), probably because I’m that used to Lightroom now. The RAW conversions seemed fine (though ever so slightly ‘yellower’ with my Nikon NEF files than I get from Lightroom).
I was seriously considering having a long term shot with Aperture, but to be honest I didn’t see enough to make it worth while for me.
Comment by mike — 22 February, 2010 @ 10:36 pm
I’m wondering if it’s a re-write. I felt V2 was just a bolt-on to v1.
Apple have a tendency to buy other software outfits – usually good ones. Logic for instance was made by eMagic and it was one of the best music writing packages out there…. if a little overly complicated. Apple got it and made it really elegant, simple for a music sequencer, which normally require a heavy investment in learning time.
So I’m curious is Aperture V3 is a completely new product. The skin looks like it’s a major reworking.
Comment by Bruce Percy — 22 February, 2010 @ 10:51 pm
Mike,
Lightroom 3 is in Beta at the moment. My feeling is that (I’ve not seen it yet), that it’s moving more into the middle ground between LightRoom 2 and Photoshop.
Lightroom 2 at the moment, IMHO, is a basic library with Adobe Camera Raw bundled into a skin.
Photoshop IMHO, is not intended for photographers. Personally, I use perhap 5% of the program, but they’ve nobbled Photoshop Elements that it’s practically useless for editing 16-bit files. So there’s not been anything in the middle.
My feeling is that LR3 will give us more of the editing features such as layers and masks, as per what Norrie has been saying about Aperture.
I found LR2 a bit lightweight. It’s a great tool for lots of rapid editing, but I’m more considered and spend a bit of time on each image and I love masks, curves and brushes.
This is all moot for me though, because none of these programs handle large files. My scans are typically around 500MB at a starting point.
Comment by Bruce Percy — 22 February, 2010 @ 11:07 pm
Bruce,
I’m an Aperture user but I agree. It sounds like you have a workflow that, while uncomfortable, works pretty well in Lightroom. My guess is that something that bothers you about Aperture would continue to do so. Switching cost is high for these applications, especially as you are more invested in them. In some ways Aperture 3 is much faster than Lightroom, but in the ways you feel it’s slower, it won’t feel faster enough to justify anything.
I will disagree with this statement: “I feel Apple had a chance back at version 1 of Aperture. Lightroom was still new and a bit wet behind the ears too.” because Lightroom wasn’t even out when Aperture 1 came out. It was a Mac only beta for over a full year after the release of Aperture 1.
My general feeling (and this still holds true even with the improvements in Aperture 3 with respect to Lightroom 3 beta) is that Aperture has always been DAM-focused first and Lightroom has been editing-focused first. Even today, an Aperture 3 would have to make round trips with Photoshop more often than an experienced Lightroom 2 user (or Lightroom 3 beta will when it’s finalized). On the other hand, Lightroom (and this includes the beta) makes no consideration to multimedia (video and audio), no move for face detection, has mediocre places support (launch a Google Map? Puh-leez), has a crummy keywording system, has a worse model of data organization, and doesn’t do slideshows or books worth a damn (it does do color printing very well—but that’s an Adobe forté).
On the other hand, there is a “trust me” attitude to using Aperture that seems to be an Apple hallmark, well which, frankly, even I don’t (I have an import preset that always backs the stuff up onto another archive on import, as well as two or three different archives set up.) And I’ve been using Aperture since release day. :-)
As for “buying other products” this is only true when there is a dominant player existing player in the market. For instance, Apple entered editing with Final Cut Pro (purchased from Macromedia), but that was in an industry owned by Avid and attacked aggressively by Adobe. Similarly they did iTunes (purchased as SoundJam from Cassaday and Greene) but that was after WinAmp won and a failed attempt to purchase Audion. When Apple came up with Aperture and iPhoto, they actually approached Adobe with the idea and were turned down (I believe this is why Adobe was secretly developing Lightroom—the launch of iPhoto clued them into Apple’s next step) and there was no established player in the market (iView Media Pro? Puh-leeez!). Aperture didn’t work this way.
Here is how the history came down. Aperture 1 was released and it was a surprise. Adobe launched Lightroom as a public beta in order to freeze purchases of Aperture (MAC ONLY, I might add, which is a huge tell), Apple decided the UX in Aperture needed to be seeded into other parts of the system and wasn’t as great anyway as they had hoped, broke up the team, and spread the personel out to other divisions (iPhone, Mac OS X, etc.). Adobe launched Lightroom and has been eating market from Apple ever since, partly because it’s a good product but honestly, mostly because of the Photoshop monopoly. Aperture 2 was a minor blip designed to deal with the main complaint of Aperture (performance) and acknowledgement Adobe’s threat by lowering the price—not really an adequate response IMO. Lightroom 2 came out and further cemented Adobe’s lead, but what it did do is wake Aperture users up to what features they’d really like in Aperture (presets anyone?). Adobe took more market share. A new version of iPhoto came out with faces and places and things that made you wonder why the pro app sucked rocks. Adobe took more market share. Aperture 3 was made to really deal with that misstep but required the use of aspects of Snow Leopard to address performance complaints. I guess the private beta period took longer than Apple intended, and, given the reports of some users of import failures (and the crashes I’ve personally experienced) even then was a tad bit premature.
If there is a product that needs a ground-up rewrite, I almost guarantee it’s an Adobe one. Those products have a crufty build system that requires hours and teams of people in India just to do stuff that shouldn’t have been automated and only a few seconds.
I think you’ll be happy with Lightroom and I’ll be happy with Aperture. I’m a Nikon guy and I have a lot of friends that shoot Canon and enjoy it. I could live with that; I can live with this.
:-)
Take care,
terry
Comment by tychay — 23 February, 2010 @ 1:26 am
Hi Bruce,
Being a large format film shooter (as well as Mamiya 7) and having recently invested in Lightroom 2, I’m interested to know what you meant by the comment that Lightroom has issues with LF scanned film.
cheers, Bruce
Comment by bruce lonie — 23 February, 2010 @ 3:06 pm
Hi Bruce,
Actually, that was an error on my part.
Lightroom has no issues with large files, while Aperture does. Aperture completely flakes out at anything that is big and I’ve often had a random message telling me the file is of an unsupported format – and no thumbnail displayed either. this seems to be completely random – some days it will display an image (once it’s creaked up, ran the CPU to 100% and finally struggled to get its act together), other days it just fails to display the same image.
Now I know that Aperture is designed for digital files from DSLR’s, so the file sizes they intended are supposed to be small. But still…. Lightroom handles them no trouble.
Comment by Bruce Percy — 23 February, 2010 @ 3:11 pm
I know a number of photographers who have the same frustration as you with LR’s management capabilities who have now moved to Photo Mechanic.
You can check out Zack Arias’ workflow involving it here:
http://www.zarias.com/workflow-photo-mechanic-to-lightroom-to-photoshop-to-delivery/
Comment by olwick — 23 February, 2010 @ 4:23 pm