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Apple Aperture RAW Photo Workflow Software Reviewby Jim Frost | ||||||||
Apple Aperture RAW Photo Workflow Software Review | ||||||||||
| Line: 136 to 136 | ||||||||||
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| Is it worth your $500? That depends. If you're looking for a tool to do image manipulations I'd say that you'd be wasting your money. Photoshop does a much better job and you probably already have it. Capture One is vastly superior when it comes to bulk image conversion, especially in terms of quality. But if you need a tool that allows you to organize and select images then Aperture looks rather nice. | ||||||||||
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Other Reviews and Comparisons
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Apple Aperture RAW Photo Workflow Software Review | ||||||||||||||||
| Line: 32 to 32 | ||||||||||||||||
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| While there were complaints about really noisy rendering I didn't see it on my first foray into using the product. In retrospect this appears to be the result of doing almost all my shooting with a Digital Rebel at ISO 200; at this setting this camera produces virtually noise-free images. Feed it a noisy image, however, and Aperture's rendering completely falls apart. By ISO 1600 on my primary camera images are effectively destroyed, appearing more like bad needlework than film. It is possible to recover the image via aggressive use of the Noise Reduction filter but at a horrible cost to the application's performance and a near total inability to perform additional sharpening. | ||||||||||||||||
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| < < |
The more I look at it the more I believe that the issue is the result of a simplistic Bayer mask interpolator. I think over-bright pixels get propagated around to nearby pixels during interpolation, resulting in a crosshatch of bad pixels. At a minimum Apple needs to inject noise filtering into its interpolator. This will slow down import (and it's already fairly slow) but there is little choice - the images it produces right now, given a noisy source image, are simply unacceptable. | |||||||||||||||
| > > |
Here is a comparison between Aperture's rendering, both with and without noise reduction, and that of various common tools. The image was captured on a Canon EOS-300D at ISO 1600.
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| Since I rarely shoot above ISO 200 this has little effect on me, but it's not the only issue. | ||||||||||||||||
| Line: 56 to 65 | ||||||||||||||||
| The biggest surprise was that Aperture does not support curve manipulation, a fairly obvious hole in its feature set versus Capture One. This is not as bad as it seems because it supports quarter-tone level adjustment (which Capture One does not) but in some cases this may not be accurate enough. | ||||||||||||||||
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| < < |
Even more irritating than the lack of curves is the lack of an eyedropper tool, making color correction a whole lot more difficult. | |||||||||||||||
| > > |
Even more surprising than the lack of curves is the lack of an eyedropper tool, making color correction a whole lot more difficult. | |||||||||||||||
| Changed: | ||||||||||||||||
| < < |
A real irritation is that image export is modal, locking other use of the application. This limitation is made more serious by the inability to render more than one image format at a time. If you want both TIFF and JPEG you must perform two individual export operations. While rendering performance is very good (nearly interactive on the Quad) this can be annoying if you have a large number of images to convert. Even if the renderer were high enough quality for bulk image conversion the modal nature of the export process makes it a poor choice relative to Capture One. | |||||||||||||||
| > > |
Another thing that bothers me is that image export is modal, locking other use of the application. This limitation is made more serious by the inability to render more than one image format at a time so you can't just set it up, go to bed, and have a directory full of TIFF and JPEG images in the morning. If you want both TIFF and JPEG you must perform two individual, interactive export operations. While rendering performance is very good (nearly interactive on the Quad) this can be annoying if you have a large number of images to convert. Even if the renderer were high enough quality for bulk image conversion the modal nature of the export process makes it a poor choice relative to Capture One. | |||||||||||||||
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| < < |
Like image rendering, Vault (backup) updates are modal. If you push in a lot of new data this can effectively lock the application for a long time. | |||||||||||||||
| > > |
Like image rendering, Vault (backup) updates are modal. If you push in a lot of new data this can effectively lock the application for several minutes. | |||||||||||||||
| There are some surprising behaviors when it comes to image sorting. For instance, I usually browse images in "date" mode and construct stacks of similar images. If one of the related images is separated from a stack by another unrelated image I would like to drag it into the stack. You can do this, but if you do the sorting mode switches to "custom" and the whole stack moves to the end of the list - often disappearing from the display. At first I couldn't figure out where the images went. While I understand that "date" sorting in combination with an out-of-order stack is something of a conflict of interest there's no reason that the sorting mode shouldn't switch to a fixed order with all of the images remaining in-place except the one you just moved. Making the whole stack disappear is disconcerting. | ||||||||||||||||
| Line: 92 to 101 | ||||||||||||||||
| The user interface for adding keywords is not quite there yet either. Aperture makes a lot of use of the keyboard to provide fast access to modes and tasks, a feature I am in love with. But the downside to using normal characters (as opposed to command, option, or control characters) is that if you fail to enter the "type keyword" mode you will mess up your viewing mode or even modify images as you type your keyword. If the keyword control panel isn't displayed then there is no feedback at all from the "9" key (the "enter keyword" shortcut) until you type the first character of the keyword. This is begging for a modal dialog. | ||||||||||||||||
| Deleted: | ||||||||||||||||
| < < |
Poor UI issues aside, the hierarchical keyword system doesn't even work when you try to use the feature in combination with dynamic albums and galleries. It simply ignores sub-keywords. | |||||||||||||||
| The last issue I have encountered to date is that it is not always possible to perform a bulk edit of metadata. For instance, I have some thousands of images in Aperture at this point and I would like to add copyrights to the metadata of all of them. There is no way to set the default copyright (so it would be set on import). This wouldn't be so bad if you could select multiple images and edit the copyright field in the inspector to set the field in all of them, but it only affects the first image in the selection. From reading other reviews I understand there are performance issues when bulk metadata editing is supported, further cementing my opinion that the metadata management system needs work. It's there, and it is good enough to get the job done, but it could be a lot better. Seeing as I previously didn't use metadata at all it's a big improvement for me but it is a big step down from dedicated archive management tools such as iView. | ||||||||||||||||
| Line: 129 to 136 | ||||||||||||||||
| Is it worth your $500? That depends. If you're looking for a tool to do image manipulations I'd say that you'd be wasting your money. Photoshop does a much better job and you probably already have it. Capture One is vastly superior when it comes to bulk image conversion, especially in terms of quality. But if you need a tool that allows you to organize and select images then Aperture looks rather nice. | ||||||||||||||||
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Apple Aperture RAW Photo Workflow Software Reviewby Jim Frost | ||||||||
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| < < |
December 14, 2005 | |||||||
| > > |
Last updated: December 16, 2005 | |||||||
| In mid-October 2005 Apple introduced a professional-grade RAW workflow software package called Aperture. This package's feature set is effectively an amalgam of media management software such as iView Media Pro from iView Multimedia and RAW workflow software such as Capture One Pro from PhaseOne. | ||||||||
| Line: 56 to 56 | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The biggest surprise was that Aperture does not support curve manipulation, a fairly obvious hole in its feature set versus Capture One. This is not as bad as it seems because it supports quarter-tone level adjustment (which Capture One does not) but in some cases this may not be accurate enough. | ||||||||
| Added: | ||||||||
| > > |
Even more irritating than the lack of curves is the lack of an eyedropper tool, making color correction a whole lot more difficult. | |||||||
| A real irritation is that image export is modal, locking other use of the application. This limitation is made more serious by the inability to render more than one image format at a time. If you want both TIFF and JPEG you must perform two individual export operations. While rendering performance is very good (nearly interactive on the Quad) this can be annoying if you have a large number of images to convert. Even if the renderer were high enough quality for bulk image conversion the modal nature of the export process makes it a poor choice relative to Capture One. Like image rendering, Vault (backup) updates are modal. If you push in a lot of new data this can effectively lock the application for a long time. | ||||||||
| Line: 96 to 98 | ||||||||
| From reading other reviews I understand there are performance issues when bulk metadata editing is supported, further cementing my opinion that the metadata management system needs work. It's there, and it is good enough to get the job done, but it could be a lot better. Seeing as I previously didn't use metadata at all it's a big improvement for me but it is a big step down from dedicated archive management tools such as iView. | ||||||||
| Added: | ||||||||
| > > |
PrintingI tried printing a number of particularly clean images. I'm not ecstatic about the quality although it's passable. Amongst the annoyances I noticed right away are a lack of any ability to position the image on the page (it's always centered) so I have to lie about the page size to get the output I want. In its favor, at least in my opinion, is its tendency to make brighter prints than Photoshop (but that means you have to be even more careful about highlights). I won't be changing my printing behaviors any time soon; if I want a clean print, the RAW file gets exported to Photoshop, re-manipulated, and printed from there. | |||||||
The LibraryBy default Aperture puts its image library in "~/Pictures/Aperture Library.aplibrary". | ||||||||
| Line: 119 to 125 | ||||||||
| The archiving and searching tools are a big step up from nothing at all but aren't going to put a crimp on tools like iView until they see major improvements. Bulk metadata management needs improvement and Apple has to make it easy to either split archives and Vaults across physical disks, provide an offline image database, or (preferably) both. | ||||||||
| Added: | ||||||||
| > > |
After I tried Aperture for the first time I said I thought it would sell a lot of Powermacs. I still think that is the case, despite the issues. For that matter I am finding myself using the tool more and more even for the things it's not so good at because it's damned convenient. I hope they improve the renderer in a patch in the near future, it would be nice to be able to create printable output of most images with the tool as opposed to right now when good prints are the exception. | |||||||
| Is it worth your $500? That depends. If you're looking for a tool to do image manipulations I'd say that you'd be wasting your money. Photoshop does a much better job and you probably already have it. Capture One is vastly superior when it comes to bulk image conversion, especially in terms of quality. But if you need a tool that allows you to organize and select images then Aperture looks rather nice. | ||||||||
Apple Aperture RAW Photo Workflow Software Review | ||||||||
| Line: 90 to 90 | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The user interface for adding keywords is not quite there yet either. Aperture makes a lot of use of the keyboard to provide fast access to modes and tasks, a feature I am in love with. But the downside to using normal characters (as opposed to command, option, or control characters) is that if you fail to enter the "type keyword" mode you will mess up your viewing mode or even modify images as you type your keyword. If the keyword control panel isn't displayed then there is no feedback at all from the "9" key (the "enter keyword" shortcut) until you type the first character of the keyword. This is begging for a modal dialog. | ||||||||
| Added: | ||||||||
| > > |
Poor UI issues aside, the hierarchical keyword system doesn't even work when you try to use the feature in combination with dynamic albums and galleries. It simply ignores sub-keywords. | |||||||
| The last issue I have encountered to date is that it is not always possible to perform a bulk edit of metadata. For instance, I have some thousands of images in Aperture at this point and I would like to add copyrights to the metadata of all of them. There is no way to set the default copyright (so it would be set on import). This wouldn't be so bad if you could select multiple images and edit the copyright field in the inspector to set the field in all of them, but it only affects the first image in the selection. From reading other reviews I understand there are performance issues when bulk metadata editing is supported, further cementing my opinion that the metadata management system needs work. It's there, and it is good enough to get the job done, but it could be a lot better. Seeing as I previously didn't use metadata at all it's a big improvement for me but it is a big step down from dedicated archive management tools such as iView. | ||||||||
Apple Aperture RAW Photo Workflow Software Review | ||||||||
| Line: 82 to 82 | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unfortunately the interface for manipulating metadata is much harder to use than it should be in almost every respect. | ||||||||
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| < < |
Apple touts the hierarchical keywords. They work just fine, but creating the hierarchy is painful. Every new keyword you want to create requires you to click on the parent or a sibling and press a button. Type in the keyword. Now press the button again for the next one and repeat. When I'm creating keywords I'd like to be able to type in an entire string of them without having to resort to the mouse. | |||||||
| > > |
Apple touts the hierarchical keywords. Unfortunately creating the hierarchy is painful. Every new keyword you want to create requires you to click on the parent or a sibling and press a button. Type in the keyword. Now press the button again for the next one and repeat. When I'm creating keywords I'd like to be able to type in an entire string of them without having to resort to the mouse. | |||||||
| If you mess up the hierarchy (for instance, I created many keywords by simply adding them individually to images, creating a flat list) you cannot simply drag a keyword into another - you have to create a new keyword child and then delete the old one. | ||||||||
| Added: | ||||||||
| > > |
What's worse, even when you have the hierarchy built it doesn't work in smart folders. This has to be a bug, but it's such a glaring one that it's hard to see how it made it into a released product. This is a major feature, and not even a difficult one to implement, and it just doesn't work. | |||||||
| The user interface for adding keywords is not quite there yet either. Aperture makes a lot of use of the keyboard to provide fast access to modes and tasks, a feature I am in love with. But the downside to using normal characters (as opposed to command, option, or control characters) is that if you fail to enter the "type keyword" mode you will mess up your viewing mode or even modify images as you type your keyword. If the keyword control panel isn't displayed then there is no feedback at all from the "9" key (the "enter keyword" shortcut) until you type the first character of the keyword. This is begging for a modal dialog. The last issue I have encountered to date is that it is not always possible to perform a bulk edit of metadata. For instance, I have some thousands of images in Aperture at this point and I would like to add copyrights to the metadata of all of them. There is no way to set the default copyright (so it would be set on import). This wouldn't be so bad if you could select multiple images and edit the copyright field in the inspector to set the field in all of them, but it only affects the first image in the selection. | ||||||||
Apple Aperture RAW Photo Workflow Software Reviewby Jim Frost | ||||||||
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December 13, 2005 | |||||||
| > > |
December 14, 2005 | |||||||
| In mid-October 2005 Apple introduced a professional-grade RAW workflow software package called Aperture. This package's feature set is effectively an amalgam of media management software such as iView Media Pro from iView Multimedia and RAW workflow software such as Capture One Pro from PhaseOne. | ||||||||
| Changed: | ||||||||
| < < |
Aperture 1.0 shipped in late November. This is a review of the software from the point of view of a semi-professional photographer. As the software is fairly large and complex it will take some time to become familiar with it; this review will be updated frequently as I discover new and interesting things about the product. For now I will try to cover topics that I have not seen covered elsewhere. | |||||||
| > > |
Aperture 1.0 shipped in late November. This is a review of the software from the point of view of a semi-professional photographer. As the software is fairly large and complex it will take some time to become familiar with it; this review will be updated as I discover new and interesting things about the product. | |||||||
Performance | ||||||||
| Changed: | ||||||||
| < < |
I'm using a Powermac Quad with the nVidea GeForce? 6600 and 2GB RAM. This is nowhere near a minimal system, although there is room to grow (particularly with the graphics card). Most people reading this review are probably using much less powerful machines; I have no experience as to how well they will work. | |||||||
| > > |
I'm using a Powermac Quad with the nVidea GeForce 6600 and 2GB RAM. This is nowhere near a minimal system, although there is room to grow (particularly with the graphics card). Most people reading this review are probably using much less powerful machines; I have no experience as to how well they will work. | |||||||
| On the Quad most activities are highly interactive, with two obvious exceptions, one in automatic stacking and the other in filtering, and a couple of minor irritations. | ||||||||
| Changed: | ||||||||
| < < |
In playing with automatic stacking I managed to lock up the UI for the better part of a minute despite only having about 70 images in the project I was working with. I had a similar lockup while attempting to remove the same set of images from an album. It recovered but it took awhile; long enough that I was expecting a crash dialog. | |||||||
| > > |
In playing with automatic stacking I managed to lock up the UI for the better part of a minute despite only having about 70 images in the project I was working with. I had a similar lockup while attempting to remove the same set of images from an album. It recovered but it took awhile; long enough that I was expecting a crash dialog. I have given up on using the auto-stacking feature; I'll try it again after the first patch release. | |||||||
| Changed: | ||||||||
| < < |
For the life of me I can't see why Apple is touting "live image update" as a feature. It's great that adjustments happen so rapidly as to be interactive, usually, but what happens when it's not? The whole filter chain must have way-sub-second rendering time or the performance of the whole UI suffers. And, in fact, some of the filters have nowhere near sub-second-response even on a high-end machine like the Quad. For instance, enabling noise reduction on a 6mpel image zoomed to 100% in full-screen mode causes five second (!) responses to changes, panning takes a second or so to repaint, and performance is still awfully slow even in the other modes. This is unacceptable. On the kinds of machines that Aperture is targeting there is no reason you cannot cache the manipulated image to improve rendering speed during simple repaint operations (like pan). | |||||||
| > > |
For the life of me I can't see why Apple is touting "live image update" as a feature. It's great that adjustments happen so rapidly as to be interactive, usually, but what happens when rendering starts to take awhile? The whole filter chain must have way-sub-second rendering time or the performance of the whole UI suffers. And, in fact, some of the filters have nowhere near sub-second-response even on a high-end machine like the Quad. For instance, enabling noise reduction on a 6mpel image zoomed to 100% in full-screen mode causes five second (!) responses to changes, panning takes a second or so to repaint, and performance is still awfully slow even in the other modes. This is unacceptable, it needs to cache the rendered image and re-render only when necessary. For now I work around the issue by turning off slow filters when I'm doing a lot of jumping around. | |||||||
| One of the minor irritations is that if you're scrolling through many images only the first few lines of images are rendered sharply. Once you scroll beyond them they render in very low resolution, only sharpening when you stop scrolling. The sharpening happens very quickly, so quickly that it's hard to see why it doesn't attempt to render sharp images while you scroll. | ||||||||
| Line: 28 to 28 | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Perhaps the biggest question mark about Aperture prior to its release was whether or not the image rendering quality was comparable to competing tools such as the camera vendors' software and Capture One. Investigation by myself and others yields some very interesting details. | ||||||||
| Changed: | ||||||||
| < < |
When Aperture does a good job, it does a very good job. The problem is that certain kinds of image data emphasize its omissions to the degree that they are not only glaring but often painful. Ironically, I think it's this area in which Apple has the opportunity to make huge improvements without a lot of effort. | |||||||
| > > |
When Aperture does a good job it does a surprisingly good job, especially for a version 1.0 product. The problem is that certain kinds of image data emphasize its weaknesses to the degree that they are not only glaring but often painful. Ironically, I think it's this area in which Apple has the opportunity to make huge improvements without a lot of effort but, at the moment, its inconsistency makes it utterly unusable as a production rendering tool. | |||||||
| Changed: | ||||||||
| < < |
Images imported into Aperture often have one or more of the following effects: Super-bad noise (looks like green lines throughout the image), or spots appearing in areas that should have minor shading. | |||||||
| > > |
While there were complaints about really noisy rendering I didn't see it on my first foray into using the product. In retrospect this appears to be the result of doing almost all my shooting with a Digital Rebel at ISO 200; at this setting this camera produces virtually noise-free images. Feed it a noisy image, however, and Aperture's rendering completely falls apart. By ISO 1600 on my primary camera images are effectively destroyed, appearing more like bad needlework than film. It is possible to recover the image via aggressive use of the Noise Reduction filter but at a horrible cost to the application's performance and a near total inability to perform additional sharpening. | |||||||
| Changed: | ||||||||
| < < |
On my first pass through Aperture I never saw the really bad noise issue, probably because I almost always shoot at ISO 200 with a camera known for low-noise pictures at that ISO. The other day, however, I imported an ISO 1600 image that was loaded with noise - and Aperture destroyed it. It had a morass of monochromatic lines all over it, so many that at 100% zoom it looks like a needlepoint. This has to be the result of a Bayer mask interpolater that emphasizes, rather than rejects, noise data. In fact, you can do a pretty good job of getting back to the kind of image you want by adding a Noise Reduction filter and cranking it all the way up. Apple needs to find a way to make their interpolator less sensitive to noise. | |||||||
| > > |
The more I look at it the more I believe that the issue is the result of a simplistic Bayer mask interpolator. I think over-bright pixels get propagated around to nearby pixels during interpolation, resulting in a crosshatch of bad pixels. At a minimum Apple needs to inject noise filtering into its interpolator. This will slow down import (and it's already fairly slow) but there is little choice - the images it produces right now, given a noisy source image, are simply unacceptable. | |||||||
| Changed: | ||||||||
| < < |
My first pass through also missed the spotting since it was an image with a lot of continuous tone. If you have minor shading, however, the shadow points get super-enhanced into spots. In my tests of the Sharpener filter I can reproduce exactly this effect manually, or enhance it if it's already in the image. Since there's no way to back off this sharpening the image is ruined. | |||||||
| > > |
Since I rarely shoot above ISO 200 this has little effect on me, but it's not the only issue. | |||||||
| Changed: | ||||||||
| < < |
One thing that didn't destroy my images, but was somewhat suprising, was that I rarely feel the need to do contrast enhancement in Aperture. This is odd because I almost always want to do it in Capture One or Photoshop CS2. I don't have any images yet that I think were destroyed by over-sharpening but I would like the default to be on the softer side. Similarly, in other tools I rarely use the saturation tool but I find that Aperture really benefits from a touch of it. | |||||||
| > > |
One other thing that I noticed right away is that I almost never had to perform contrast enhancement on the images. This is unique amongst the pro-level tools I use; I believe Apple's importer provides a significant amount of contrast enhancement by default, too much for some images. I would rather it be backed off a bit. | |||||||
| Changed: | ||||||||
| < < |
I have seen one image render with highlights blown out. It took awhile to figure out why that happened. I believe that it's becase the image was shot with Adobe 1998 color space, which Apple converted to sRGB. This results in images that are pushed brighter and washed out. It's also easy to fix; open the Export dialog, select the image type for the image, and change the solor space value to Adobe 1998. | |||||||
| > > |
Similarly it appears to do significant sharpening by default. This is doubly problematic: First, because Apple's sharpening tool is a simple unsharp mask and doesn't do a particularly good job; and second because you can't back it off after-the-fact as you can with contrast enhancement. If you have an image with mild dappling in shadow detail the import will harden the dappling into spots, ruining the image. | |||||||
| Changed: | ||||||||
| < < |
An oddity, which might reflect a similar misconfiguration, is that I find myself steering away from the contrast adjustment whereas I use it heavily on other tools. Instead, I touch up Saturation. I think this implies that contrast is applied to the image by default. | |||||||
| > > |
Both of these would be far less important if there were any way to (de)tune the amount of sharpening and contrast enhancement that is performed on import. For now you have to live with what Apple thinks is right, and it's too much. Luckily the defaults are very easy for Apple to change so I anticipate at least these issues to disappear in the first patch. | |||||||
| Changed: | ||||||||
| < < |
It seems to me, then, that many of the major complaints people have had with this tool are, at their root, very minor. Were Apple to detune sharpening and contrast enhancement alone it would likely produc images of far higher quality. | |||||||
| > > |
Other reviewers have complained that the import process adds too much saturation. I was surprised to hear that as enhancing saturation slightly is one of the things I find myself doing with some regularity in Aperture despite almost never adjusting it in Capture One or Photoshop. Maybe it's a matter of taste. | |||||||
| Changed: | ||||||||
| < < |
Limitations and Annoyances | |||||||
| > > |
On the export side I ran into two surprises, one in JPEG and one in TIFF. | |||||||
| Changed: | ||||||||
| < < |
The biggest surprise was that Aperture does not support curve manipulation, a fairly obvious hole in its feature set versus Capture One. This is not as bad as it seems because it supports quarter-tone level adjustment (which Capture One does not) but in some cases this may not be accurate enough. | |||||||
| > > |
First, full-size JPEG output produces massive images, 3M per image whereas Capture One's images are around 1M. This is the result of Apple choosing a very high quality setting; too high for the default if you ask me. It's easy to change in the export dialog, at least. Second, I found that some of my images saw blown-out highlights when exported. It took me awhile to figure out why that happened: It turns out that the default color space in TIFF (and everything else) is sRGB. This is a fine default for JPEG but bizarre for TIFF since the latter is likely to be the source of print output rather than the web. Again it's easy to change (you can use any color space you have installed; I chose the same Adobe 1998 that I use with Capture One) but the default is a poor choice in my opinion. In summary I see a lot of issues with the renderer and cannot recommend it for production work even though I have used it to produce very workable images in some cases. It's just too inconsistent in its quality. I can't say I'm particularly surprised that Apple didn't match the big boys in RAW conversion on their first try (consider that it took Adobe three tries over a number of years to do a good job) but they could have at least given us some control over some of the import manipulations to limit the damage. | |||||||
| Changed: | ||||||||
| < < |
Image rendering ("Export" in Aperture parlance) is modal. While exporting you may not continue using Aperture. Capture One, in contrast, renders in the background. This limitation is made more serious by the inability to render more than one image format at a time; if you want both TIFF and JPEG you must perform two individual export operations. While rendering performance is very good (essentially interactive on the Quad) this can be annoying if you have a large number of images to convert. | |||||||
| > > |
Some Other Annoyances | |||||||
| Changed: | ||||||||
| < < |
The limitation that almost all previews of Aperture pointed out is that the Library must reside on a single physical disk. I discuss this limitation, and a possible workaround that does not involve RAID arrays, in more depth later. | |||||||
| > > |
The biggest surprise was that Aperture does not support curve manipulation, a fairly obvious hole in its feature set versus Capture One. This is not as bad as it seems because it supports quarter-tone level adjustment (which Capture One does not) but in some cases this may not be accurate enough. A real irritation is that image export is modal, locking other use of the application. This limitation is made more serious by the inability to render more than one image format at a time. If you want both TIFF and JPEG you must perform two individual export operations. While rendering performance is very good (nearly interactive on the Quad) this can be annoying if you have a large number of images to convert. Even if the renderer were high enough quality for bulk image conversion the modal nature of the export process makes it a poor choice relative to Capture One. | |||||||
| Changed: | ||||||||
| < < |
Like image rendering, Vault (backup) updates are modal. | |||||||
| > > |
Like image rendering, Vault (backup) updates are modal. If you push in a lot of new data this can effectively lock the application for a long time. | |||||||
| Changed: | ||||||||
| < < |
The "stack" feature, used to group multiple related shots, has jumpy UI behavior when unstacking images. Perhaps it is predictable behavior but it is very unexpected. | |||||||
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There are some surprising behaviors when it comes to image sorting. For instance, I usually browse images in "date" mode and construct stacks of similar images. If one of the related images is separated from a stack by another unrelated image I would like to drag it into the stack. You can do this, but if you do the sorting mode switches to "custom" and the whole stack moves to the end of the list - often disappearing from the display. At first I couldn't figure out where the images went. While I understand that "date" sorting in combination with an out-of-order stack is something of a conflict of interest there's no reason that the sorting mode shouldn't switch to a fixed order with all of the images remaining in-place except the one you just moved. Making the whole stack disappear is disconcerting. | |||||||
| I have a number of TIFF files which do not display correctly. I believe they were generated by Capture One, but they might be from Photoshop. If the latter, they would be using LZW compression. I'll investigate this in more depth when I get the chance. | ||||||||
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Is There Anything Good About it?To read some of the reviews (for instance, Ars Technica's review and follow-up) you'd think that Aperture is a complete piece of junk. While I agree with much of what they point out, and you can see that I have encountered plenty of issues myself, rendering isn't the only use for which Aperture is intended. There is the question: Does this provide any workflow benefits that might justify its cost independent of rendering and image manipulation? When I first saw Aperture's marketing literature the thing that struck me more than anything else was the virtual light table and image comparison screens. These are things that no tool I own does. The best you can do with Capture One is jump back and forth between images and the images it displays aren't even full quality. In Photoshop I can do the same in Bridge or I can open multiple images and place their windows side-by-side. All of these solutions leave a lot to be desired. Indeed it is in the area of sorting and comparing a lot of images that Aperture really, really shines. The stack and comparison features allow me to rapidly relate similar images and select the best. The rating feature allows me to filter the best images to the top. This allows me to winnow hundreds of images to a handful in a far shorter time than ever before; no longer is it a tedious task. If you do shoots that produce a lot of images, only a few of which you want to use, Aperature will be a big help in the selection process. The time savings in this area alone may make Aperture well worth the price tag.TaggingAnother thing Apple touts in Aperture is its strong support for metadata. In my book, however, "strong" is somewhat overstating things. Historically I haven't done a lot of metadata manipulation; other than trying to preserve EXIF information I didn't have tools to use the data so I didn't put it in. Aperture makes it fairly easy to add keywords, modify other metadata (although some metadata, such as the capture date, are not editable), and select and search using metadata. Unfortunately the interface for manipulating metadata is much harder to use than it should be in almost every respect. Apple touts the hierarchical keywords. They work just fine, but creating the hierarchy is painful. Every new keyword you want to create requires you to click on the parent or a sibling and press a button. Type in the keyword. Now press the button again for the next one and repeat. When I'm creating keywords I'd like to be able to type in an entire string of them without having to resort to the mouse. If you mess up the hierarchy (for instance, I created many keywords by simply adding them individually to images, creating a flat list) you cannot simply drag a keyword into another - you have to create a new keyword child and then delete the old one. The user interface for adding keywords is not quite there yet either. Aperture makes a lot of use of the keyboard to provide fast access to modes and tasks, a feature I am in love with. But the downside to using normal characters (as opposed to command, option, or control characters) is that if you fail to enter the "type keyword" mode you will mess up your viewing mode or even modify images as you type your keyword. If the keyword control panel isn't displayed then there is no feedback at all from the "9" key (the "enter keyword" shortcut) until you type the first character of the keyword. This is begging for a modal dialog. The last issue I have encountered to date is that it is not always possible to perform a bulk edit of metadata. For instance, I have some thousands of images in Aperture at this point and I would like to add copyrights to the metadata of all of them. There is no way to set the default copyright (so it would be set on import). This wouldn't be so bad if you could select multiple images and edit the copyright field in the inspector to set the field in all of them, but it only affects the first image in the selection. From reading other reviews I understand there are performance issues when bulk metadata editing is supported, further cementing my opinion that the metadata management system needs work. It's there, and it is good enough to get the job done, but it could be a lot better. Seeing as I previously didn't use metadata at all it's a big improvement for me but it is a big step down from dedicated archive management tools such as iView. | |||||||
The LibraryBy default Aperture puts its image library in "~/Pictures/Aperture Library.aplibrary". | ||||||||
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As previously discussed many photographers and reviewers have expressed concern that the Library, by design, cannot span multiple disks. While it is possible to create massive disk arrays that will alleviate this problem, these are expensive and not always easy to manage. | |||||||
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Many photographers and reviewers have expressed concern that the Library, by design, cannot span multiple disks. While it is possible to create massive disk arrays that will alleviate this problem, these are expensive and not always easy to manage (especially when they fail, and they do fail). | |||||||
| Out of curiosity I investigated the library design. "Aperture Library.aplibrary" is a simple directory into which projects and folders containing projects may be inserted. Because the library design uses the filesystem for management it occurred to me that it might be possible to span multiple disks by using symbolic links - fooling Aperture into believing the folder resided on one filesystem when in fact it resided on another. | ||||||||
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It's hard to believe that this is version one of Aperture. It has an astounding number of features and, in general, they work extremely well. The user interface is extremely well thought out and puts its competitors to shame. Despite overall excellent performance, at least on a Quad, there are some performance quirks that need to be ironed out and several long-duration operations are modal. | |||||||
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It's a version 1.0 piece of software and it shows in the quality of its renderer and filters. The default settings for sharpening and contrast are over-aggressive, more like what you expect from consumer software than a professional tool, and it simply cannot deal with noisy image data. Given a clean image that could stand a little sharpening and contrast enhancement you can get some nice prints out of it, but that may be the exception rather than the norm. For now, I am treating Aperture's rendering system as a preview mode rather than a production tool; when I want to make a production image I export the master RAW image to Photoshop CS2 and take it from there. Image stacking and rating are dreams come true when it comes to my workflow. Aperture makes me vastly more efficient at image winnowing, previously a very time-consuming practice. In this area alone it made back its price in only a few sessions. The user interface is fairly well thought out although it has major quirks and some big "what did it do?" surprises. It can stand some tuning, but I've certainly dealt with worse - Capture One's interface, for instance, is just shy of horrible. The archiving and searching tools are a big step up from nothing at all but aren't going to put a crimp on tools like iView until they see major improvements. Bulk metadata management needs improvement and Apple has to make it easy to either split archives and Vaults across physical disks, provide an offline image database, or (preferably) both. | |||||||
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This product is going to sell a lot of Powermacs to photographers, particularly if they correct those few | |||||||
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Is it worth your $500? That depends. If you're looking for a tool to do image manipulations I'd say that you'd be wasting your money. Photoshop does a much better job and you probably already have it. Capture One is vastly superior when it comes to bulk image conversion, especially in terms of quality. But if you need a tool that allows you to organize and select images then Aperture looks rather nice. | |||||||