A Quick Review of Aperture 1.1

I haven't fully exercised Aperture 1.1 but I spent some time comparing the output of 1.1 versions 1.0 for a few images that rendered poorly under 1.0.

Fine shadow detail, which used to be pretty splotchy in 1.0 (due, I think, to over-sharpening), is vastly improved in 1.1 even on the default conversion settings. I don't tend to shoot things like that so it didn't impact me very much, but when it was bad it was really bad. Not so any longer, as you can see from the following examples:

Aperture 1.0.1	Aperture 1.1

In 1.0.1 the shadow is deep black and very splotchy, exposing almost no detail. In 1.1 the color of non-shadow areas is improved and the shadows are smoother and more detailed.

The thing I hated most about 1.0 was its handling of noisy images; it was one of the worst converters I've ever seen when given noisy input. It was totally unusable. The improvement with 1.1 would be hard to overstate:

Aperture	Aperture+NR (1.96/1.07)	Aperture 1.0.1
Capture One Pro 3.7	Photoshop CS2	Photoshop CS2+Neat Image
Aperture 1.1	Aperture 1.1+NR	Aperture 1.1+NR-CB

In many ways the output of Aperture 1.1 is comparable to Adobe Capture Raw now, with very similar texture, although dark areas still get some speckling. If you additionally apply a (fairly heavy) dose of the Noise Reduction filter you can even get results that are comparable to Capture One. Although C1 still remains my favorite converter for noisy images it's not a slam dunk anymore.

With these improvements comes the ability to adjust the raw conversion parameters to a degree. I mucked around a bit on a few images but found that the defaults are pretty much to my liking, and certainly much better selected than they were in 1.0.

Apple's claims of tremendous speed improvements appear to be significantly overstated. Using heavy filtering I still see significant UI lags even on my Quad. It may be better but the improvement is not obvious. Along those lines it is rather disingenuous of Apple to say that the product is 4x faster on a Macbook Pro than a Powerbook; I don't disbelieve that, but the fact of the matter is that the raw hardware is roughly that much faster. It appears to me that what they're really claiming is that you would prefer to have a new, fast laptop to use this product. That shouldn't surprise anyone. But if you were looking to 1.1 to make the product quicker on whatever hardware you already have you probably aren't going to see much improvement.

Anyway the basic conclusion is that the rumors were true, the renderer really is a dramatic improvement over 1.0. I'm sure not everyone will be happy, no one ever is, but I believe I'll be able to use its converter for almost everything now.

If you have a bunch of images in 1.0 you should be aware that the new interface allows you to select which renderer to use. I had heard that it was going to be a one-way migration but it isn't. You can migrate en-mass, create new versions instead of destructively migrating, migrate a few images at a time, or even one at a time. The documentation implies that you can't revert to 1.0 but it must be referring to the inability to revert en-masse; you can select which renderer you want to use in the raw converter fine-tuning dialogs. It's trivial to flip back and forth between the renderers. I know that with Apple's claims of on-the-fly rendering people were worried that their images would change underneath them whenever Apple upgraded; clearly Apple heard this concern and has addressed it appropriately.

I'll let someone else go through the other myriad small improvements. There are a bunch that aren't earth-shattering but that make the product significantly more usable in various situations. Still no curves though, sigh.

One last thing that's sure to make early adopters happy is the $200 coupon for the online Apple store offered to anyone who bought 1.0. I've never seen a vendor do that before. I suspect that no small number of these coupons will be applied to new laptop purchases. (Mine will.)

If you have 1.0, go get the update -- you'll like it. If you dismissed Aperture because of renderer quality, you might want to take another look.
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