Apple Aperture RAW Photo Workflow Software Review

by Jim Frost
Last updated: December 23, 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.

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.

On December 21 Apple shipped a patch to Aperture, 1.0.1. Except where noted this review covers 1.0.

Performance

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.

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. Update: In the 1.0.1 patch Apple made changes to auto-stacking that make it very usable, although it flickers a lot.

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.

The other irritation is that the loupe has a significant delay when rolling it over multiple images in the image browser. It shows "loading" for a few seconds the first time you roll over an image. Once loaded it is totally interactive.

Rendering Quality

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.

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.

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.

In order to get a feel for how well Aperture (both 1.0 and 1.0.1) performs at rendering I looked around for one of the most difficult-to-render shots I could find. What follows is a crop of a dark image shot at ISO 1600 on a Canon EOS-300D rendered by various common tools. I used each tool to perform an exposure compensation, added noise reduction as noted, rendered the file to a 16-bit TIFF, then used Photoshop to convert to 8-bit JPEG for web display.

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

I could talk all day about what I like or dislike about each of these but in my opinion Capture One is still the clear winner, producing the most film-like result. Without a healthy dose of noise reduction Aperture's rendering is terrible, full of speckles, and exposure compensation highlights the artifacts. Despite its lack of sophistication Aperture's noise reduction filter does dramatically improve the quality of the image - the result is more or less on par with Photoshop (each has its own particular unpleasant artifacts) except for the loss of sharpness in Aperture's result. Neat Image does a nice job of cleaning up color noise in the Photoshop rendering and smooths continuous-tone areas while it's at it.

The more I look at it the more I believe that Aperture's renderer uses 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 (as Capture One is clearly doing; Photoshop appears to apply a smoothing convolution). 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.

Unfortunately the inability to deal with noisy images is only one of Aperture's rendering issues, although everything else is minor in comparison.

Another issue that I noticed right away is that I almost never had to perform contrast enhancement on images in Aperture. 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.

Similarly it appears to do some 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.

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.

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.

On the export side I ran into two surprises, one in JPEG and one in TIFF.

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.

Some Other Annoyances

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.

Even more surprising than the lack of curves is the lack of an eyedropper tool, making color correction a whole lot more difficult.

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.

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.

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.

Tagging

Another 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. 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.

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. Update: There has been no improvement in Aperture 1.0.1.

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.

Printing

I 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 Library

By default Aperture puts its image library in "~/Pictures/Aperture Library.aplibrary".

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.

To test this possibility I created a new folder, copied it to a different disk, removed the first folder, and created a symbolic link to it. Aperture behaved as expected, importing and manipulating images on the second disk. The only misbehavior I found was that if you delete the folder the root folder of the copy is left around.

Clearly this technique is not supported by Apple, however it may be a way to work around the single physical disk limitation until such time as Apple supports the feature. If you use this technique you may have trouble using Vaults, which also cannot span multiple physical disks. I have not yet investigated if the same trick can be used to create a Vault which spans multiple volumes although it appears likely.

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. You might even get the impression that I'm very unhappy with the product from what you've read so far. So this raises the obvious question: Does Aperture provide any workflow benefits that might justify its cost independent of rendering and image manipulation?

Let me first dispel the notion that I am not happy with the software. I've had it only a few weeks and it is already indispensable. The reason I'm not terribly disappointed in the software is that I didn't really buy it for rendering and image manipulation. I already have excellent rendering and image manipulation tools in Capture One and Photoshop. Spending another $500, sight unseen, for a tool that wasn't likely to be quite a bit better than what I already had would be insane. I didn't even buy it for tagging and archiving, although I'm now using it for that because it's a big improvement over shell scripts and carefully named directories. I pre-ordered Aperture for another purpose entirely.

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 even tries to do well, despite the fact that most photographers spend an inordinate amount of time comparing images.

Indeed it is in the area of inspecting, sorting and comparing a lot of images that Aperture really, really shines. Between the loupe, full-screen mode, and zoom I can very quickly inspect image detail. The stack and comparison features allow me to rapidly relate similar images and choose the best of the lot. The rating feature allows me to filter the best images to the top. And all of these features have keyboard shortcuts to speed their use.

The combination of these features 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. It has been for me, and would be even if it had no rendering, no manipulation, no tagging, and no archiving features at all.

Conclusions

Both versions 1.0 and 1.0.1 show their immaturity in the quality of their renderers and filters. The default settings for sharpening and contrast are over-aggressive (note: I have only inspected 1.0.1 for noisy image handling), 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.

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.

Other Reviews and Comparisons

• Part one of PDOnline's review of Aperture.
• Macworld's "First Look: Aperture 1.0"
• Ars Technica's review and follow-up
• Outback Photo's review
• Digital Photography Review's "Apple Aperture for Pro Photographers" preview
• PC World's "Aperture Takes Digital Photography Back to the Future"
• MacInTouch's reader feedback on Aperture.