Aperture 3 is here and Apple has made it a lot more flexible and friendly. In fact, Apple has reversed the waterfall and pulled the popular Faces and Places feature in iPhone up to Aperture. Features like photo books, which have existed in both products, have become easier to use in Aperture but there are also more options. Aperture, if you don’t remember, is a photo management tool introduced for professional photographers. It was brought forth sometime before Adobe introduced Lightroom and it caused a sensation. It handled some of the most common tasks performed by professional photographers—and in so doing it duplicated some of Photoshop’s jobs albeit in a simple, one-two button way. Reflecting its development as a professional tool, Aperture was priced at $499 when it was released. As it turned out, that was too much and the price dropped to $199.
Unfortunately, after a fast turn around to Aperture 2, which fixed some bugs and improved the way in which Aperture worked with RAW files, Apple seemed to lose interest in Aperture and Adobe’s competing product Lightroom gained adherents.
I was reminded of all that when I got back on the Mac with a PowerBook Pro. I tried out iPhoto and liked it at first. Actually, I thought to myself, this could work instead of Aperture. I loved the Faces tool and I loved the easy geotagging. Apple, makes it really easy to place pictures by letting you search for easy place names, like Grand Central Station, the Ebisu Center in Tokyo, the Golden Gate Bridge, the White House, it gets you there. At the same time, Apple’s presumptuous file handling got the better of me again, especially when I wanted to use my images in a Premiere video. I wound up downloading Picasa.
With the release of Aperture 3, Apple has removed any reason that might have made me hesitate to use Aperture. It’s been 3 years in the making but Apple has really fixed the problems that plague professional photographers … and me. There is a whole army of people like me who use images in our work. It would be nice if we were better photographers with assistants to log our photos, and clients to buy them but even though that’s not the case we need a good photo management and editing tool to deal with our images.
There were several very positive signs right out of the box. Aperture lets me import my images from anywhere and it gives me the option of pulling the images into the Aperture file system, leaving them where they are, or moving them to the pictures file folder. For me, this is pretty much the whole ball game. It also did a slick job of importing my database from the files stored on the Time Machine disk.
Aperture goes even further with an import feature that allows professional photographers to sync and edit databases between machines so that changes can be maintained across computers.
Apple has obviously made extensive changes to Aperture’s imaging engine. In fact, Aperture is built on the iPhoto engine. This has an effect on images edited previously in the older version of Aperture. If you want, Aperture will reprocess the image or you can step back since the editing process is non-destructive.
Faces and Places
Apple says they’ve added 200 new features to Aperture and that’s easy to believe. Most obviously, the interface is easier to use and the tasks you perform most frequently are located in a panel that has tabs for library functions, metadata, and adjustments.
There are still some features that were hard to find but Apple has created instructional videos that solve those kinds of problems instantly. For instance, Apple has expanded the tools for making books but I couldn’t find them at first. And, I knew that Apple had added video support to its slide show capability, but I couldn’t work that one out either. As it turns out, it was easy, just click on new to create a new project, web page, book, or slide show. The older version of Aperture asked you to work in separate environments depending on the job you were doing. (Lightroom has a similar problem and it doesn’t really reflect the way most people work.)
The Faces and Places feature comes from iPhoto and as you might expect, when you import images from iPhoto all that metadata comes along. In Aperture, identified faces can be found throughout your entire database or by project. Places expands on iPhoto’s geotagging capabilities with support for cameras with GPS. Images can also be dragged to an interactive map. If you like, you can track the progress of a photo shoot or a trip—and that information can be used in the photo books to add a map.
Adjustments
Apple has worked hard on the adjustments and it has recognized the dirty little secret shared by professional photographers and not-so-professional photographers and that is when a one button enhance works, use it. Apple has added new presets and it allows users to save their adjustments as a preset. This is the sort of thing you only have to use once to understand. Frequently, one batch of photos is going to have similar problems—the lighting was not great, for instance. Creating a preset lets you use the same correction in batch mode, or just have an easy correction to reach for first when familiar problems crop up. Kirk Paulsen, a senior director at Apple, was particularly pleased with the work done in adjustments and says he believes that photographers will contribute their own pre-sets, they’ll share them and they’ll sell them.
Poking around Apple’s Aperture site, by the way, reveals that a very active community of developers has grown up around Aperture.
The brushes feature in Aperture is also nice. It would be nice to be able to save these as well, but so far I haven’t seen a way to do this. Brushes let you apply a change to just a part of an image. With edge detection you can stay within the lines and the ability to soften and vary the strength of the effect and the size of the brush gives a nice feeling of control. One of the new features added is a skin tone brush for portrait work that lets you smooth out skin tones.
Apple has taken advantage of the CPU and the GPU to accelerate the performance of Aperture. I have a fairly modest Macbook Pro but I found little to complain about in performance—that’s not to say I didn’t notice some lag but it was well within the bounds of reasonable expectation and those blessed with discrete graphics processors will.
A note of caution: in general Aperture is solid, but in a heavy session of adding places and renaming files to make a book—Aperture crashed frequently. However it recovered with minimal loss of work. Others have complained that it is slow but I’m not seeing anything out of line in comparison to comparable professional products.
Aperture is $199, $99 upgrade.
What do we think?
Apple has recognized that “professionals” come in all different sizes with very different job descriptions and technical skills. With features like Faces and Places, Apple has added an element of play to Aperture that actually improves its ability to organize information.
Using Aperture has made me think about how much image processing has improved over the years. It’s not that these capabilities are so new but they have been refined so that everyone can use them. Probably the most important thing Apple has done has been to show a commitment to Aperture that will bring many disaffected users back to the program. To make sure that happens, Apple is offering the upgrade price to users who have Aperture 1 and 2.
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