Aperture 1.1

Hi Gang,

Am wondering about the latest release of Aperture. My workflow is entirely Photoshop CS2, and works well for me. So what I'm interested in learning about Aperture is how well the updated RAW conversion flows, and how fast it will be on a MacBook Pro with 2.5GB Ram.

I wish they offered a demo. I'm not going to spend three bills on something that 'might' work, been there, done that, not doing that again. If you have side-by-side conversions from ACR and Aperture I'd love to see what you can do with it. FWIW I've tested Lightroom and DPP and kept going back to ACR and Pshop.

Thanks,

matt

--
Be Good Humans

http://www.theMirrorpool.com

Hobbies: Art, Photos, Shooting, Music, Etc.

ethernectar said:

Hi Gang,

Am wondering about the latest release of Aperture. My workflow is
entirely Photoshop CS2, and works well for me. So what I'm
interested in learning about Aperture is how well the updated RAW
conversion flows, and how fast it will be on a MacBook Pro with
2.5GB Ram.

Click to expand...

MBP maxes out at 2.0GB not 2.5GB

ethernectar said:

I wish they offered a demo. I'm not going to spend three bills on
something that 'might' work, been there, done that, not doing that
again. If you have side-by-side conversions from ACR and Aperture
I'd love to see what you can do with it. FWIW I've tested Lightroom
and DPP and kept going back to ACR and Pshop.

Click to expand...

After I've got Aperture, I ditched Photoshop and used it only for pixel editing. ACR sux in my opinion.

ethernectar said:

Thanks,

matt

--
Be Good Humans

http://www.theMirrorpool.com

Hobbies: Art, Photos, Shooting, Music, Etc.

Click to expand...

--
Check this out! The coolest keyboard I've ever seen!
http://www.artlebedev.com/portfolio/optimus/

oops, my mistake about the Ram, yes it has 2GB of ram.

Do you have photos to compare?

matt
--
Be Good Humans

http://www.theMirrorpool.com

Hobbies: Art, Photos, Shooting, Music, Etc.

I ditched CS2 also. I do not have any images now to compare, but I did a comparison against CS2 and C1Pro and Aperture for me was better. This is on Canon 1D series files and whether or not it holds true for other manufactureres I do not know. That being said, for some images one of the other programs may produce better results, but in general I prefer the Ap conversions.

It's about workflow, I convert 1DsmkII files in Aperture, I used Photoshop before, as for which does a better job, no idea, I just don't have time to compare pixels, does the Aperture look good? looks great to me. It makes handling clients so much easier and keeping track of who's had what etc.

If your looking for a program with plugins etc or layers, Aperture is not for you, it just does a very good straight conversion of the RAW as is.

Kevin.

Glad to hear that. Most of my RAW conversions are done in one setting and are pretty straightforward, but occasionally I'll take an image - or multiple exposures - into photoshop to work some magic or make panos/etc. Buy my raw processing is done in a separate workflow.

I would still like to see the same RAW file converted in CS2/ACR and Aperture at full size. If anyone's got that, that'd be great. Even a 1:1 crop would be good to see.

Thanks,

matt

--
Be Good Humans

http://www.theMirrorpool.com

Hobbies: Art, Photos, Shooting, Music, Etc.

Aperture should run quite well on a MacBook Pro -- better than on my dual 2GHz G5 with the ATI Radeon X800XT card.

Aperture doesn't replace Photoshop. Think of it as a sophisticated front-end for PS.

Aperture does a better job at RAW conversion that ACR or Lightroom beta 3. It has enough flexibility to post-process most things on its own. For the few images that you will want to round-trip to PS, Aperture handles that seamlessly.

Check out the Ars Technica review. They gave the 1.0 version a rating of 4/10 and bumped the 1.1 version to a rating of 8/10.

Highly Recommended.

IF you are shooting a lot of RAW images, you will want a big, fast external drive (FW800) for Aperture's library.
--
Cheers,
Joe

ethernectar said:

Glad to hear that. Most of my RAW conversions are done in one
setting and are pretty straightforward, but occasionally I'll take
an image - or multiple exposures - into photoshop to work some
magic or make panos/etc. Buy my raw processing is done in a
separate workflow.

I would still like to see the same RAW file converted in CS2/ACR
and Aperture at full size. If anyone's got that, that'd be great.
Even a 1:1 crop would be good to see.

Click to expand...

Here's about the closest thing you are going to see, the Ars review of 1.1.1 - they have full-size (100%) crops from a variety of images in APerture 1.0, Aperture 1.1, C1 Pro, and Lightroom (which uses a slightly newer version of the ACR engine in CS2).

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/aperture-1.1.ars/5

The page after that has further conversions from different cameras.

I didn't like the Ars review of 1.0 because I thought they placed way to much importance and focus on the RAW conversion quality without considering other features; but that same tunnel vision yields a good review to look at when wanting a carefully detailed look at RAW conversion in newer versions such as Aperture 1.1.1.

--
---> Kendall
http://InsideAperture.com
http://www.pbase.com/kgelner
http://www.pbase.com/sigmasd9/user_home

Matt --

I recently purchased Aperture and have had it running for a coupl eof weeks on a MBP with 2gb of ram. Definately woud be faster on a quad but I don't find any real problems with the exception of getting the occassional apining beachball when examining areas of an image through the loupe...but I really don't find myself using the loups all that often.

I have opended the same RAW file in Aperture, Nikon Capture 4.4 and Lightroom beta3. As has been my experience in both ACR and Lightroom, the file in Lightroom appeared a bit flat overall. The NC file had a bit more shadow throughout the image but it and the Aperture file are pretty comprable in overall color and appearance.

Prior to purchasing Aperture, I have primarily used NC because of my desire to utilize a bit of the in camera settings from time to time and then used PhotoShop to make final adjustments. My goal or view with either Aperture or Lightroom was simply to streamline the process a bit...although it took a bit to feel comfortable with Aperture -- because it is so much different from Lightroom or PS and I am used to using curves to make an adjustment -- I feel pretty comfortable with the program now. In fact I feel that via Aperture the resulting tones and colors are much richer than what I previously acheived in Lightroom...haven't tried it in NC NX but at this point I don't think I will as I am happy with the Aperture results. I should point out that I was a bit concerned as I had heard the NEF files appeared flat in Aperture as well...so far this has not been my experience and if it were flat it is not as bad as ACR's appearance.

Like you, I found the lack of a 30 day trial a bit frustrating and the help you get even in an Apple store is tough also. This said, you might try to take a RAW into a store and pull it up in Aperture and play a bit... This truly is a well done program and it can only get better as they tak into account the feedback that is received. Good luck!

--
Best regards -- Bishop

http://www.hitherandyonphotography.com

I've been using Aperture since it was released (yes, I even got my $200 credit from Apple) and will toss in my two cents.

1) The sharpening takes a bit getting used to as you have a sharpening tool in the "raw fine tune" section and also the "standard" sharpening tool. As a D200 user, I pretty much max out the raw tool sharpening intensity to "1" and then use the "standard" sharpen tool from there.

2) RAW conversions are very good in 1.1 and I did some comparisons at one point against Capture 4.4 and NX and ACR as well. Overall, I found Aperture 1.1 RAW conversions equal to or better than ACR and not quite as good as NC/NX in the shadows. Seemed like Aperture, in some shots, introduced a tiny bit more noise than NC/NX in shadow areas. Totally subjective on my part and it's pretty hard to make sure all settings are identical, but I could see the difference. I'm not convinced the difference would be noticable on a print so I don't worry.

3) You loose in-camera adjustments made to RAW images. NC and/or NX will use those camera adjustments when you pull up an image but in Aperture you are back to square one.... kind of makes all those banks of settings in a dslr like the d200 moot. If you use NC/NX to make raw adjustments before sending the image to Aperture, those adjustments are not recognized by Aperture unless you convert to TIFF first. (if you shoot jpg, then in-camera changes are passed along of course)

Ability to use external editor (CS2) is key if you need more of a bit editing tool or want to do Photoshop-y stuff. I find myself doing very little of that though.

Regards,

--
P. Guyton
http://www.pbase.com/corsairvelo

After reading more reviews and forums about it, I bought it yesterday. Got it installed last night and played around a bit. Undecided as to whether I'm going to import all of my old RAW files quite yet, or just use it from here on out. I may uncover some images if I go back through them...but that's a big chunk of time...

Stay tuned, will post more feedback on it...

matt

--
Be Good Humans

http://www.theMirrorpool.com

Hobbies: Art, Photos, Shooting, Music, Etc.

A lot of folks who are new to Aperture assume that like Apple's consumer products it is absolutely easy to use and needs no manual. That is not true of this program. It is a very feature rich and deep program that has almost limitless capabilities. I recommend the Apple Pro Training series book by Orlando Luna and Ben Long. You will learn tons of things this program can do, and how to do it.

I did some comparisons between Aperture, ACR, and Nikon Capture with a D200 file. ACR and Capture tended to add some noise reduction into the RAW conversion that made the picture look sharper, but if you zoomed in on the shadows, you saw that the noise in the shadows was all "chunky", vs. Aperture which did not do much noise reduction and had a smooth, random noise that I personally like better.

Experiment with the Camera RAW Fine Tuning controls. I found that if I turned off the auto noise reduction, and the chroma blur, that I got the best raw converison for my camera. High ISO's, of course, may need them turned back on.
--
Only my opinion. It's worth what you paid for it. Your mileage may vary! ;-}

Thanks for the warning, but I know what I'm getting into, don't need/want a consumer product.

I think the biggest advantage Aperture offers is the organizing functionality. Just from my initial experiments last night, it'll cut at least one or two steps out of my workflow.

matt

--
Be Good Humans

http://www.theMirrorpool.com

Hobbies: Art, Photos, Shooting, Music, Etc.

I have a whole bunch of articles on Aperture on my blog. Before you import everything, read the Library articles so you understand the library and its folder system. It will save you a lot of experimentation. It's also handy to set up a test library and just throw a couple of hundred images in there. Use it to play with, then junk it when you are done.

--
Aperture Articles -> http://homepage.mac.com/bagelturf

ethernectar said:

After reading more reviews and forums about it, I bought it
yesterday. Got it installed last night and played around a bit.
Undecided as to whether I'm going to import all of my old RAW files
quite yet, or just use it from here on out. I may uncover some
images if I go back through them...but that's a big chunk of time...

Stay tuned, will post more feedback on it...

matt

Click to expand...

I also did some research online before buying Aperture. Although I was still a bit skeptical when I bought it last week, it's more than lived up to my expectations. It's replaced Photoshop for the vast majority of my image editing, which mostly involves cropping, straightening, adjusting levels and white balance, and a bit of sharpening. Aperture is also great for organizing images and especially for going through hundreds of images quickly and picking ones to delete.

has anyone decided to just use aperture with max quality jpgs at medium size, exported from, say, NCR, to improve the speed of aperture, instead of importing all the raw files into apertures library?

i have 100gb+ of d70 & d200 raw files that need sorting and catergorizing and i'm a bit in 2 minds about which way to go

the speed with a small amount of d200 raws on a dual 1.8 w 3gb of ram and radeon 9600 XT is fine but i'm concerned the responsiveness will decrease once i import my entire library into aperture

i want to set up a workflow that allows me to do selects from 15,000+ images for a book that will have around 1000 images, and i'm concerned that it will be too time consuming doing all that using the orignal raw files

ultimately everything would go to photoshop for cmyk conversion, for which i will setup a script as described in http://www.completedigitalphotography.com/index.php?p=414

any advice appreciated

Poking around inside the Aperture application I came across a lot of clues that point to a furure version being able to handle off-line media and proxies.

It would work like this. You import RAW into Aperture and do your normal processing. Then you back up to one or more vaults. Once backed up, Aperture will let you convert the images in your library to proxies: JPEGs or some other format that is faster to process and uses less disk space. You manipulate those proxies exactly as you would anything else but faster. Make your book.

Now you come to print or export your images and Aperture figures out where the originals are and prompts you to mount the vaults if they are not already on line. Crunch crunch overnight. Your book is ready, this time with the original images in it. Part of Aperture's philosphy is to defer processing to when it is actually needed. This is just part of that philosophy that they have not implemented or debugged fully yet.

--
Aperture articles -> http://homepage.mac.com/bagelturf

--
Good Golly Miss Molly

Have done a bit of DV, so applying the whole proxies idea to still editing would be very nice indeed. So far I'm +1 on Aperture. Did some studio stills this weekend, raw conversions look great, even with default settings. Organizational features are great so far.

As I understand it, you can only have 1 library?!? I can see an immediate need for multiple libraries on different storage devices, or vaults rather.

Performance on the MBP seems to be pretty good. Got one unusual pause when I tried to 'stamp' some adjustments on a group of images, still haven't quite figured that out.

matt

--
Be Good Humans

http://www.theMirrorpool.com

Hobbies: Art, Photos, Shooting, Music, Etc.

Actually you can have multiple libraries. Just select which one you want in Aperture> Preferences, quit the program, and when relaunched you'll be in the newly designated library.