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Apple Aperture 3

April 28, 2010 05:26 PM Filed in: Gadget

I upgraded to Apple Aperture 3 shortly after it was released. I was fortunate enough that that I did not experience some of the initial upgrade woes (much discussed in various photography fora), but apparently those issues have since been fixed via the patch releases (version 3.03 is the current one). You can see the new features and specifications on the Apple website, so here I wanted to share my personal experience with Aperture 3.

Overall the experience has been very positive. Read on to see what I liked and disliked about it.

Likes:
  • The performance gain in processing and browsing is great, but you do need to have the right amount of RAM on your machine. I run Aperture in 64-bit mode on a 64-bit OS so this probably helps.
  • The UI changes are good.
  • The new edit features are really useful. The ability to selectively brush in or brush out most edit capabilities is a very welcome change. I no longer have to rely on 3rd party add-ons and create large TIFF files. I also like the new skin smoothing feature for portraits.
  • I can now correct for lateral chromatic aberration and vignetting.
  • The RAW conversion seems to have improved quite a bit, at least for Nikon and Panasonic cameras. The color saturation and sharpness seems better than Aperture 2. It comes pretty close to Capture NX2 for Nikons.
  • In the metadata now you can see what exposure mode was used and what focus point was used—this is very helpful for selecting/cataloguing images.
  • Support of the new cameras, especially the micro four thirds format cameras was a huge plus—it allows me to use the Panasonic GF1.
  • The ability to merge two Aperture libraries is a huge help. I have Aperture running on the Mac Pro at home as well as the Macbook Pro which I use while traveling. I can process photos during my travel then merge them back into the main library when I return.
  • The faces and places features are a nice to have especially since iPhoto supports them. They are helpful for searching and cataloguing. With the GPS unit attached to my D700, the photos are automatically geo-tagged and Aperture can put them on a map.
  • Integration with Facebook is improved. It now behaves like what the Mobile Me integration was on Aperture 2.

Dislikes:
  • External plug-in editors are still 32-bit applications so when I use them Aperture has to shut down and restart in 32-bit mode. It's not a huge issue, but just an annoyance. I am expecting this issue will go away over time as the third party plug-ins become available in 64-bit.
  • There is no correction for lens distortion. I was using a plug-in called PTLens—I will continue to use it for now. Although it is actually rare that I have to use it with the lenses that I have.
  • Some plug-ins (e.g. Genuine Fractals 6) cannot handle 16-bit TIFF files as input from Aperture, so I have to be careful about what order I perform the edits. This is probably more of a plug-in issues than an Aperture issue.

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