Luminous Landscape Forum

Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Other Raw Converters => Apple Aperture Q&A => Topic started by: braeburnboy on August 10, 2008, 09:46:01 am

Title: New Aperture plug-ins
Post by: braeburnboy on August 10, 2008, 09:46:01 am
Aperture 1. got me back into digital photography in a big way but  Apple almost lost me with when i had crashing episodes  -  which ironically and happily drove me to stumble on Luminous Landscapes. I started using Lightroom after buying LL's excellent tutorials from this site

When aperture came out with ersion 2.0 i tried it and discovered the book feature. Combined with the ability to edit inside aperture using photoshop has made me use it almost exclusively since then

i'm only a partime semipro (i get paid for some stuff i do) who has loved photography for 30 years and my workflow & work volume isn't great enough or as demanding as Michael's to warrant settling on one or the other.

If it were, i guess i'd lean toward lightroom as i do use all the other adobe products but the book feature in Aperture has made me a regular user - i have done several books and the customers LOVED THEM and aperture makes the workflow so easy

i digress - so now i just got a rss feed from apple

Aperture Plug-ins (http://www.apple.com/aperture/resources/plugins.html)

announcing 70 new plug-ins for Aperture including NOISE NINJA - one of my favorite photoshop plug-ins

-has anyone used any of these plug-ins?

more important  - will LUMINOUS LANDSCAPE weigh in on Aperture with these plug-ins as the appear to give lightroom a real run for its money as well as changing the workflow significantly but adding a pile of "inside aperture" abilities??

what say you?
Title: New Aperture plug-ins
Post by: CatOne on August 10, 2008, 10:41:09 am
I've used Noise Ninja a bit -- it does a fairly good job of noise reduction inside of Aperture.

On the plus side for Aperture's plug-ins... there are now a large number of them and you can do some very nice things with them.  On the downside, the plug-ins work on TIFF files so it breaks the fully "non-destructive, always work on the RAW data itself" nature of Aperture.  It's basically like round tripping to Photoshop, but it's faster and a bit easier.

Lightroom doesn't yet have plug-ins but does support non-destructive local editing in the LR 2.0 version.  I wouldn't expect to see a full suite of plug-ins for Lightroom that operate without rendering out a TIFF... doing this in a way where performance is reasonable is very, very difficult.

I wouldn't really expect Michael to cover Aperture here much.  He's already noted he uses LR and will focus on that as opposed to Aperture.
Title: New Aperture plug-ins
Post by: braeburnboy on August 10, 2008, 10:53:44 am
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I wouldn't really expect Michael to cover Aperture here much.  He's already noted he uses LR and will focus on that as opposed to Aperture.
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i thought since he was reviewing all new versions the onslaught of plug-ins might be almost an equivalent

oh well . . . anyway how do you get a book out of lightroom? i recall michael has an article on books but i believe it is somewhat dated
Title: New Aperture plug-ins
Post by: digitaldog on August 10, 2008, 12:12:44 pm
Its also important to understand what these plug-in's, by and large do. They are not at all different from the plug-in's you may already be using in Photoshop in that Aperture renders the Raws to pixels and then applies the plug-ins (just like rendering the Raw to pixels and doing the same work in Photoshop). IOW, the work is not being done in the Raw pipeline, such as you do see in Bibble.

So, if you had say Noise Ninja, applying corrections in Photoshop or Aperture would pretty much result in the same quality of data. You may save some time by not having to open the rendered image in Photoshop and apply that, so in a way, that's useful. But its a far cry from what we really need, which is the ability to apply these plug-in's within the Raw processing pipeline.
Title: New Aperture plug-ins
Post by: Graeme Nattress on August 10, 2008, 02:03:06 pm
That's totally correct Andrew. The current Aperture plugin architecture is back to the old paradigm of applying plugins, rather than the nice, non-destructive way of working we've come to enjoy. It is a far cry from what is needed.
Title: New Aperture plug-ins
Post by: CatOne on August 10, 2008, 08:18:17 pm
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But its a far cry from what we really need, which is the ability to apply these plug-in's within the Raw processing pipeline.
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Agreed.  And I'd bet both Aperture and Lightroom would do it today if it were easy  
Title: New Aperture plug-ins
Post by: ajtaylor on August 11, 2008, 04:55:21 pm
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Agreed.  And I'd bet both Aperture and Lightroom would do it today if it were easy 
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Bibble does it. Ok, so it's not a "non-desctructive" editor (I hate that term), but you can install plugins, and they appear in the adjustments "HUD" - i.e. you don't have to turn your image into anything to apply them, and can tweak them and see the results as part of your RAW workflow.
Title: New Aperture plug-ins
Post by: Graeme Nattress on August 11, 2008, 05:08:40 pm
Given Apple themselves have added features that fit in their OpenGL based pipeline, I don't see why not 3rd parties could "drop in" at the appropriate place. It would be tricky to drop a CPU plugin in, but there's a hell of a lot you can do on the GPU.

Graeme
Title: New Aperture plug-ins
Post by: Kenneth Sky on September 15, 2008, 10:49:24 am
I've been using Noise Ninja for 2 weeks as a plug-in. I've used it early in the work process and just prior to printing with good results. I am confused about the right workflow. Picturecode recommends using it early. I prefer to make adjustments parametrically to keep file size down and then go to NN which will convert it to a TIFF automatically as opposed to doing all the adjustments on a TIFF. Which is best?