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Author Topic: Aperture 3 is out.  (Read 19338 times)

Richard Marcellus

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Aperture 3 is out.
« on: February 09, 2010, 09:43:12 am »

http://www.apple.com/aperture/

Apple is claiming 200 new features. They have added the expected features from iPhoto (Faces, Places, new slideshows). There are edge-aware non destructive brushes, setting presets, library switching without restarting, a curve tool, and 64 bit support. There is even audio and limited video support now.

Overall it looks like a solid upgrade that fills in all of the features I have been wanting.

As expected it is Intel, and Leopard (either variety) only.

There is a 30-day free trial available for download.

Richard

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adam_j

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Aperture 3 is out.
« Reply #1 on: February 09, 2010, 03:53:54 pm »

I've been using lightroom and don't really want to switch but I thought I'd give it a try and some of the features are pretty cool.  I'd recommend giving the 30day trial a shot even if you stick with Lightroom it shows you what else is available.
Adam

KirbyKrieger

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Aperture 3 is out.
« Reply #2 on: February 09, 2010, 04:03:36 pm »

Quote from: adam_j
I've been using lightroom and don't really want to switch but I thought I'd give it a try and some of the features are pretty cool.  I'd recommend giving the 30day trial a shot even if you stick with Lightroom it shows you what else is available.
Adam
I've been using LR3b since getting a camera.  I loved C1Pro, but need DAM as well as raw processing.  I'd love to hear from experienced users how LR3b and Aperture 3 stack up against each other.  LR is powerful, but I still find the interface somewhat hard to use -- like dressing a family of butterflies.  Aperture feels much more supple.

CatOne

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Aperture 3 is out.
« Reply #3 on: February 09, 2010, 04:55:49 pm »

Quote from: KirbyKrieger
I've been using LR3b since getting a camera.  I loved C1Pro, but need DAM as well as raw processing.  I'd love to hear from experienced users how LR3b and Aperture 3 stack up against each other.  LR is powerful, but I still find the interface somewhat hard to use -- like dressing a family of butterflies.  Aperture feels much more supple.

Feature-wise, Aperture 3 closes the gap on the main Lightroom advantage, which was local adjustments.  There are _tons_ of new features:

http://www.apple.com/aperture/features/

The metadata handling, metadata and develop presets, XMP metadata import support, IPTC Core support, are all huge.

Feature-wise, I'd say the two products are now very, very close.  Save the support for faces, places, and video/audio support that Aperture 3 has.

It remains to be seen if Adobe has some tricks up its sleeves between the LR3 beta and the LR3 product that ships.  Also, I don't have enough time with really tough, noisy images to test the quality of the RAW converter differences between the two products, so I can't say.  Obviously, output quality is a critical thing and Adobe's focusing on that with LR3; I don't yet know how Aperture 3 is, but Aperture 2 was IMO quite good already.
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Hywel

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Aperture 3 is out.
« Reply #4 on: February 09, 2010, 05:29:16 pm »

I'm delighted that Aperture 3 has finally emerged. I was forced to move from Aperture 2 to Lightroom 3 beta because Aperture just couldn't handle Hasselblad H3D and Canon 5D Mk2 files stably enough, especially when exporting to the portraiture plug-in that was an essential plug-in given that Aperture 2 didn't do skin smoothing particularly well.

Working with LR3b, it has certainly earned my respect for its capabilities. Not least its stability- whilst I've had crashes, the production releases of many products are less stable. My fears of doing production work on a beta have proved unfounded. It's a bit slow, but it is a lot easier to make a reliable program run fast than a fast program run reliably, so I'm sure the release will be much quicker.

I like LR's adjustment brushes a lot, and I find myself sending less and less images to portraiture, and none at all to Photoshop: haven't opened it in months. Hooray! (I'm in the small minority who found photoshop a cussed, unintuitive kludge together of 15+ year old code an impediment to making good images rather than an enabler).

LR2 was inexplicably missing some fundamental-to-me features (dumb stuff like PNG overlay on output so I can watermark my images and maintain my corporate identity). I was thinking that I'd have to move to LR3 for good when it came out, and was hoping that it emerged before the time limit expired on the beta, because I didn't want to fire up Photoshop just to batch run putting the damn watermarks on every image.

However, LR3 beta definitely did not earn my love. I find it frankly incredible that any modern software is built around a modal interface: you have to be in the right mode to do anything- try to crop in library mode, or look at files on your hard drive in develop mode, or add a keyword to the metadata in develop mode and you can't. Or you can but it works in a subtly different way. Even the keyboard shortcuts and menu items are modal, with some menus not appearing in some modes, so you can't even use the Mac's ability to attach keyboard shortcuts to override them. For example, R gets you to develop module, crop tool, from anywhere in the program. But N only gets you the Spot Removal tool in develop- in all the other modules it does something different. Even hold-down-space-click-drag to move around the image at 100% zoom is modal- if works with a tool selected in develop mode, but if you do it without a tool selected, it zooms out. So you need to know whether you have a tool selected or not before being able to use the keyboard shortcut. For all the excuses that Adobephiles come up with, that's just poor design in my book. I've been using LR3b day in day out for two months now and that spacebar one STILL trips me up several times a day!

 This modal interface was the reason I was using Aperture 2 over LR2, and even with LR's impressive functionality I'd still be using Aperture 2 if it had been able to handle my files robustly. It did less, but I really liked the way it did it and it suited my work flow rather better.

  I'm therefore delighted to be able to give Aperture 3 a full run down before the LR3 beta runs out, and decide which program to settle on for the next few years of DAM and non-destructive editing for all my photos. I'm really hoping to like Aperture 3- they seem to have been listening to the wish lists, which is nice. It would have been even nicer to have a vague hint from Apple that some of this was in the works... I know Apple is famously secretive, but letting your professional customers suspect you might have abandoned them is not a clever move when trying to built a user base.

  Oh, plus aperture can at least SEE my Hasselblad FFF files, which really helps when it comes to DAM, even if I'm actually still using Phocus to make intermediate TIFFs at the moment.

  I've ordered Aperture 3 in the post- might just download the 30 day trial and get playing with it anyway!

  Cheers, Hywel.


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msbc

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Aperture 3 is out.
« Reply #5 on: February 09, 2010, 05:59:16 pm »

Quote from: CatOne
Feature-wise, I'd say the two products are now very, very close.  Save the support for faces, places, and video/audio support that Aperture 3 has.

And don't forget - Aperture has had soft proofing since day 1!

Mark
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Mark Connell
Melbourne, Australia

pete_truman

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Aperture 3 is out.
« Reply #6 on: February 09, 2010, 06:11:03 pm »

I've been so happy just taking pictures and processing them with Aperture 2 I'd almost forgotten that an upgrade might happen. Now I'll have to spend some time learning about the new features...
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Pete Truman

Theodore

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Aperture 3 is out.
« Reply #7 on: February 09, 2010, 11:20:04 pm »

This is really exciting.  Aperture 3 is appears to be a huge improvement over Aperture 2.

I've been using Lightroom, and then LR2 in conjunction with PS CS 3&4 for the last few years.  And I need to give real credit to LR - it has served me well.  I tried Aperture and the Aperture 2 upgrade and I loved a lot about that program.  The interface was excellent, but I was always amazed at the import speed - instantaneous and the previews were there instantly as well (and 10.6 increased Apertures speed by significant amounts as Lloyd Chambers noted on his blog a few months back) - and I really liked the RAW conversions that Aperture did.  But, and these were big issues for me,  I didn't like that the localized adjustments in Aperture 2 were baked in, and file management on multiple drives seemed better in LR 2 as well.  

With the new release, I see that Aperture has a lot of powerful brush effects that are all non-destructive and they appear to go beyond the LR offerings into Photoshop territory, with some commonly used "action" type effects like skin softening.  And other effects, like vignettes can be brushed in.   I don't know if that will replace my round trips into CS4 to use the Boutwell's Totally Rad Action's Retouch Pro, which is just fantastic, but I'm eager to try it.  The level of control appears to be great - I've just watched a few of Apple's excellent tutorials and I'm really impressed.  Here's the tutorial page:  http://www.apple.com/aperture/how-to/  Again, I'm looking forward to seeing how those controls work for me.  The preset functions also look really neat - real time previews, and like LR - you can create your own presets which will preview as well.  

The new release looks very robust for multiple drive locations and multiple libraries.  That's excellent. I know that was one of Michael's issues with the first Aperture incarnation - for some reason his comment on this site from a few years back has stuck with me.  Also, you can now put the photos off the laptop to the MacPro and keep working on them on the laptop - not just key wording - and then merge the work files.  I'll thrown in a few of the Aperture page links that I've been looking at today.  Here's a piece that highlights the merging the library files.  http://www.apple.com/aperture/action/menuez/

The multi-media powers of the program look ground breaking and appear to be done with elegant simplicity of the best Apple software.  The program allows for the import and organization / editing of HD video.  That video can be part of photo projects, so everything is together.  The video can then be edited - in Aperture - with photos, which can have transitions, the Ken Burns effect, music, etc. added.  You can play the music and then mark where you want the transitions to be with a key stroke, so you can have a frame change with every snare drum beat.  The piece on combining video and stills is really impressive.  Here's a neat one by Bill Frakes http://www.apple.com/aperture/action/frakes/  

I even like the GPS feature as Jim Richardson's video demonstrated how it can be used to find all the photos taken in a given location.  And if you don't have a GPS device, just snap a photo with an iPhone (assuming one has one) and then you can import that coordinate into the photo folder with a drop down menu.  It's like a visual meta-data search.  Really cool.  http://www.apple.com/aperture/action/richardson/

There's also a Chase Jarvis video that's interesting:  http://www.apple.com/aperture/action/jarvis/

What's interesting about this is that I'm really excited about this software.  I can't recall the last time I was excited about software.  I think it may be because it appears to be doing so many of the things that I always wanted a work flow program to do and doing them in a very simple yet powerful way that look efficient and have that Aperture "organic" interface to them - i.e. being able to edit at any time, in a slide show, making a book or a layout sheet, without restriction and the seamless integration into the OS that is so powerful for file handling on a Mac.  So, perhaps it's too much caffeine, but I do have really high hopes for this.  Joe McNally appeared to be emotionally affected by the new version, which he notes on his blog today that he's been using for a few months now, so perhaps my excitement about the new version is not a completely isolated reaction.  

I'm excited to also read what people discover about the software here as folks begin to use it, whether the new version solves issues that you may have had with ver. 2 or not, and what pleasant surprises are encounted.  


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Theodore

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Aperture 3 is out.
« Reply #8 on: February 10, 2010, 12:30:39 am »

One new discovery and one that surprised me: Aperture 3 has integrated some high end book / album shops like Leather Craftsman in addition to the Apple book printing service.  http://www.apple.com/aperture/resources/th...arty-books.html
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Jeremy Roussak

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Aperture 3 is out.
« Reply #9 on: February 10, 2010, 03:45:03 am »

Quote from: Hywel
I'm in the small minority who found photoshop a cussed, unintuitive kludge together of 15+ year old code an impediment to making good images rather than an enabler.
Less small than you might think, I suspect!

Jeremy
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Richard Marcellus

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Aperture 3 is out.
« Reply #10 on: February 10, 2010, 10:11:06 am »

Quote from: Theodore
One new discovery and one that surprised me: Aperture 3 has integrated some high end book / album shops like Leather Craftsman in addition to the Apple book printing service.

Those look really nice. Thanks for pointing that out.
Apple has really made a effort in all areas to improve Aperture.

Richard.
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David Hufford

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Aperture 3 is out.
« Reply #11 on: February 10, 2010, 07:32:09 pm »

This may seem an odd question as it certainly does to me, but does anyone actually have the download link? I went to the Aperture site, clicked the icon to have the serial number and link sent to my e-mail. No response on the first try to hotmail, but on the second for g-mail, I got a jibberish-like message with the serial number but no link. There is no way to directly contact a human at Apple by e-mail that I am aware of that will get a reply.

Never mind, was successful on the third try to a Yahoo account.
« Last Edit: February 10, 2010, 07:37:13 pm by drichi »
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Theodore

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Aperture 3 is out.
« Reply #12 on: February 10, 2010, 09:27:47 pm »

I was just on the Apple page of short tutorials ( http://www.apple.com/aperture/how-to/ ) and was looking at the videos on the Recovery slider and the Highlights and Shadow sliders - three different adjustments in Aperture.  What struck me was the massive control over something like the Highlight slider - how you can set all sorts of parameters about how its going to behave.  As with all of the adjustments you can choose to brush in highlight recovery or the the shadow settings.  This appears to be a whole other level of control over what LR has had to date.  

Also, there's no restriction on putting the trial on multiple machines which is nice, so I've got it now on the MacPro and the Macbook, which I'll take with me to New Orleans this week which should give me an opportunity to really work with it on some new images.
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hsmeets

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Aperture 3 is out.
« Reply #13 on: February 11, 2010, 09:51:54 am »

Quote from: msbc
And don't forget - Aperture has had soft proofing since day 1!

Mark

Installed the trial version yesterday.

I use softproofing in Photoshop and find the match with the actual print good. Using softproof in Aperture, ofcourse the same profile, gave on screen quite different results (softproof off in both programs and the image is looking equal). Changing rendering intent has no effect, colors are within the gamut of the printers. I haven't yet printed, maybe the gamut conversion and rendering intent implementation is different to Adobe's one and the Aperture print equals the Softproof.....


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Cheers,

Huib

Bruce MacNeil

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Aperture 3 is out.
« Reply #14 on: February 11, 2010, 01:53:03 pm »

I hitched my wagon to Aperture when it was first announced and have been using it daily since.


Now - A3 is great. I used it last night for the first time on a real job. The download speed was UNBELIEVABLE. It uses the embedded jpegs and the download is seamless - you can get editing and choosing immediately.


My subjective opinion is that Aperture gives the most lovely output and makes my images more pleasing. The book design features are a perfect choice for the non-designer photog that needs to create high level finished products and presentation.
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pcg

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Aperture 3 is out.
« Reply #15 on: February 11, 2010, 07:53:53 pm »

I too have been fooling with AP3 for the last couple days. I can now see myself largely transitioning from the CS family. I'm amazed, and also pleased. Kudos, Apple!
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Hywel

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Aperture 3 is out.
« Reply #16 on: February 12, 2010, 04:53:16 am »

Quote from: pcg
I too have been fooling with AP3 for the last couple days. I can now see myself largely transitioning from the CS family. I'm amazed, and also pleased. Kudos, Apple!

That's definitely the best thing about them, to me. Non-destructive image editing in a way that can be done across entire sets of photos: no need to record actions, just do the adjustments on one photo and click- all of them have it. Even works for dust spotting, although you might need to fine tune that it still gets it right 90% of the time, which is a real time saver. And if you change your mind, none of the edits are baked in you can change them freely, forever.

I think Photoshop is good for compositing, assembling disparate elements into one finished image which might take a week of creative work. For batch editing thousands of images it sucks, and the PIEware (Parametric Image Editing) programs are just a much more elegant and efficient solution.

Lightroom and Aperture (and maybe Capture One, though I've not used it) are now at the stage where photo editing can be done entirely non-destructively. If you are assembling some complex multi-layered art piece you will probably still need Photoshop, but for the pro digital photographer it has finally become unnecessary. It isn't even installed on my MacBook. Hooray!

  Cheers, Hywel.
« Last Edit: February 12, 2010, 04:55:38 am by Hywel »
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Chairman Bill

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Aperture 3 is out.
« Reply #17 on: February 12, 2010, 02:43:10 pm »

I've loaded Aperture 3. Took ages. Nothing else would run, the whole thing would just hang, RAM usage was maxed out, & virtual RAM using about 50GB of HDD. Having finally loaded it, opened it, selected a photo, then tried to crop it - instant hang. Nothing would work, all previous RAM issues seemed to recur, eventually had to force quit.

Anyone else with problems?

Richard Marcellus

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Aperture 3 is out.
« Reply #18 on: February 12, 2010, 10:11:47 pm »

Quote from: Chairman Bill
I've loaded Aperture 3. Took ages. Nothing else would run, the whole thing would just hang, RAM usage was maxed out, & virtual RAM using about 50GB of HDD. Having finally loaded it, opened it, selected a photo, then tried to crop it - instant hang. Nothing would work, all previous RAM issues seemed to recur, eventually had to force quit.

Anyone else with problems?

I played with a few pictures when I first installed A3 and everything seemed fine on my iMAC (Snow Leopard, Core2Duo 2.8 GHZ, 4GB ram). The program seems much faster than A2, but I only had a couple of test pictures in the library. I had no problems with any of the tools.

I have seen reports of people having trouble on the Apple Aperture forum http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=184

Some people are having a lot trouble with the import. For me everything is going well so far, with my System Monitor showing around 10% CPU used by Aperture while it is importing my 600GB managed library. It will take a long time to complete though. It seems to be pulling in around 3000 images / hour from my USB2 external drive (10MP D200 Raw mostly)

Richard
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Chris L

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Aperture 3 is out.
« Reply #19 on: February 19, 2010, 04:33:34 pm »

"There is even audio and limited video support now"


Has Apple said that they will be enabling more video support in Aperture 3 in the future? Right now you can only trim clips, not color adjust or tonal adjust.
« Last Edit: February 19, 2010, 04:34:11 pm by christo »
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