To say that Apple’s been busy is quite the understatement. The iPod Nano, the video-capable iPod, iTunes 5…then 6, new iMacs, upgraded PowerBooks, dual-core PowerMacs. The coolest thing for me so far was announced today, their own new image-editing / image-management app, Aperture. By the way, that’s just the coolest name–for an app that’s aimed directly at Pro Photographers, there isn’t a word that captures photography better.
I’m not pro photographer, but at my amatuer photographer skin tingled at the features. Among them:
- Non-destructible Image Processing – rather than having multiple copies of a photo, each version that you save is dynamically generated from the untouched master.
- Virtual light-table – Being able to lay out photos and see which ones go best together with other photos is something that got lost in the whirlwind of digital photography, and Aperture brings it back!
- Stacks – a new way of grouping similar photos or versions of the same photo.
- Automatic Color Conversion – Something I never fully understood is now handled completely by Aperture. I can’t tell how frustrating it is to see the colors that come out of the printer way off from what I see on-screen.
- Book Printing – Create a photo album right in Aperture, and order it. Much more customizable than the same feature in iPhoto.
- Powerful Image Tagging with Keyword Heirarchies – Time to organize that huge photo database!
Ok, it’s true that I’ve turned into somewhat of an Apple fanboy in the last year, but Lem, Daniel…anyone else that’s into Photography: I dare you to watch all of the 5 video quicktours and not be excited about it. I’d like to you know your thoughts.
We’ll see how the professional reviewers treat it when it comes out in a couple months. I admit, it’s no Photoshop, but it’s got a little bit of a different focus. It would work well to complement Photoshop, but if I was a professional photographer and could only buy one, I think, dare I say it, Aperture is better suited to my needs. Hey, people were skeptical when Apple entered the video editing world with Final Cut, but now it’s probably the most popular video editing suite with amateur to semi-pro videographers.
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Ok, i just watched all of the quicktours, and read most of the tech specs. This thing is definitely awesome! Wow, I want to use it right now.
I saw quite a few features that would save me a lot of time. Especially interesting to me is stacks, and the easy ways to compare similar images in a given stack. That would be a HUGE help. I’ve always wished I could manage my photos like that. I’m always switching back and forth between different versions of the same photo. The easy to use loupe and light table also look awesome.
Also intriguing are the promises of fast RAW manipulation. I don’t know how fast it would actually be on a Powerbook G4 w/ 1gb of RAM. But it definitely looks like it would be faster than other RAW worlkflow programs I’ve used, and I’m sure it screams on a G5.
It also appears that you can create different versions of a RAW image without taking up much more disk space. They didn’t elaborate on it too much, but I’m guessing they just save the RAW customizations, and apply those multiple times, instead of saving each image in its entireity. That would be really nice, because it’s really easy to fill up your HD with different versions of a single image.
Looks like they might have taken care of the 2 biggest downsides I find in working with RAW: speed and size.
This program would be great even at that, but it looks like there are some really good photo management and backup tools as well.
Yes, they picked a very good name.
The student discount price is $250. Sounds like a lot of money, even if it’s half off the regular-priced version. Very tempting, especially if I was actually making much money doing photography.
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F-spot does at least half of the things on the feature list, and it’s free. It should run on Windows if you have Mono.
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Thanks for the comment, Daniel. Good to hear from another photographer’s point of view (of course, you’re now a biased Mac-convert).
Recommended specs is a dual 2 ghz G5–perfect, that’s what I’ve got at work! I just hope it’s as snappy as they advertise, though I’m skeptical at version 1.
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Shut your mouth, Phil. No one wants to hear about your open source propaganda. Ha!
Aperture looks interesting. I thought it was more like Apple’s program to compete with Photoshop, but it seems to be more of a image organizer than anything else (I only looked at two of the quicktours VERY briefly). I guess no one will even try to compete with Photoshop since it is the master.
Phil, I don’t want to hear it about GIMP.
Anyway, Aperture looks very clean cut and stylized just like every other Apple program. I’ll have to wait to see what people have to say about it before being sold. Just looks like a fancy Photoshop image browser to me, which is cool because Photoshop’s browser is dang slow. It’s time for something much better. (Keep in mind, I haven’t use CS 2 yet.)
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Lem, you should watch all of them, especially the one on printing. That would be nice for your wedding photography business–just hand your client one of those books as a proof book. Or as the wedding album itself…
In CS2 they came out with Adobe Bridge, which is marginally better than Photoshop’s browser. But, to me, it’s even slower and is a beast to startup.
Lem’s right Phil, proprietary is way cooler than open-source.
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I won’t mention Gimp, but I had a program when I was in 9th grade called ColorIt that was at least on par with Photoshop of the time. Photoshop was currently at version 4.0 and had only one level of Undo, (major suckage–it was painfully slow as well) so ColorIt rocked it. Colorit also had decent typography tools way back when Photoshop just had fire-and-forget. (There was no way to see what you typed until you closed the Text dialog box.)
Course, version 6 was a lot better than version 4 of Photoshop. But it seems recently the only “noteworthy” (ha ha ha) feature they’ve added is checking every image you open to make sure it’s not an image of money. (http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,61890,00.html)
Jon Gruber knows why things have gone so far down: http://daringfireball.net/2005/04/fish_head
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Oh yeah, and Acrobat is one of the most terrible pieces of software ever devised. I guess you could say I’m still bitter at Adobe for the fact that Acrobat exists.
How come line breaks don’t come up properly on here? All the paragraphs get shoved together.
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I don’t know why–it’s annoying. It’s WordPress default I guess. [update: I just fixed it. I love CSS.]
How come Mac’s “Preview” program opens Acrobat files faster than Adobe Acrobat?
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Doesn’t OS X have PDF creation/rendering built in to the OS somehow? Could be why the preview opens faster.
Yeah, Aperture definitely doesn’t replace Photoshop. And might not even be as good as some other photo cataloging programs. But where it looks like it will shine is in the laborious (and time-consuming) task of the intitial sorting, comparing, and managing of photos after downloading them from your card. Especially when working with RAW. I have yet to find a program that works really well with RAW and is fast. As Tim said, Bridge is too slow.
The thing is Aperture doesn’t do anything new; but it looks like it might do some of those things better and faster. So, I’m sure you could do most of this stuff with open-source software like F-spot & Gimp; you certainly could with other less expensive programs. But sometimes it’s worth spending money to save some time, have one program that does it all, and avoid some of the hassles of getting open source to run properly. This wouldn’t really apply to the average point & shoot digital camera owner, of course: which is why this is targeted at a professional.
Of course, a program always looks really cool in the demo…
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Daniel, yes, OS X has it built into their system. You can save almost anything as a pdf. In fact, the OS’s rendering system, Quartz, writes pdfs, which is how they can do all those cool effects without slowing down the system.
Aperture does do new things in the area of management. Comparison and selecting between sets of the same shot, organzing them into “stacks,” the virtual light table If not new, it is certainly more streamlined in Aperture. Is non-destructive editing new?
Pro photographers, whose livelihood depends on a good, streamlined workflow will have no quibbles about the price. Photoshop, which is what the pro’s use now, is even more expensive.
Wait for the reviews.
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I think the only reason Apeture will touch Photoshop’s market is that a lot of people buy Photoshop only to use a tiny amount of its functionality. They don’t need a $600 program, but since that’s what they hear about, they use that even for simple tasks. Apeture will grab those users who really don’t need Photoshop–they just think they do.
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Well, you can do non-destructive editing with photoshop (or other programs) as long as you are smart about what you do. Especially if you just save the RAW file separately. But this will make it easier to do that kind of editing.
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Phil is right. As a photographer, I only use like 10% (if that) of what Photoshop offers me. That’s okay, though, because Photoshop is cool and I like Adobe.
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I know Photoshop pretty well, yet I don’t use it for web design as much as I used to. As some web designer once said, “Photoshop for web design is like driving a Hummer to the grocery store.”
I use Fireworks for designing for the web, and for all its faults, it’s faster, leaner, and specialized for web design.
Too bad Adobe took over Macromedia and Fireworks will probably die.