Crunchy pits
Yay! The server problems are much better now. Everything seems to be working tip-top again at ye olde timofejew.ca and finitesquid.com.
Now, I wish I had something interesting to write about. Well, maybe I do.
A few weeks ago, I picked up a copy of Aperture, a “pro” photo library manager and “basic” editor. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t make their software available for a trial basis, so I had to rely on reviews and forum opinions to make a case for a full purchase. And Apple software is tough to get unbiased reviews. There tend to be a lot of pro and anti Apple zealots, and that adds a lot of noise to reviews. However, after weeding through the mess of reviews, I came to the conclusion that it would probably be worth the price, so I picked up a copy.
I’m certainly not going to write a review of it here, but just give some quick impressions:
- Aperture, like Adobe’s Lightroom, uses a non-destructive approach to processing photo files. Rather than editing and saving these changes, it only saves a list of instructions that are to be used to render the file to screen (or print). The means that it performs an enormous number of calculations pretty much continually, which translates to “get fastest computer possible” if you want to run it. And since it also uses the GPU on the video card, that means “get most expensive video card possible” as well. My machine, a dual 2.5GHz G5 with an ATI Radeon X800 XT and 2.5GB RAM, was smokin’ hot two years ago, and is now pretty middling for running Aperture. But it does work acceptably fast for me. I can imagine Aperture really sings on the new Mac Pros.
- The library management is really quite good. Lots of places to stick keywords, “smart” albums (as made popular with iTunes), project hierarchies, and “vaults” (for backing up). And, although many people complain about having all photos in a single library, this works well for me. I still keep a “virgin” copy of the RAW files from my camera stored separately, and another copy in Aperture’s library. A library can only be on one disc, but with 500GB SATA discs being pretty commonly available, this is a lot of pictures (and, of course, you could use RAID to created larger spanned discs). I could see someone who shoots a couple of thousand photos a day overwhelming Aperture, but that’s not me.
- One amazing feature that I love is “stacks”. This allows one to keep different versions of a photo together in one spot, and a “stack pick”, that can be different per-album. Incredibly convenient.
- Printing appears to be simple, but I don’t think I’ve got the hang of it. I’m still printing from within Photoshop.
- The spot healing is just horrible. I’m sticking to Photoshop.
- Cropping and straightening is clumsy. Lightroom does this with ease, with Photoshop a close second.
- The RAW converter is brilliant. Excellent control over detail. In fact, I think I prefer it to Adobe’s. But it does fall down with extreme shadow enhancement when it comes to “hot” pixels. Adobe’s converter doesn’t show these.
- The B&W channel mixer conversion is good, but Lightroom’s is better.
- I haven’t created a full book from within Aperture, but it’s very powerful. It gives amazing control over layout. Like iPhoto’s book creation, but on steroids. I’m definitely going to create a couple of books with this.
I’ve started to use Aperture provisionally (i.e. I’m not getting married to it just yet, but we’re living together…) I can only imagine it getting better as it matures.
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