By NewType
Apple’s new Aperture application is more revolutionary than it first appears. As Macworld’s first look at Aperture amphetameme.org that could prove to be
“I’m a bit speechless, but it was only a matter of time–this is the same company that has produced such powerful and beautiful video editing software as Final Cut and audio software as Garage Band, as well as digital media management software like iTunes and iPhoto. I switched to PC a year ago for programming purposes (and have had a headache configuring the computer ever since), and have an OS 9 G4 tower at home, but I’m convinced now that I need to switch the hell back to Mac, to OS X, soon.”
It confirms my belief that Aperture was by far the most significant announcement out of this week’s media event.
Advertisement: Introducing Aperture. Designed for professional photographers. $499. Free shipping.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Apple’s new Aperture signals that Photoshop is no longer invulnerable – October 20, 2005
Pro photographers see Apple’s Aperture as complement to Adobe Photoshop – October 20, 2005
Does Apple’s Aperture threaten Adobe’s Photoshop? – October 20, 2005
Apple’s revolutionary new Aperture software a must have for every professional photographer – October 19, 2005
Apple introduces Aperture, first all-in-one post production tool for photographers – October 19, 2005
“‘As you make changes, those changes are recorded in a SQL database.’
You might recall that an SQL-based filesystem was exactly what WinFS was supposed to be.”
Look!! Here’s an instance where Apple is copying Microsoft! “Cuppertino start your copy machines.” Perpare to see more of this in the future.
6 months Aperture will be taking market share in chunks from Adobe Photoshop.
Maybe for consistency, iPhoto should be renamed Pinhole.
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”grin” style=”border:0;” />
“The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he who, by peddling second-rate technology, led them into it in the first place.”
– Douglas Adams
I presume Apple is using Core Data and storing the information in SQLite. Apple talks the talk and then walks the walk. If Adobe doesn’t adopt these amazing technologies from Apple, then Photoshop will die a painful death. Apple can’t sit around and wait for Adobe.
Its amazing to see what high end professional apps can do when they use Core Data and Core Image.
But if Adobe would rather write their code to the dumbness of Windows, so be it.
Shiller. How is it copying MS if they can’t do it? or….am I missing your sarcasm?
Nothing new, iCal has no save either.
Snowdog,
Nothing new? Dude, maybe not for a simple calendar program (Outlook doesn’t have a save either) but for a program where one is making multiple edits to a file, or groups of files, then you can close them, quit the app then relaunch and edit ANY step of those changes independently – then it is something new and somethiong BIG indeed. Try doing that with Photoshop and not causing the file to blow up like a CPU and ram hogging monster. hint: can’t.
First Apple drops the 3.5″ drive
Then the modem (notice is is now a USB option on all new hardware)
Will Leopard usher in a wave off to the “Save” button? This is truly revolutionary. When you have your changes dynamically stored in a database, and you have an “undo”, all you really need is to be able to set certain “rollback” points – a version control system – to revert your data.
And really, in the vast majority of situations, don’t we all just work with the latest version of something? How often do you really go back to a backup version of a document?
MDN word: water
rlhamon: Aperture is not a Photoshop competitor.
OK, now I have an idea: a neural transmitter connected to Spotlight so that you THINK of something somewhere and Spotlight finds it in your files.
There, now whenever neural transmitter will be available everybody would have copied from me!
Shiller: you can’t copy VAPORWARE. In addition, query-able file systems á la SQL with dynamic search and content-addition capabilities are no secret or original ideas. BeOS attempted something similar, Tiger is filesystem dynamic metadata enabled already and gave us Spotlight, Microsoft tried for years and delivered… vapor and Apple attempted that and delivered. It is a matter of being able and capable or not. Now that Apple did it maybe Microsoft will *find* a way to solve its impossible mission. As usual.
<<
Look!! Here’s an instance where Apple is copying Microsoft! “Cuppertino start your copy machines.” Perpare to see more of this in the future.>>
Copying??? MSFT’s effort didn’t work, Apple’s effort does. What about MSFT’s non-functioning feature did Apple copy?
NOTICE: There is a litmus test for Aperture reviews.
If you say any of the following:
– Aperture is like Photoshop
– Aperture competes with Photoshop
– Aperture will kill Photoshop
You prove, unequivocally, that you don’t really know what Aperture does and you don’t really know Photoshop either. Bzzzt, thanks for playing!
Aperture does compete with an Adobe product, but if you can’t name the right one, you don’t deserve to be part of the discussion!
If Aperture did the same things Photoshop did, its files wouldn’t look like they do now. Aperture looks better simply because it doesn’t try to do what Photoshop does. You have to understand what a RAW workflow really means and why it means almost nothing to, say, a Photoshop-using web designer or Photoshop-using pressman.
Get a clue!!!!
Ummm… Someone needs to point out to the writer that that is more a function of processing RAW photos. You don’t “save” either using C1 or DXO or DPP.
Move along, nothing to see here.
I am an retard.
“Look!! Here’s an instance where Apple is copying Microsoft! “Cuppertino start your copy machines.” Perpare to see more of this in the future.” – ‘Schiller’
Hard to copy something that does not exist! ‘Hope you’re being sarcastic; otherwise, you’d be called a fool.
“Look!! Here’s an instance where Apple is copying Microsoft! “Cuppertino start your copy machines.” Perpare to see more of this in the future.”
Ha! Explain how it’s “copying” when Apple’s implementation actually works while Microsoft’s doesn’t? Sounds like Apple has beat M$ to the punch (yet again) to me.
iPodder: “you can’t copy VAPORWARE.”
WinFS isn’t vaporware. The Beta has been out for a few weeks now.
Quite frankly, what Apple has done with Aperture’s method of saving files is not what MS is trying to do with WinFS. WinFS will not change the way files are saved, it will change the way files are stored and provide a mechanism to relate disparate files to each other.
Apples and oranges here, no need to compare the two.
I was going to provide my opinion regarding Aperture/Photoshop but after reading Dave’s post I think I’ll go hide.
Dave,
Please provide us with a clue. I would love to be educated. Please compare and contrast Aperture and Photoshop.
Anyone that thinks Photoshop is going to “die a slow death” because of Aperture doesn’t know from shinola.
magic word bring , as in bring some common sense to this board.
Photshop is for image maipulation.
Aperture is for processing RAW images.
As of this moment, many digital cameras have their own proprietary way of handling RAW images. Photoshop has no way of handling ALL types (Canon, Nikon, Pentax, etc) of RAW images. Aperture can.
Aperture does NOT do photo manipulation. Yes, you can do basic things such as hue, saturation, brightness and contrast, and level manipulation. But, you cannot add text, apply PS filters, create layers, make web buttons, etc.
In other words – you use Aperture to import all of your RAW photos from your card, choose which ones you want, save them, THEN open them in PS and manipulate them.
Photoshop is a pixel editor, while Aperture is not. In Photoshop you can “paint out” (or in) people/objects/whatever. You can’t in Aperture.
MW= our
“You might recall that an SQL-based filesystem was exactly what WinFS was supposed to be. Microsoft had to drop that from Vista because it proved to daunting a project for a general filesystem.”
I love the random MS bashing. Apple didn’t implement a goddamn FS. Just a SQL-based diff system for an application. Don’t you even dare to compare the two.
So … let me get this straight. Apple’s so-called brilliant move is taking Microsoft’s SQL-as-a-file-system idea and implementing instead as an application file format???
>sigh< Why are Mac writers so utterly clueless?
Do you doofuses have any idea what SQL even is? It’s an application file format. Apple is simply using it to organise information in a single set of related files — EXACTLY AS ORIGINALLY INTENDED. It doesn’t take an Einstein to use SQL to store an incremental history of changes to a file. It has been used in this way only since FOREVER. And it has nothing to do with any subversion of Microsoft’s file system plans for SQL. It’s just a *reversion* of SQL to its normal habitat.
There is nothing superspecial about SQL. The advantage of doing something in SQL is that it is a universal format that is exportable and importable on very old legacy devices … but this advantage is fairly meaningless if what is being stored is picture-editing instructions that only have any meaning within Aperture. Are you going to query and filter out picture transformations for export? To where? Nowhere. You will export the state of the picture itself, not individual functions. I’m sure the only reason for the use of SQL is because it is very fast and standard on UNIX and therefore simplifies the development time for the app. Otherwise, any other incremental file format would have served just as well.
This will not save any space over Photoshop files. There is no getting around Layers with independent information having to be stored independently. SQL is not a magic data-thinning wand.
Aperture may be a great piece of software, but if so, it has zero to do with SQL.
DB.
Aperture and Photoshop are indeed very different programs with very different capabilities. Even if Aperture had most of Photoshop’s tools, which it most definitely does not, the absence of LAYERS alone would make Aperture useless to web designers and graphic designers, who have been relying on Photoshop for years and (Adobe’s mind-boggling Windoze bias notwithstanding) will continue to do so until a worthy competitor appears, which so far has never happened.
Aperture sounds wonderful, but Photoshop is absolutely irreplaceable.
“Dave,
Please provide us with a clue. I would love to be educated. Please compare and contrast Aperture and Photoshop.”
The last few posters after mine have added enlightenment to the thread. To add to that. From what is seen on the Apple site so far, Aperture appears to note your changes on top of a RAW file but not apply the changes until the RAW file is output. This is why the files are so small. It looks like the app moves as few actual bits as possible. They’re deferred instructions. It is not like Photoshop where you could start from a blank page and paint. It’s not even clear whether you can combine two images. If you can’t do that, we’re not talking about Photoshop. Anyone from Apple who knows more about this is free to correct me.
As far as what Aperture competes with. 90% of Aperture’s top marketed features are about inspecting, ranking, and organizing RAW files and tuning the RAW conversion to other formats or output. Photoshop doesn’t do those things, but Adobe Bridge and Camera Raw do. (OK, you can say those come with Photoshop, but they are separate.) Ranking, assigning, searching on metadata, and order printed products from an online service? You can already do all of that in Bridge. Nondestructive adjustments and sharpening applied to RAW? You can do that in Camera Raw. 90% of what Apple is marketing is already being done by photographers with existing products like Bridge, Camera Raw, Photo Mechanic, Capture One…but not Photoshop.
The difference is that Aperture looks like it’s going to be far more fun and easier and faster to do those things. That is what we want to go “wow” about. Photoshop is not really affected by this. The real deal is that in one fell swoop, Aperture makes all other RAW converters and image organizers look ten years older and awfully clunky. The only question left is whether it actually makes good output. But Photoshop gets to stand on the side and watch.
Actually, Dogger manages to be both right and wrong in the same post.
Aperture is – to all intents and purposes – the 21st century resurrection of Live Picture.
Without being able to play with Aperture at the moment, I would imagine that metadata is being stored within a run-time only version of MySQL or another high-performance database, with file pointers effectively pointing to the base image on disk, rather than compromising performance by storing a 12MB+ image file as a BLOB within the data structure. I would further imagine that each set of parameters that define a “version” of an image is held as an independent row using an XML “blob”.
I fully recommend that people wander around the Aperture micro-site, especially the Quick Tours, because Apple’s next pro Photography product become pretty obvious when you do: it may have to wait for a while – possibly until Photokina 2006 – but I would expect an Aperture Server to appear within 12 months, thus creating the possibility of a multi-user picture desk/asset management environment for professional photographers, especially for picture agencies and press.
From there, it’s only a hop, skip and a jump before they implement an interface that allows asset owners to flag which versions can be “published” complete with maximum size, resolution, output format and cost and another web services interface for “customers” to order prints (either tangible or digital) and put them in a “shopping basket”.
With the best will in the world, if Adobe don’t like this development, they’ll only have themselves to blame: with no implementation of Graphics Server for Mac OS X, they have effectively left the door wide open for Apple to define a product under their own terms.
Dave,
Thanks for the clue.
Let’s take this a few degrees to the right. Given your statement
“Aperture makes all other RAW converters and image organizers look ten years older and awfully clunky”
how much work would it be for Apple to add to Aperture the functions found in Photoshop but with the same apparent elegance? Do the editing/organizing functions even belong in the same application?
Personally, I’d doubt they’d do that in the same application. Now, perhaps a little further down the line, when and if Aperture gains a legitimate following, perhaps a separate app dedicated to specifically to the post-processing needs of the professional photographer might have its place. Call it “Darkroom”?
Photoshop isn’t affected yet directly, but with the existence core image sometime in future they will be.
Looking…>
At this time, why bother?
Aperture can open images in an external editor (e.g. Photoshop) and then save the resulting file (so long as its flattened) within the same Aperture project as an image version.
This is why Aperture will grow to become a multi-user workflow manager/picture desk/DAM solution, whilst allowing creative Photoshop jockeys to do their best in an application that is a) mature, b) has a lot of external developer support (although the plug-in architecture could be implemented in an Apple-developed Photoshop competitor and c) fully integrated into Creative Studio.
Creating a Photoshop Killer™ is probably best left on the back-burner, unless Adobe start throwing their toys out of the pram regarding Aperture (and probably Aperture Server).
“how much work would it be for Apple to add to Aperture the functions found in Photoshop but with the same apparent elegance?”
That’s like asking how much work it would take Apple to add to the iPod the functions found in a Windows Media Center PC but with the same apparent elegance. Who cares and why would you want that?
Why do so many Mac users seem to think there can only be one application in any category–preferably an Apple one? Photoshop is a great application. Why is it necessary that Apple compete with and “kill” it?
This “article” proved that “NewType” is a clueless moron.
I’ just like to add to this thread
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”grin” style=”border:0;” />
One, if anyone thought I was saying Aperture’s filesystem was a replacement for WinFS, that was not what I was saying. My point was that Apple’s approach to solving the problem of relational data and metadata is very different from Microsoft’s universal approach. Without going into the nitty-gritty details, it seems to be that the philosophies are intrinsically different.
Take a look at how iTunes totally changed the way we manage our music data. Before iTunes, people were using WinAMP and manually dumping their MP3s into nested folders on their hard drive. If you decided to organize your music by artist name => album name, there was no way you could go back an reorder those folders by album name => artist name without a lot of extra copying and manual labor.
iTunes changed by saying, “Forget all the management crap. Let me organize it for you. Just you my search feature and column views to sort and see the music any way you want.” iTunes change music software forever by telling people life was better if they let go and let iTunes own internal database to do the dirty work. I mean, no one cares where the bits are physically written on the hard disk platter today, so why should you be concerned where the MP3 is located on your drive?
So Apple’s philosophy was, forget about a universal database-driven relational filesyste (for now). Let’s provide the theoretical benefits of such a filesystem like WinFS by implementing it at the app level, to handle specific tasks. iTunes organizes music files and relates them to one another. Aperture implements what looks to be a more fully-featured SQL database for organizing, managing, and relating RAW images.
Now, you many wonder then, what makes Aperture different from other applications that have SQL databases built-in? The concept of a database-driven app or filesystem is not new, an did not even originate with Microsoft.
But I think what may make Aperture different is that if it relies on CoreData services.
Aperture today is clearly not a Photoshop competitor because it is not an image or pixel editor. But think of it this way. What if there was no “Save” function in Photoshop, either? What if you can create dozens of versions of a image file, and versions of versions, and never had to worry about naming conventions or accidentally altering the source image, and yet manage all those versions easily, intuitively, quickly? And it would all be real-time?
In this sense, Aperture is both a stick and a carrot. It’s a stick because it could goad companies like Adobe to innovate more. It’s a carrot because it’s another “celebrity” app from Apple that seems to be designed to show what exactly is possible if developers actually tap into all the services OS X has to offer.
Building an SQL database into an app isn’t trivial (or we’d see more prevalance of it in today’s apps), but if Aperture uses CoreData, it may just be.
I think we’ll find out more when the real programmers and developers dig in to Aperture’s guts, but this coul very well be one of those under-the-hood changes that result in a real pardigm shift.
Sorry. That was rude.
“But think of it this way. What if there was no “Save” function in Photoshop, either? What if you can create dozens of versions of a image file, and versions of versions, and never had to worry about naming conventions or accidentally altering the source image, and yet manage all those versions easily, intuitively, quickly? And it would all be real-time?”
Unless some advance was made in data handling, it sounds like such a strategy in Photoshop would automatically mean all my hard disks are way too small. Once you cross the line and decide to manipulate and save actual pixels…
“how much work would it be for Apple to add to Aperture the functions found in Photoshop but with the same apparent elegance? Do the editing/organizing functions even belong in the same application?”
Apple already demonstrated somthing this: circa WWDC 2004. Phil Schiller demoed a CoreImage application called “Funhouse” (you can find this in the demo projects if you have the Developer Tools installed).
Basically it’s a demonstration on how to add image editing/manipulation functions to Cocoa applications using CoreImage. At the time, when Schiller was demoing this, I thought it was a shot right across Adobe’s bow, because it implemented a lot of the tricks you have in Photoshop. Of course, not to piss the Adobe developers, Schiller said “we want Adobe to make full use of CoreImage because we want to see this in Photoshop (paraphrasing)”. Yeah, riiiight….
Just let me say that this has got to be one of the most interesting, enlightening and civilized threads I have read on MDN for a long time.
Bibble, Nikon Capture, Capture One, ACR and more have worked on RAW files with deferred changes for a few years now, this is how all RAW software I have tried works.
Each file has it’s own preferences file that lives alongside it (except in manufacturers own software where the process is the same but the deferred changes are hidden inside each file)
Thus a Nikon RAW file with the name DSC_0001.NEF
will have a partner after editing named as follows, either
DSC_0001.XMP if worked on with Adobe ACR
OR
DSC_0001.BIB if worked on with Bibble
Delete this file and you revert to the default settings.
The SQL database may or may not be new, the Adobe Camera Raw Cache is a database that stores changes in a similar way.
I can edit images that are already burnt on CD and ACR will save the changes in it’s cache. It has worked like this at least since CS2
It allows me to backup my RAW files before I have begun work on them.
As a photographer I have loved Nikon Capture for it’s power and hated it for it’s lack of speed (particularly on the Mac).
I have loved Adobe ACR for it’s speed, but sometimes felt frustrated by it’s limited feature set.
The really innovate thing about Aperture is some of the features that have never existed in one program before if at all, such as the Vault, Light Table, the Loupe and Stacks.
Every one admits that modern life seems to be high priced, nevertheless different people require cash for different stuff and not every person gets enough money. Therefore to get some home loans and credit loan would be good solution.
The essay topic or custom papers creation can take very long period of time, but time is a valuable issue, thus that would be worth to buy term papers to save a lot of time.
The online essays composed by experts, should bring people A+. Thence this is worth to buy custom writing services to get your aim, I opine.
I was doing a bit of research looking at some other essays service. and this is the fifth link to the search essay about this post as relayed by Google… so you are correct that you are administer a free service for them and improve their traffic. So if you morally support this then you should take the money but if your opinion has direct at all and you’re against it then you should as likely as not assassinate them. But it’s still yours to come to decision.
That is never good to fail academic future. You have to order course work to forestall that.
Attain success alone, without favor from others really difficult. And it’s indeed necessary to take the right priorities in life! We can support you thrive in writing buy research papers.
Writers from uk papers service do great contribution for all students, creating great quality term papers.
Buy an essay or custom essay and be insured you have correct information referring to this good post*.
It is known that the distinguished research paper service will be able to furnish people with term paper. Furthermore, smart students can save their time.
I think, there is a lot of reasons why should we buy essays online! It can be great alternative for essays completing. Many men use it many years.
Did you hear something just about custom writing companies? Did you see such kind of professionals could create academic papers of very high quality. Therefore, you could buy an essay to win the best prize.