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.