“It saddens me to say that Aperture’s innovations are only skin deep. If it could deliver on the promise of being both fast and produce flawless results, it would be the dream package. At this point it is an expensive and questionable alternative to Camera Raw, a free extension to Photoshop, and Adobe’s Bridge which can batch produce better quality images in arguably less time. For US$500 (Photoshop itself retails for US$750), there is no excuse not to be aware of professional needs like a high-quality sharpen tool, DNG exporting or more basic things like curves, a sampler tool for RGB pixel readings, or retention of EXIF data on output,” Dave Girard writes for Ars Technica.
“Maybe by 2.0 Apple will have the foundation sorted out. At this stage Aperture is a big, expensive misfire and considering the hefty price tag, I can’t think of a reason to recommend it. Reading this review, you may think I sound jaded, but I am genuinely angry for those who shelled out US$500 for a program that promised professional results and failed to deliver. Thanks for coming out Aperture, now get off the stage,” Girard writes.
Full article here.
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Related MacDailyNews articles:
Apple’s revolutionary Aperture: will all Mac applications work like this someday? – October 21, 2005
Apple’s Aperture more revolutionary than you might think – October 21, 2005
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
Can anyone with experience in this area comment on this? Is this a fair assessment?
I only use Photoshop
<<I only use Photoshop>>
then why comment on Aperture if you havent tried it… here is your 2cents back now blow away…
Ouch.
Betty, Veronia
I want to date both of you!
hands off freak
I was just playing with Aperture this weekend, and the interface is really cool. Performance is fair on a 1.67Ghz PowerBook, using 8MP RAW images from a Canon EOS XT digital SLR. I noticed that the default behavior on high ISO images is to crank the sharpening stupidly high, resulting in horrible looking picture quality. I’m used to using Photoshop CS2 to generate JPEGs which I stick into iPhoto, which definitely gets me better image quality than I’m seeing in Aperture.
I would warn anyone against EVER using Adobe’s DNG format, and I would say that Aperture is far better off without it. I’ve done RAW->JPEG and RAW->DNG->JPEG conversions and seen really weird differences when going through DNG. I have one shot in which the subject’s eyes look bloodshot in the DNG version.
I would say that if Aperture’s poor image quality was fixed, it would be pretty dreamy. Since image quality is the most important thing to a photographer, I hope Apple improves things soon.
Is everybody on his or her period?…
Blow me Girard, when did a 1.0 version ever be perfect?
Adobe have said some bad things about Apple before the G5 came out, like “forget the Mac platform” and “get a PC it’s faster” and things like that.
Apple is laying some ground work just in case Adobe falters.
Just like Appleworks to counter OfficeMac in case that falters.
peesh…
This product Rocks! kudos APPLE!!!!
disregard the stupid article..
Nick … nice to see that someone was nice enough to answer kick ass colonosts’s original question … who knows what the rest are here for … thanks …
Adobe can kiss off. And you can go with them, you ass-kisser paid-off hack, Girard.
Too bad Apple just won’t buy Adobe to shut them the f-ck up! Probably have anti-trust issues, but wouldn’t it be oh-so-cool to see Jobs buy that shitless company, prune the diseased parts, and make the products all OS X-only?!?
Adobe are a buncha f-cking assclown f-ckheads. Shove your Creative Suite and punitive single-app pricing up your asses.
Aperture is pretty sexy but I have only played with it for a few hours…. this article does point out some large shortcomings and oversights in the application… here is hopping there is a quick update to this app… but for a v1 app there is still some kudos deserved here
So when Aperture came out, the question was “Is Aperture supposed to compete with Photoshop?”, i.e. is this a Photoshop Killer™? The answer was NO! This is not suppose to compete with Photoshop.
Not having used Aperture, I can’t tell you my thoughts on it. But I can tell you that if Photoshop costs 50% more than Aperture, it’s possible that the person buying it needs something more powerful than iPhoto but less powerful than Photoshop. The reviewer making the comparisons he is shows that perhaps this difference escapes him.
bob… and you are here for what exactly?
My period was last week. That’s why we sounded so bad during the concert at the sock hop.
I like Aperture. It’s like, really, really, cool ‘n stuff for processing shots of Veronica and that slut Betty when they’ve had one too many margaritas. You know, when they get all drunk at the after-concert party and they’re all sexed up ‘n trying to hump that Scooby Doo dog.
Aperture rocks!
ummmmmm, aperture isn’t a photo EDITING program, stupid (Girald)
(that’s why it has seemless integration with Photoshop… so you can EDIT photos, aperture is for organization, etc.)
By the way, I’m sure that there is a way to override the default RAW image importing settings; there certainly is in Photoshop CS2. When I complained about image quality, I was referring to default behavior – an expert user could surely get it working beautifully.
I think that ARS Technica is kind of wacko to be so hard on Aperture; it is really an incredible piece of software, and it comes with really nice documentation too. The dual display support is really cool – I plugged in an external monitor through my DVI on my PowerBook, and instantly put it to good use with built-in secondary display options accessible from the menu bar.
I’ve also seen lots of articles claiming that Aperture stores its files in a single database file, but it this is totally wrong. If you secondary-click on the file and select “show package contents” (repeatedly once you’re inside), you can go spelunking in there and eventually find your original images.
The article reads more like a blog entry or an extensive forum post than an actual product review.
It a workflow photography application and it’s not even touched upon in the review. The next system update in a few weeks could fix many of these issues immediately, making much of the article irrelevant.
This is simply a tech dude finding some flaws in an insanely deep application.
I’m the real deal. Not some ditz on a fake TV show!
“(that’s why it has seemless integration with Photoshop… so you can EDIT photos, aperture is for organization, etc.)”
Matt – good call. I noticed in the included documentation how to set up Aperture to automatically use Photoshop as the external editor.
Aperture has really nice archiving systems too – you can even backup onto network drives.
My take on Aperture is this:
– It does have problems with RAW processing/output
– It does preserve your RAW file intact and you can access it is NOT like Entourage
– I reckon Apple is aiming foer this product to be perfect by the time we’ve switched to Mac with Intels
– Apple must REALLY pay attention to what pro-photogs are saying and work bloody hard to get it right
– The treat from this kind of review is that Apple is going down the lightweight, consumer route…the world does NOT need another MS thank you.
As a part-time-pro I couldn’t think of trying this on my Apple kit – it just ain’t up to it. But I’m interested to see what others are saying..
I have to say I agree with much of what he says. Very expensive glitzy over rated. Camera Raw handles the image processing and color correction part better.
Aperture gets a thumbs up in the photomanagement area. Easy to sort by metadata and the time scrubber is a quick method to organize shots of the same scene. Stacks are a great way to organize. And I like the versioning method rather than making dupes for every variation of a file.
Integration with a .Mac account for posting photos for clients is easy and pages can be dynamically updated with smart folders.
The question becomes will apple improve the image processing and color correction capabilities down the road? Right now I do not think it was worth the money.
That said you need serious hardware. I tried to install on iMac and it wouldn’t let me because my video card didn’t meet the min reqrmnts. Just an nvidia 5200. I have since installed it on a new Quad G5 which is plenty fast enough.
Oh dear, this has become quite a flamewar it seems.