“The recent abrupt discontinuation of Apple’s Shake professional compositing software has left fans of the company’s professional photography workflow tool, Aperture, nervous about the future of that product too. On many user forums people are discussing Aperture with an impending sense of doom. It’s been quite some time since Aperture was updated, and reports from the internet suggest that many users have left the software in favor of Adobe’s rival product, Lightroom,” Thomas Fitzgerald blogs. “So should Aperture users be worried?”
Fitzgerald writes, “In a word, no. There are some pretty big differences between the situation with Aperture and the situation with Shake. Shake was a very old piece of software that Apple had bought and continued to develop. However, development on it had pretty much stopped when Apple lowered the price of it a few years ago. Since then the product has been on life support. Recently all marketing efforts for Shake had been ceased and there hasn’t been a service upgrade for it in a long time. People were surprised primarily because rumor sites had suggested that Apple had been working on a replacement for Shake, but unfortunately this never materialized. With Aperture however Apple are still actively marketing the software.”
Fitzgerald writes, “What’s more, Aperture received a maintenance upgrade in March of this year, and Raw support has continued to be added through operating system upgrades and system patches… I highly doubt Aperture is going away. Despite it’s troubled birth I suspect that the software is still actively being developed as we speak. Unfortunately Apple’s lack of communication on any level is not helping.”
Read more in the full article here.
Some very important Pro Aperture forums…:
http://www.apertureprofessional.com/
http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/aperture/
Well that headline made my heart jump!
I am not a pro photographer but use Aperture and have found it to be a really good tool. Though admittedly one that I need to learn more about and get better at using.
The potential market for Aperture has got to be huge compared to the market for Shake. It’s a market that will fuel Mac sales as well. I can’t imagine Apple walking away from it.
Anything that competes with Adobe is great. I hope aperature stays.
Why not release Shake as an open source?
After recently seeing an Apple rep demo Aperture 2 with Nik Effects software, I bought the combination package that Apple is promoting.
The package gave me;
Aperture 2 and Nik Complete Collection for Aperture, for a price that basically gave me Aperture 2 for free.
I highly doubt Apple would be pushing this product and putting effort into teaming with partners, if Apple intended to let this product die.
My photographer friends use and recommended Aperture, and I can only see sales growth for this software.
I don’t think Aperture users have anything to worry about.
I believe that there was licensed tech in it (at the very least Keylight), so they’d need to pull any of that out, and if that requires time/money/resources, I seriously doubt it would happen.
Apple should mix Shake, Color and Motion together. Hmmm… What a Cocktail!!!
I tried Aperture. I tried Lightroom. I went with Lightroom. I hope Aperture stays around. Two competitive programs improve both. Lightroom 2, for example, is a great improvement over version 1. I’m sure that’s because they were looking at Aperture and thinking ‘good enough’ won’t cut it this time.
I suspect the opposite — Apple stabilized Aperture’s infrastructure in the 2.0 development cycle, and the 3.0 cycle is likely to incorporate major front-end improvements.
I like aperture, I don’t use lightroom anymore. I just don’t like adobe products. I gave them up a long time a go.
Most of what apple bought shake for was rolled into the programs of apple’s own creation. Granted, not all of shake’s abilities but lots. By contrast, apple created aperture on it’s own and has constantly been working with photo processing of digital photos since iPhoto came out. iPhoto is certainly not a replacement for aperture. I am sure that aperture is safe. I’ll bet that Color, as a separate program is not safe though. I’ll bet it will be incorporated into the remaining parts of final cut by the next version.
aperture is fine, what else is going to replace it from apple?
shake functionality was built into the finalcut package
Free Shake for everyone!
This would probably increase sales of FCS, I think.
Aperture is going nowhere. It has been Apple’s motif to have consumer grade, prosumer grade, and professional grade software to try to upsell to people as they become more versed with a given software package.
apple ought to buy pixelmator, then release it as part of the aperture package
I feel Aperture is here to stay. First, Apple has iMovie and Final Cut Pro and also iPhoto and Aperture. The consumer/pro versions of each make sense.
Also, I tried both products after Aperture hit v1.5. In fact, I was in a small group of select beta testers for Lightroom to give feedback from pro photographers. In the end, I went with Aperture for many reasons. I am still very happy with my decision.
@iMacBerlin
That’s exactly what Apple has been trying to do for the past 3 years. There’s even Shake features added to the new iMovie…. However Shake is a node based compositor, this technology was never really transfered over. It seems Apple thinks Motion will be enough, but it’s not a compositor and no pro will use it as such. There’s a few rant threads on the Motion forums at creativecow.net about this issue. I myself would use something like Combustion over Motion (Composite wise).
To be honest though, Shake was outdated and it’s main use was as a sister app to Maya, along with the best support for high resolution (2k – IMAX).
Aperture is a market leading, (OK so alongside Lightroom), product that has a great future ahead of it.
If you have ever shown interested photographers how it works, they are blown away by it.
It’s my choice over Lightroom, and by quite some margin.
I think about 90+% of pro photographers prefer Apple (actually, I think I read it somewhere it’s more like 99%). These are very opinionated lot, hard to please, yet supremely loyal.
Apple would not only be silly by not gratifying this loyal base, but also it would be suicidal to allow the one solid base to be dictated on Adobe’s terms.
And we all know, which platform is the preferred one for Adobe product support and upgrades.
For myself, I got Aperture and never tried Lightroom. Heard many good reviews on Lightroom, but I’m glad with Aperture right now, and like the previous few posters, I’m a bit biased against anything Adobe. I too would like Apple to acquire Pixelmator and throw that in as a bundle.
MDN MW: post, as in…
Despite it is troubled birth, eh? Stupid people and their stupid lack of grammar. For more info, see:
The Grammar Teacher
I have Aperature and like it but have never used Shake. Not sure what it deos, either.
Myself, I went with Lightroom after trying demos of both. I thought Lightroom’s feel and style to more to my taste. I do hope Aperture stays around because the competition between the two helps in making better products for all.
Yes, he had put the Aperture scare in there. If the headline only talked about Shake, would you have read it?
BTW – I use and love Aperture, and I do this for a living.
Here in Ottawa we had a presentation on Aperture by the product specialist a few weeks ago at Carbon Computing and there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Aperture is here to stay. The presentation focused, in part, on the differences between iPhoto and Aperture2 and on what one would use Photoshop for vs. Aperture2, the features of each. So forget about Apple dropping Aperture. It’s not going to happen.
I am neither an Aperture or Lightroom user, but I am a professional Photoshop user; and I can only say that, generally speaking, Adobe’s interface design skills are somewhere south of the toilet, whereas Apple excels in this arena. If I had to pick a dedicated photo processing app, I’d pick Aperture sight unseen.
P.S. The Photoshop CS4 interface is much improved over previous versions, but it’s still butt ugly and quirky in the way that only Adobe can make it.