“If you glanced at the new features in Aperture 3, it would seem easy to pass off the audio/video and Faces and Places features as gimmicky things for hobbyists, but the value of these features will grow on even for hardened studio nuts,” Girard reports. “Seeing the power of the Places features makes me wish I’d GPS-logged our trip through Japan, because it would be satisfying to navigate those squiggly tracks and photos with my girlfriend.”
Girard reports, “For pros who just want to get work done, Aperture 3’s improved interface, flawless curve adjustment, multiple maskable edits, and 64-bit update are more than enough reason to upgrade. Add the metadata improvements and the high-ISO RAW conversion, and you have an essential upgrade.”
Read the full review – extensive, as usual, and recommended – here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
I absolutely love and look forward to John Siracusa’s reviews of each major OS X revision.
Ars Technica is the bomb for facts and thoroughness!
You’re right… I didn’t see that bit way down that gigantic page, I just read a few entries at your link point. Thanks for the info.
I still don’t see anything about Aperture that seems worth the trouble to switch. But by the end of the year I hope to have that new iMac and I’m going to test Ap 3 against the final version of LR 3 and make the decision then. I really hope Adobe doesn’t screw us on this. It’s my favorite app ever. But I’ll go Aperture long before I’ll buy a frikkin’ PC.
Aperture shills are a funny folk. They have *NO* idea what they talk of when the open their mouth hole about photography software. No Apple software is more clearly documented at being slow, buggy, and virtually unusable for the vast majority of users.
Adobe is handing Apple their ass with Lightroom. It is a phenomenal piece of software that is getting better and better. This comment coming from a Mac user since the Mac SE days.
I don’t like Adobe software – i just don’t like the user interface or the cramped screen layout, especially in After Effects…
That said, I don’t much like Aperture either. It is a resource hog and my 2yr old 4Gb 2.4Ghz Intel Core Duo Macbook Pro dies in the arse whenever Aperture is running – same with iTunes actually…
I don’t do much fiddling with images, except perhaps cropping them, and have yet to find a compelling reason to use Aperture instead of iPhoto…
And does anyone know how to find an image in either Aperture or iPhoto from within another app? Uploading photos to any site is very time consuming and I end up exporting a copy of the image from Aperture to the desktop so I can upload it… Painful – there must be an easier way…
I’ve used both LR and Aperture and think Aperture is far and away the better program. I actually find Aperture faster than LR.
And the interface of LR? What a piece of sh*t.
The rivalry is good for all end users though. Speed can always be increased, but I definitely find A3 is improved, the color correction tools in aperture are more intuitive as well.
I was editing 65MB Leaf files the other day and could edit remarkably quickly in Aperture 3.
@ byronic
Lightroom can export directly into Flickr and a few other sites too.
I’ve been using iView Media Pro, which MS bought and turned into Expression Media and put it in stasis. I actually like the separate catalogue metaphor, but it’s really long in the tooth and I’ve been mulling switching to Lightroom or Aperture. Some have even suggested using Bridge.
I don’t have an axe to grind, or foam-at-the-mouth hatred against Adobe, Freehand and Flash excluded. NO software is perfect, you just learn to deal with the pros and cons, just like any and every other tool you use, digital, analogue or whatever. Sure, Photoshop is bloated, but I like it and use it, in my limited way and it pretty much does what I want. I’ve used it since version 1, BTW.
That said, most of the real photographers I know gnash their teeth at the slowness of Aperture. I haven’t bothered to try Lightroom or Aperture, so maybe when my new i7 15″ MBP arrives this week, I’ll take them both for a spin.
Is there some side by side comparison review somewhere?
Don:
If you and ChrissyOne read a little further down on that MacUser page (after Lix N. Paulian’s comments), you’d see other reports from people that support the claims made in my article.
Even Paulian notes in the tests they did that “4. Obviously, some fields were not visible in Aperture”
What exactly that means is not clear at all. I did some fairly extensive testing and posted the full results via a link http://www.controlledvocabulary.com/imagedatabases/aperture3.html on my site.
Paulian notes for the fields that were not preserved that, “I attribute the lost fields either to the false data I included (some of them are rigidly defined), or to the fact that they do not adhere to the XMP 1.0 spec.”
It’s not clear if Paulian filled out every single field or not, so if you make your living by licensing photos, you might want to check the results I found to see whether or not those fields are seen by others. IMHO, professional photographers should be very concerned.
As the IPTC Extensions are not supported in Aperture 3, (which are part of Photoshop CS5) anyone taking the time to fill those out might want to see whether those survive a trip through Aperture 3 as well. I’ve tested with Photoshop CS5, CS4 and CS3 as well as Photo Mechanic and all of those preserve these newer values (all stored in XMP) even though not all currently show those values in their respective metadata viewers.
David