Aperture 3
Apple today announced the release of version three of their pro photo editing and cataloguing tool, Aperture. As ever there is an option to try the product for 30 days, so I availed myself of the offer and had a quick play with it. Of course there is only so much you can work out from an hour or so using something as richly featured as Aperture, however it was enough to give me a feel for the software and to compare it at a very high level with Photoshop Lightroom 2, my current workflow software of choice.
As you’d expect from Apple, the user interface has some very nice touches and it didn’t take me long to find my way around the software. Of the headlining new features, I don’t really expect to have much use for the Faces tool, as I don’t take family snapshots, nor for Places as there is no GPS device attached to my SLR. However Brushes is a local adjustment tool that matches Lightroom’s adjustment brushes pretty much feature-for-feature. The various presets for Brushes include ‘skin-smoothing’ (not available in Lightroom), which will be very useful for people who make a living from portrait photography, though I suspect more advanced users would use their own settings rather than trust it to the software. Disappointingly there is still no option to tint the highlights and shadows in a monochrome image, which is not the biggest let-down in the grand scheme of things, but it is a feature I use in Lightroom a lot for my black-and-white work.
I also have a beta version of Lightroom 3 which I haven’t really used much. If I get the opportunity I’ll spend some time working with both Aperture 3 and Lightroom 3 beta over the next few weeks to see if I can make some more detailed observations on the various features available, and may even be able to decide whether my next step will be to upgrade to LR3 when it is released officially, or whether Apple have done enough to help me to switch.
Update: prompted by the comments from Mark below, I went back to see if there was a graduated filter tool in Aperture 3. I couldn’t find it.
February 9th, 2010 at 9:27 pm
Holy cow that was quick.
February 9th, 2010 at 9:29 pm
I work fast, man. :D
February 9th, 2010 at 9:31 pm
Is there no graduated filter available in Aperture? I had a quick glance through the Aperture new features page on the Apple ‘site but couldn’t see anything approaching this function in Lr2.
February 9th, 2010 at 9:33 pm
Good point. This also appears to be missing.
February 10th, 2010 at 9:12 am
I’m already into the Aperture world, so I can only comment from that side of the fence. I won’t be jumping just yet, preferring to wait for the first x.0.1 round of bug fixes that inevitably follow a release.
I also want to see what other Aperture users find, and whether there is any benefit to also upgrading my OS to get the 64-bit goodness. (Can my MBP even do 64-bit. Hmm, don’t think it can. Bum.)
It is a little disappointing the graduated filters isn’t in Aperture, this is true. It’s a feature I’ve heard and read a lot about in Lightroom, and I was sort of hoping it might make an appearance. Still, it might appear in a future update. Loads of new features crept in during Aperture 2’s lifecycle.
February 10th, 2010 at 10:00 am
I’ve got the download trial too. Those who know me will be please to know that is does support the Leica D-Lux 4. For me, this is a big deal. It (and its Panasonic brethren) have not been supported by Apple until now, which means that RAW files have been unusable in Aperture (and indeed any software which uses Apple’s RAW APIs). I am really happy to see that Aperture 3 has addressed this. Up until yesterday, I was considering a jump to Lightroom. Obviously, the Aperture upgrade price is far, far better than a Lightroom purchase.
As for the Graduated Filters, I can’t find them either, but you CAN brush adjustments using a brush with a lot of feathering, which may do the job.
February 11th, 2010 at 1:52 pm
Hi Paul — technically I guess you’re correct, but unless you’ve seen the grad tool in Lightroom I guess you’ll not know how inadequate that suggestion is! When you place the graduated effect in LR, you can change the strength of the gradient and the angle afterwards; not something you’ll be able to do quickly and easily with a brush!
March 4th, 2010 at 6:13 pm
[…] 3 was just recently released by Apple (a good overview of it against Lightroom can be found over at nickminers.com) and this has narrowed the gap quite considerably between it and […]