Nick Miners Photography

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.

Fol­low­ing on from my com­ments of earlier today, here is a com­pet­i­tion from the Guard­ian with far more favour­able terms and con­di­tions. They offer a com­pet­i­tion like this every month, and the prize is an entry-​​level DSLR from Nikon. For those inter­ested, the rel­ev­ant clause in the T&Cs relat­ing to the licence gran­ted is as follows:

By sub­mit­ting an entry to the Com­pet­i­tion, You give GNM per­mis­sion for your entry to be pub­lished on guard​ian​.co​.uk and grant GNM a non-​​exclusive, royalty-​​free, world­wide licence to repub­lish your Com­pet­i­tion entry in elec­tronic format and hard copy for pur­poses con­nec­ted with the Competition

There it is: “for pur­poses con­nec­ted with the Com­pet­i­tion” — which looks like a good deal to me. The theme this month is macro photography.

My good friend Mark Casey, who has accom­pan­ied me on some of the By Cam­era tours, has just launched his own pho­to­graphy web­site. You can find the site at SFG​Pho​to​graphy​.co​.uk — please go and have a look and leave com­ments on his pho­tos so he feels pop­u­lar! He also has a Face­book page here, and a Twit­ter feed at this page.

Ware­house Express have a review of Canon’s latest DLSR here. This looks like a very high spec model that improves many areas (19 point AF, ‘vir­tual hori­zon’ fea­ture) that were lack­ing in earlier Canon mod­els. My only com­ment would be this: if I’d just bought a 50D (Canon’s pre­vi­ous semi-​​pro smal­ler sensor model) I’d be pretty annoyed!

This bloke knows how to improve your chances of get­ting your cam­era back if you lose it.