Perhaps only the Xbox 360 has been more hyped than Aperture. Apple's tool for high-end photo editing posed so many questions in the weeks before its launch that Apple spent a long time evangelising its benefits. So why do we need Aperture in a world dominated by Adobe? Apple's director of software product marketing, Oren Ziv, explains: 'Photoshop wasn't particularly designed for photographers. It was designed for image manipulation'.
After a week at Aperture's controls, we can see what he meant. This isn't an editing tool in the traditional sense: there's no cloning, no real layers support and no curves for playing with contrast. The workflow is more dialog- than tool-based, and adjustments are applied canvas-wide, rather than to selected portions of an image.
It's also built for end-to-end processing of Raw image files, from input to output, with Jpeg, Tiff and more familiar formats taking a back seat. Sure, you can tweak them as well, but if that's how you shoot your pictures, stick to Photoshop or iPhoto, depending on your needs.
Despite this, Raw support remains patchy. While Adobe's camera Raw tool supports more than 100 different models in Creative Suite 2, Aperture provides 'optimised' support for just 24. Fortunately, it will read any format understood by Mac OS X, so improvements made here through Software Update will ripple down to Aperture, but we were surprised it didn't support the Canon EOS 350D out of the box. Despite Apple proclaiming support for the Digital Rebel XT, its US counterpart, Raw images imported from a European version of this camera were unrecognised until we had hacked one of the plist files with some XML code we had found on a third-party website.
Images are organised in a number of ways: folders, projects, albums and smart albums are the most common, but you can also attach any number of light-tables to a project or collection and use that to visually sort through your pictures, thinning them down to just the ones you want to work with. If you shot several in quick succession, you can group them together in a stack, either manually or automatically on the basis of their chronological proximity.
You can also edit the metadata attached to each image, either in the software or at the time of import, where you'll attach new tags, change file names, and even batch-update the time zone if you forgot to adjust your camera before you flew overseas. Once inside the application, the metadata is exposed, and applying new category tags such as 'landscape' or 'headshot' are single-click jobs.
We were disappointed that Aperture doesn't perform any kind of auto-complete when you define tags, so if we couldn't quite remember what we had used in the past, it would be easy to enter something similar but not quite the same: boat rather than boats, for example, after which searching for the plural would filter out those categorised using the singular.
Working in such a visual manner feels natural, though. You literally drag and sort images the way you would on a desk, not the way you drag files in the Finder. There was occasionally some lag on our PowerBook G4, but we were using a machine at the bottom end of Aperture's minimum system requirements.
Aperture never touches your original files. Instead, it treats them like digital negatives, creating new versions of each as you make your edits. These are stacked on top of the original, allowing you to have several versions of each image on the go at one time.
This may sound like another resource hog, but it isn't. Each 'version' takes up only a few kilobytes of disk space, as it's just a list of the changes, rather than a complete image in itself. Because of this, you can effectively lift changes from one image and stamp them onto another, which will be an invaluable time-saver if you want to selectively apply the same lighting changes to a range of sibling shots.
Almost all changes are applied through a single Adjustments display, which is quick to navigate, and surprisingly comprehensive. It looks quite stark to begin with, but once you start to combine its functions and experiment with the various gauges and dials, all of which are tied into a series of responsive histograms, you quickly find the most effective way to complete the task at hand. Indeed, we soon wondered why we relied so heavily on the curves tool all these years, realising that it was because Aperture's histograms are so well implemented that we were using them as our central frame of reference. We didn't once resort to any of the auto buttons, and as a result feel we got a better set of images.
We were highly impressed by one tool in particular: the loupe. Pass it over images on your light-table or Raw thumbnails in the film strip and you'll see 100% previews without having to manually zoom, which might sound like a small point, but is a surprisingly effective time-saver. It reappears when you use the Eyedropper to pick a black, grey or white reference point on an image you want to balance, giving you a close-up of the area without you having to first play with the magnifier as you do in Photoshop.
It's this kind of attention to detail that makes Aperture's non-modal interface its strongest asset. When editing, your picture dominates the screen, with semi-transparent head-up displays, rather than opaque palettes hosting your correction tools. Other palettes are hidden off the edge of the screen and will pop up like a hidden Dock when you move your mouse to the borders. As such, it works best on a large screen; indeed, even the 17in screen on our two-year-old PowerBook felt poky at times. Bear in mind that this has the same resolution as a 20in Cinema Display and you'll understand why Apple has been demonstrating this product on screens of 23in or more.
It's not just on the screen that Aperture makes some hefty demands. The system requirements are high, starting out at a PowerBook G4 1.25GHz and working up from there. We did our tests on a PowerBook G4 1.5GHz with 2GB of RAM, and it crawled at times. It took 52 minutes to import our 1750-shot iPhoto library.
Beyond simply exporting, there are two primary means of outputting your images: as web galleries on .Mac or your own web space, or as an iPhoto-style book. The second of these options is the more exciting, as the layout of the books is more impressive than those in iPhoto, with panoramic pictures able to span two consecutive pages. Perhaps more importantly, the pages can be output to PDF, so you can select your own printer.
We didn't expect to be impressed by Aperture's highly focused feature set, but we're happy to have been proved wrong. This is more than an iPhoto Pro, and although it's not a direct competitor to Photoshop, it does make the latter suite look like a far more high-end and niche product than we once would have said. Aperture may be resource-hungry, but it's a beautiful and efficient environment in which to work, and it's somewhere we can see ourselves spending a lot of time. We're completely sold on its features, which do everything a professional photographer could want - namely colour and exposure correction, red-eye removal and cropping - and it does them very well indeed.
That leaves just one concern: the price. At £350, it's poor value and, we would judge, £200 expensive more than it should be. For this reason alone, we can't give it better than a three-mouse rating. If you think it's the product for you, be very aware of its limitations and, if you still think you can live within them - and justify the price - it's worth serious consideration.
Verdict
At £350, it's poor value and, we would judge, £200 expensive more than it should be
Author: Nik Rawlinson
MacUser Online