Aperture 2 by Tim on February 16th, 2008
Last year I attempted to drive myself into bankruptcy by taking up photography as a hobby. Pretty much every aspect of photography can be made into a crucial spending decision. Unfortunately no amount of money spent can make you a better photographer, which is hopefully learned early on. After buying a digital SLR, a tripod and some lenses, I needed a better app than iPhoto or Picasa to manage and develop photos, especially since I would now be working with the much lauded RAW imagees.
At the time of my decision there were only three apps that seemed worth considering. Lightroom had recently come out of beta (along with an obnoxious Photoshop moniker), Apple was making the rounds with Aperture 1.5 and my father swore by Capture One (which now seems to be confusingly named Phase One Capture One 4).
I watched my father use Capture One but found the interface to be slow, unwieldy and decidedly un-Mac-like, regardless of how good it’s RAW processing was. A strange criticism, I know, but if I’m going to spend hours a day with an app, it needs to flow a certain way. I know I’m not alone here. Either way, it was off the table.
My poor 20″ white plastic iMac didn’t seem up to the task of running Aperture, with it’s monstrous system requirements and Apple’s continuous flaunting of it running across dual 30″ displays, so I decided to take Lightroom for a spin. It was love at first launch. The interface was completely novel, but felt strangely at home with its image-centric design. It made managing thousands of photos so easy I quickly unloaded more cash for a dedicated image drive and began shooting as much as I could.
Now, not quite a year later, Apple has released Aperture 2.0, with 100+ new features to brag about. Reading through the list and taking note of my new hardware and newer hardware, I thought it was time to finally see what Aperture was capable of.
My very first impressions were promising. What used to require a Power Mac G5 now runs on an ‘underpowered’ MacBook Air and still feels pretty zippy. Unfortunately, after getting home and trying Aperture with my iMac, things took a turn for the worse.
The first, and probably most irritating thing was the unstableness of Aperture. I found there were certain parts of the app that were just off limits to me; hitting the export preferences panel and creating a webpage or journal. Worse, these areas worked fine on my Air, but not on the iMac. Puzzling indeed. After a scan of the support forums I found a solution. It turns out that certain colorpickers are the source of the crashes, specifically RCWebColorPicker, in my case. One trip to the trash later and I was on to the next problem.
When I installed the Aperture trial I pointed it at my existing photo drive, where the Lightroom catalog lived and all was well. The two libraries co-existed together just fine. Then I decided to bump up my storage and bought a new drive complete with two kinds of FireWire. After copying my existing images over and disconnecting the old USB drive, I went into Aperture and tried to convince it the images were somewhere else, without resorting to re-importing everything.
The first part of this problem is that the Aperture trial seems to be missing support material. The only item under the help menu is “Create Support Profile…”, which is slow and especially unhelpful. After another trip to the support forums (I lied, it was actually the same trip), it sounds like the boxed versions are fine but something is strange with the trial.
The second part came when I selected “Relocate Masters for Library” from the menu. After watching a progress bar scan through all my images, I was left with everything still “offline.” I learned that Aperture required both drives plugged in to perform the relocation. Lightroom was much easier to persuade, I just pointed the base folder to a different drive and it believed me.
This reveals an interesting difference between the way the two apps work. While both work off of a database, Aperture seems to prefer knowing where everything is at all times, whereas Lightroom is comfortable with just a base folder which is used to map ‘relative’ paths. I think I prefer Lightroom’s method, since it’s more flexible and powers it’s ability to monitor a folder for new images, which automatically get imported.
After what seemed like a very long time, I finally had all my images where I wanted them and had stabilized Aperture enough to put it through some maneuvers. This is where I uncovered a puzzling problem, which magically solved itself. Lightroom automatically removes hot pixels during it’s RAW processing. Given that these defects are part of a photographer’s life (much like dust and lens scratches), this is an especially time saving feature. In my initial runs of Aperture this feature was nowhere to be found. All of my images had the slightly familiar pink and green spots in the middle. I found a pair of articles that talked about this, the second one offered a compromising solution.
The solution was to take a lens cap shot and use it to find all the offending spots, then use the touchup tool to remove them. You could save this touchup data to stamp on any images you were working on. Not a great solution, but it could work, so I turned on my camera and took a few snaps at different ISOs to import into Aperture. That’s when something creepy happened. I imported the photos and loaded one up only to watch Aperture zap the hot pixels out of existence. I loaded another and was presented with a flat black screen. Scratching my head, I hopped over to one of my earlier photos and again the hot pixels were removed.
I’m still not entirely clear on what was wrong before, but I suspect that the hot pixel removing algorithm required some sort of priming, prompted by the lens cap shot. But I can’t find any documentation of this, beyond one forum post where someone mentions automatic hot pixel removal as a feature of version 2.
There are still some areas where Lightroom outdoes Aperture, particularly the way in which you can browse by metadata. Aperture lets you filter and search to your heart’s content, but sometimes you’re not sure what your options are, and this is where the browsing part gets interesting. In Lightroom I can tunnel down through my photos based on which lens I was using or even by camera serial number. That’s especially handy when you’ve got photos from friends or family mingled into your library.
There are some problems with Aperture’s fullscreen implementation too. Notably there’s no way to access the menubar, and it swallows up keyboard shortcuts too, making it impossible to access Spotlight or Cmd + Tab to another app, which gets very annoying, very fast. The new tool HUD is well implemented though.
So why am I even considering Aperture? That’s a question I’ve been asking myself. I can’t lie, some of the appeal comes from its Apple’ness. It’s part of an ecosystem and that means it’s going to integrate better. I no longer have to export images from Lightroom just to get them on my iPhone or iPod, I can take them straight from Aperture, same for .Mac galleries and other web projects. There are a few other reasons too. Aperture’s loupe tool beats Lightroom’s somewhat confusing “double-click to zoom, but not quite where you clicked” behavior.
Oh, and Aperture is fast. Really fast. Especially when in quick-preview mode, where the speed is really noticeable.
For now I’m going to run both products side-by-side until my trial runs out, to see what other differences I can find. They seem to play fairly well together, but I’ll be interested to see how easy it is to sync metadata and hear what the pros have to say about the two products.
I suspect I’ll continue my drive towards pauperism by owning licenses for both.