I put Aperture 1.1 through its paces over the last couple of days while editing the shooting that I and two other guys did on our trip to Gooseberry Mesa.
There were about 300 images from 4 days of riding (still one batch from day 4 still pending). They were all JPEGs, which doesn’t help test the new RAW functionality, but we were all shooting small cameras with no RAW mode because they are convenient to take riding.
The first thing I noticed as I spent time in Aperture was the enhanced speed. I’m sure it’s a combination of being on the new Intel Mac as well as general 1.1 improvements, but Aperture has crossed the line from being pokey to being a generally useful tool for me.
Importing images from 3 different cameras was a snap, as was assigning metadata on import—who shot the batch, adjusting the cameras’ internal timestamp from Pacific to Mountain time zones, and assigning captions. I made extensive use of the Stacks feature—which I consider to be the single biggest innovation Aperture brings to the workflow of sorting and reviewing pictures. Since mountain bike photos tend to be shot in bursts around a particular moment, the stacking was incredibly helpful in editing the shoot.
One niggle here: I’d frequently select a stack and expand it (Shift-K on the keyboard is one to learn quickly), organize the stack in order of preference (left most in the stack being the “pick”), and shift-K again to collapse the stack. The problem is that after the last shift-K to collapse, Aperture would sometimes lose focus on that stack, meaning that no image was selected in the Browser after closing the stack. When I’d then hit right-arrow to move to the next image in the Browser, Aperture didn’t have the context anymore, and would focus on the first image in the Browser—often way far away from the one I was just working on. That’s really annoying, and I couldn’t determine why it doesn’t happen all of the time.
Aperture’s speed increase is on display when making edits to the images. In 1.0, after applying even basic edits, display refreshes and other interface cues really slowed down. The interactivity of the histogram was really laggy, making on-the-fly changes to an image clunky. Particularly slow was the lift/stamp function—applying the lifted changes to other images was really slow. The MacBook/Aperture 1.1 combo fixed that, at least for this batch of images. I made exposure, sharpening and other changes directly to images during the edit, and Aperture always kept up with a good degree of interactivity throughout. They also corrected the “smoothing” of the histogram that sometimes hid detail about the editing one was performing.
One thing that bothered me a little: You can change how Aperture displays selected images in the viewer or full screen mode. I was editing on the road in the RV, with no big nice monitor to spread out on. That meant heavy full screen mode use with the “filmstrip” auto-hiding, which generally worked well. But I’d frequently want to use the Stack view in full screen mode (has the current pick on the left, and the current selection on the right), and then flip to just the current selection. The keyboard shortcuts are a bit weird (option-k and option-u, respectively, I think), and Aperture behaves a little strangely when moving images up and down the stack, giving no indication that the move took place and occassionally (but less so than the earlier issue) losing the focus of the current image.
The new user manual was a critical addition, and I hope (but doubt) that a printed copy is included with Aperture from now on. I spent time reading sections of it, and certainly intend to print it and comb through it more carefully. The manual helped clear up some of my confusion about what the different types of containers in Aperture’s Library view are capable of doing. There are folders, projects and albums, all of which seem to have some overlap until you really understand what they’re all for.
I ended up taking the edited shoot and making an album for the images I wanted to upload to Flickr and share with folks. The enhanced Export Versions command let me export this entire album, setting format, size and metadata options (Flickr had no problem picking up the metadata from the exported images). It worked very well…a big omission in 1.0 fixed here.
Now what do I want to see (aside from fixing the problems I pointed out above)? Well, a few things on my list betray my non-professional photographer status, but I still hope they happen.
- An easy way to add even more flexible export options, maybe through a plug-in architecture. I want it to be painless to export an album or other set of images to Flickr, .Mac or other web host. A plug-in framework is the best way to let the community make Aperture a friendly way to quickly share images.
- Plug-in-based access for developers to add tools to the Adjustment Hub. The new Sharpen and improved noise reduction tool was much-needed (and I used the sharpen tool with some success), but I want third-party developers to be able to port their excellent tools (like nik Sharpener and neatimage) to Aperture. This is likely possible through Core Image somehow, but formalizing access to Aperture’s innards is key.
- Developer access to the RAW conversion flow. Similar to above. I want third parties to be able to plug their RAW converters into Aperture’s flow. This is likely to be a tall order since Aperture’s ability to display images quickly depends a lot on the RAW conversion implementation, but I hope Apple provides a way. The RAW settings in the Adjustment Hub hint that there’s a way—a drop-down lets you select the 1.1 or older 1.0 converter to use on a per-image and per-camera basis.
- Better archiving support. The Vault is a fine system for making sure you don’t lose things if you lose a drive, but now I want Aperture to be able to archive to DVD (or other drive) and retain some search index of those images to point me in the right place without keeping the full images online.
Overall, 1.1 is a big improvement to Aperture, and combined with the Intel upgrade, makes Aperture a prime-time tool. I recently shot a wedding with my Nikon, so I’ll have a chance to edit that shoot (which I shot completely in RAW) soon, and I’ll report back on the RAW improvements then. I’m also planning on printing some of these images, both on my printer at home and possibly making a book (using Apple’s service), which will give me a chance to play with the as-yet-untested-by-me light table and book layout tools.