Apple Aperture 2 For Mac Photo Editing Review
Expert tester and pro photographer, Ian Farrell takes a spin around Apple's 3rd instalment of Aperture. Most Mac users will know that Apple has two photo editing applications – iPhoto and Aperture. Word for mac mark text as heading. The first of these comes preinstalled on every Mac, is packed with undeniably cool features, and is easy and good fun to use. The second has always been a more serious, sensible affair: Aperture’s interface is minimalist and grey – no colourful, cartoon-like icons here. It offers numerous ways to edit Raw files indestructibly with powerful tools; iPhoto has more friendly controls that seem to say “Play with me!
April 16, 2009: Apple has released an update to its Aperture 2 application for Mac users, which improves overall stability and provides fixes for issues related to the integrity of the Aperture Library database and compatibility with specific file types. Apple still has a way to go. The first thing you should know about Aperture is that it comes with a very big manual, and for good reason.
You might like it!” That’s how it’s been for ages: iPhoto for amateurs; Aperture for professionals. Until now that is. The latest release of Aperture (version 3) is targeted firmly at existing iPhoto users. The interface is less daunting and almost cheerful in places.
Features like Faces and Places, which use face recognition and GPS technology to organise images, are straight from iPhoto 09. You can also share pictures on the internet via Flickr and Facebook straight from the application – no plug-ins required. This isn’t to say that Aperture 3 has nothing to offer the advanced enthusiast or professional, it’s just that even Apple’s marketing for this release is focused almost entirely on getting the beginner or amateur to upgrade from iPhoto (free) to Aperture (£169). An Apple executive told me recently that there are over 200 new features in Aperture 3, but before we get stuck in and look at some, it might be helpful to quickly recap over what Aperture does. At its heart, it’s a database that stores images, and allows them to be edited non-destructively. This means that you can make 20 edits to a photograph, then go back and change the first one in the sequence without affecting any of the others. Adjustments are stored as instructions in the database and applied in real time to the images in real time.
It’s an efficient and highly creative way of working. Aperture also allows you to keyword your photographs and organise them in projects, folder and albums. You can search thousands of images according to all manner of critera (rating, keyword, location, date, camera model, etc) and output them in different formats, from simple JPEG and TIFF files to websites, slideshows and on-line prints and photobooks. All this functionality comes at a price, though: you need a fast computer to run Aperture, and lots or RAM.
Faces and Places are two new ways to organise your images, although we’ve seen them before in iPhoto. Faces uses face-recognition technology to identify people in your pictures. When the application has found a face, the user tags it once with a name.
Aperture then applies this tag every time it finds that person in another photograph. In our real world tests using Aperture 3, Faces took quite a while to find all the faces in a library of just over 8000 pictures, and it then took a while to tag them all with names too. It’s then possible to choose a name and see all pictures containing that person. Or at least in theory. In our test a large number of pictures (some only landscapes!) confused the application (“Laura may be in these pictures”). If you have the time to spend on Faces, then I can see the technology being useful, but it seems it does need training. Places organises pictures according to where they are shot, obtaining this information from either a GPS device, an iPhone or by the user entering information by hand.