Apple Aperture 3

Friday, 16 April 2010

The new Aperture looks more like iPhoto too, with Projects letting you see skimmable stacks, a left side-bar where your albums can sit and so on.

Well, there’s the starting point. Two of the standout features of the latest iPhoto (iLive ’09 version), Faces and Places, are two of the features added to Aperture 3.

You can see the point immediately – professionals can run up huge catalogues of images of people and having to deal with ‘You took a photograph of my Aunt Agnes a few years ago; can I have another copy please?’ could entail laborious searches through databases or worse, yer actual filing cabinets.

Places, likewise. A mate of mine, photographer Sean Craig, travels about taking pictures all the time. I’m sure he’d appreciate an instant search tool for finding all the pictures he took of that Ford Mustang in Invercargill using Places, or Kevin Rose bungie-jumping via Faces, and I’m sure he’s not alone among the pro and semi-pro photographers out there – in fact, I know a couple who do shoots with their pro DSLRs, then add a placement shot with their iPhone, as they know the GPS feature will ‘place’ it for them in iPhoto. They just group their high-def shots with that and assign the coordinates to all. Aperture 3 just makes that easier.

Places

You can still assign location data to photographs that you took with cameras that don’t support GPS metadata – in Aperture 3, simply click on Places in the left sidebar of Aperture in Library view, then drag the photo to the spot on the map where you shot it. A pin appears. Clicking on a located image along the bottom activates its pin in the map – you can right-click on the pin to get options including Move Pin. Then click Done.

When you’re searching for photos, you can use the map’s navigation menu to quickly find the location. When you click the pin, Aperture displays all the photos taken there.

You can also import the GPS data from a device’s track file. If you drop a photo taken with an iPhone 3G or 3GS into Aperture 3, it can extract the GPS locations so you can assign them to other photos in your library. You then drag and drop photos onto the location pins from the drawer beneath. Actually, dragging any photo (or group thereof) onto the map produces an instant pin – it’s very easy to use.

Just be sure to invoke Places from the top-right toolbar – the Places item at the left is the repository for any images with location data (it’s not the Places tool, just its resulting album).

Faces

To get this feature up and running, press the Faces icon under the Library tab on the left, then click Show Unamed Faces. All the faces in your collection which have not been tagged will appear, and you can name them. Of course, Aperture uses your Address Book contacts database to speed things up, making suggestions once you’ve started typing just as iPhoto does.

After you’ve named a few, Aperture starts asking you to confirm additional picks. After a certain point (often just 3-5 correctly labelled photos), Aperture assigns the correct name on subsequent imports.

Aperture 3 also picks up existing Faces data from current iPhoto libraries, if you are upgrading to Aperture rather than investing in something like Photoshop. Also, names added to faces become converted to standard keywords when exported; if you publish the images straight to Facebook, entering the corresponding Facebook IDs for images means they will get automatic notification once they’re in an online gallery.

Other new features

Among the other new features, the new full screen browser is pretty cool. This works according to what button you press first, so if you click on Browser then press Full Screen at upper right, you get a full screen of thumbnails on a black background.

If you click on Viewer first, then Full Screen, you get thumbnails along the bottom of your monitor, but only when you move your mouse down there, like a Dock with disappearing turned on. Any selected photo fills the screen. This works elegantly and lets you concentrate nicely on the images – you can also flip through them with the arrow keys on your keyboard if you don’t want or need thumbnails. Just press the Escape key to get back to normal.

You can now customise the simplified Import browser to show only the import settings you want to use. Hiding unneeded options allows you to create a simpler, uncluttered Browser window.

You can also automatically apply adjustments to images as they are imported using new adjustment presets. You can choose any combination of image adjustments, from Auto Levels and Auto Exposure to Auto Curves, as part of the preset. You just have to make the preset first – but what a time saver if you know exactly how a certain camera shoots.

Among other speedups, AppleScript is much more supported in A3 so you can customise all sorts of functions, and I like the customisable command key feature – Aperture (menu)>Commands>Customize (above).

Adjustments have a few added twists, like brushable adjustments (above), but this is a bit of a coarse tool, even with Detect Edges turned on. I imagine the pros will most likely use this as a quick look at enhancements they might then do later in Photoshop, turning them off in Aperture before saving the image out.

Not every Adjustment category lets you do it anyway – you click on the little Action icon in each palette (under Adjustments) but some, like White Balance, only offer Remove this Adjustment and Remove from Default Set, whereas Chromatic Aberration, Devignette, Noise Reduction, Enhance, Curves, Highlights & Shadows, Levels, Color, Black & White, Color Monochrome, Sepia Tone, Sharpen, Edge Sharpen and Vignette all let you brush. It’s a rough tool because you can’t do precise selections, but at least you can turn them on and off (like all Adjustments).

Also, of course, accuracy would be a lot better if you used a tablet instead of a mouse.

I understand why you can’t brush Straighten and Crop. I can’t brush Retouch because it’s a brush adjustment to start with (it has its own brush).

And you can apply multiple adjustments of a single type of adjustment to different parts of an image by creating multiple adjustment bricks for each adjustment. For example, set one Levels adjustment for the sky, and another Levels adjustment brick for skin tones. To add a new instance of an adjustment, choose the Add New option from the Action pop-up menu in each adjustment brick, but once again, only some of the available adjustments have this feature.

The straighten tool is a bit of a disappointment, at least if you just drag the angle slider. It’s better than Photoshop’s (up to CS4 anyway) but not as good as iPhoto’s, because in iPhoto you get a non-printing vertical/horizontal grid you can line things up to, whereas A3 does not. But that said, if you turn on Straighten and then just click and drag on the image, there’s your grid, so all good.

Some preset brushes for common tasks (ie, skin smoothing) are also provided, by the way – these appear under Quick Brushes, the top option under the menu that lets you turn Adjustment ‘bricks’ on and off.

I do like this though – if you hold down the Shift key while moving an adjustment slider in the Adjustments HUD, the HUD vanishes, giving you an unobstructed view of your photo as you make adjustments. (These being the Heads Up Displays you turn on in the Window menu.)

Aperture 3 includes dozens of ready-to-use presets, and you can easily create your own and export them for use by others. If you use a combination of adjustments frequently, save it as a preset, for example, which you can apply to individual or batches of images. Also, powerful Curve adjustments can be applied to luminance, RGB, or individual colour channels.

Publishing has been boosted too, like iPhoto from iLife ’09 – you can publish straight to FaceBook, Flickr and MobileMe directly. I tested the Facebook option, which is fast and works well.

Printing has also had features added, from border styles available, options for how many photos per page, crop image to fill, to Print Only adjustments … Apple’s engineers have really gone to town on making this useful to working professionals.

Audio video

Aperture now handles the importing and browsing of video right up to HD video. And it can play back the video clips. Since many digital SLR cameras now shoot high-def video, this is a good idea.

But I found the performance of 1920x1080 HD video shot on a Canon 5D MkII to be imperfect. Once again, this may be due to the fact I’m running all this powerful stuff on a three-year-old MacBook Pro – I’d be keen to see if it’s better on a more powerful Mac. But in my experience, display of the thumbnails was slow enough (85 files); playing them back was almost impossible.

But if you do have a more up-to-date Mac, you can supposedly do all sorts of things with video, like detach JPEGs from frames, detach audio recorded as an audio attachment and turn it into a standalone audio clip, and connect audio to photographs. But see ‘Performance’, below.

Slideshows & books

Aperture 3 offers eight slideshow themes, including six from iPhoto ’09 and two new themes: Watercolor (sic) Panels and Photo Edges. To use the feature, choose New> from the File menu and choose Slideshow.

You can almost instantly create a simple slideshow on the fly, or build an advanced slideshow and save it in your library for future use. To do this you simply press the Export button at top right.

The Scrapbook theme is really nice – you get a view with a scrolling playhead below. I found this easy to use, effective and powerful – you could, for example, bang together a slideshow for a client and email it to them, or make it available for download on a website.

Books, like the excellent iPhoto books, are in this version too. You can choose a new 13x10-inch size (33x25.4cm) in any Aperture book theme, of which there are Photo Essay and Journal (the new themes – Journal is pictured above) along with the older themes, making 11 in total.

Choose File>New>Book to check this out – you can edit the layout a lot more than you can in iPhoto, to make something truly stunning. Just press the Edit Layout button near top right.

There are actually lots of other new features, mostly to do with cataloguing etc, like up to eight colour labels, project merging (great!). You can see them all on the Aperture 3 page at Apple.

Performance

I found Aperture 2 quicker and more stable on my MacBook Pro, but it is three years old. Mind you, it has a bigger hard drive than standard and 4GB RAM, but the 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo CPU has seen better days, especially when compared to the latest. I had a couple of crashes with Aperture 3, like when I tried to turn on every Adjustment available, I got to Sharpen the first time: bzzzt – crash.

Zooming into photos could be really slow, and the video that shows on launch, that can tell you lots about the new features, could really stutter and misbehave.

And yes, I applied all the updates. I’m not sure, though, if this is the fault of Aperture 3 or my MacBook Pro, which has been pretty slow all round, lately. I have been looking at that …

With Snow Leopard, though, the Mac can support up to 16 terabytes of memory, and Aperture 3 is fully 64-bit to take advantage of larger memory capacities. I imagine this would be most useful to working pros, considering the performance issues with my older machine, but there’s still no default that I know of to tell your Mac OS 10.6x system to boot 64-bit every time. You still have to hold down the 6 and 4 keys on startup. Which seems silly, frankly.

Updates

Make sure you update to the latest version (just run Software Update in the Apple menu) as soon after release a memory leak was discovered. This was fixed quickly, but your processors probably don’t need the stress to check your version.

Using faces is as easy as it is with iPhoto (which comes free with all Macs, unlike Aperture which is a pro application you buy for $349 or upgrade from a previous version for $179).

When I wrote this, a second update had pushed it to 3.0.2.

Conclusion

Aperture 3 is a comprehensive update to a powerful package. It doesn't suit fine editing of images – you'll still need Photoshop for that – but rather a broad-stokes approach to enhancing and improving images. But if you have a powerful enough Mac, and you're serious about your photography, this is a must-have.

What's Great: All the new features are impressive.

What's not: You'll struggle with an older, or slower, Mac. (My 2.2GHz 4GB RAM Core 2 Duo 15-inch MacBook Pro from 2007 definitely struggled.)

Needs: Lots of hard drive space for your collection, lots of photos and a serious will to have your collection catalogued ... which Aperture 3 makes considerably easier.

It's: Apple Aperture 3, NZ$349 (upgrade from A1 or A2, $179).

System: Mac Pro, MacBook Pro, MacBook, MacBook Air, iMac, Mac mini Duo or better processor, Mac OS X v10.5.8 or v10.6.2 or later, 1GB RAM (or 2GB for Mac Pro), DVD drive for installation, 1GB hard drive space, additional 7GB if you install the sample library.

More info: Buy from Apple NZ Ltd, 30-day free trial available, or buy from Authorised Apple Resellers.

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Apple Aperture 3