APERTURE
Apple’s New All-in-One Workflow Application

Over the years there have been a lot of software applications designed exclusively for professional digital photographers. Everything from FotoStation to PhaseOne and of course Adobe’s king of the hill application, Photoshop CS2, are designed to help digital and traditional photographers handle their workflow and image output with as little fuss as possible. Most applications positively excel in some areas and leave others with qualities to be desired, forcing most professional photographers to work across a variety of software tools.

Leave it to Apple to come up with a solution that will theoretically eliminate all of that. Aperture was announced back in October of 2005 at the New York City PhotoPlus Expo to a great deal of fanfare and hype. Those who attended the expo came back proclaiming Apple’s future rain as the photo editing software king and there were numerous rumors flying of die-hard Windows operators selling off their machines for the latest quad-pro G5’s so they could run Aperture right away. Needless to say it made a big splash.

Apple enjoys touting Aperture as “designed for/by professional photographers” and as being an application that will revolutionize your photographic workflow. Naturally as a photographer this left me rather curious so I shelled out the money right away to get my hands on a copy.

Let me start this review by making one very important observation. Aperture does not come with a user manual. Yes you heard me correctly – a $500 ‘revolutionary’ application doesn’t come with a manual for new users, electronic or printed. All that comes with the program is a slim “Getting Started” book that reminds me of the instructions that recently came in my new DVD player. To make matters worse, Apple has the guts to make a manual available for purchase to the tune of an extra $30. I know that doesn’t seem like a lot, but when I’m paying $500 for an application I at least want a printable PDF that I can use as a reference. No such luck in this case.

Okay, so that is one strike against Apple, but that certainly doesn’t completely discredit the software as a potentially very useful tool once I figure it out for myself. I should also mention to any potential buyers out there that Aperture is one power hungry application. If your Mac is not up to version 10.4.3 of OS X Tiger and your hardware doesn’t have at the very least 1MB of RAM the software will not even run. My computer is currently operating off of 2MB of RAM and Aperture still seemed slow in some cases. Investing in Aperture also means investing in some hefty duty hardware as well.

Why is so much juice needed to run Aperture? Well, I have to admit it makes even the largest RAW files feel like you are browsing through a bunch of JPG thumbnails. Any photographer knows that handling and converting RAW files is a necessary evil. However, with Aperture that evil has become an experience of pure joy. Customizable workflow folders and image naming options are a breeze to work with and organize. In addition, small touchups can be performed to your RAW files on the fly making file conversions less of a tedious investment in time.

Other Aperture tools help you to rapidly compare and select images, and then print out composite sheets of your favorites or export them to the Web. You can also organize images into books, which one of Apple's online partners will print (cute but sort of silly for such an expensive program). The software also includes a color-managed printing engine that lets you choose paper and printer profiles, generating results similar to those you would get from Adobe's Photoshop CS2.

At this stage I was really beginning to like Aperture and could understand where all the positive hype was coming from. Unfortunately my enthusiasm quickly began to fade when a few obvious drawbacks began to surface. For example; when more advanced editing is required, you can convert RAW images into other formats such as JPG or TIFF. Or you can open them automatically in the editing program of your choice-including Photoshop. However, the TIFF images I sent to Photoshop from Aperture only came in as 8-bit TIFF files, not 16-bit. A little disappointing and frustrating, especially since RAW images exported as native Photoshop PSD open in full 16-bit mode.

While I am on the subject of editing, Aperture’s image editing options leave much to be desired. Granted, Aperture is not intended to be as powerful an image editor as Photoshop yet there are some obvious options that seem to be missing. For example, Aperture seems to be missing the ability to adjust curves and there are no white balance presents. In addition, the sharpening and noise reduction features seem poor at best. In fact I’ve had better noise reduction output from software packages that I’ve downloaded for free then I did with Aperture. In addition, I could not for the life of me find an option that allowed me to specify my own color space, which is of course a necessity when optimizing images for print.

Though Aperture can export images to other applications quite well, it is incredibly shy about importing files. A big example of this is the fact that Aperture will not respect Photoshop layers and strips metadata imported from other programs. Part of this is due to the fact that Aperture writes metadata to an external library rather than writing it to the files themselves where they should be. Not good, not good at all. I also had a lot of problems working with DNG files (universal RAW) and could only get about half of mine to open.

I am very happy to see Apple undertaking a project like Aperture and attempting to come up with a solution that will make the life of a professional photographer easier. As an organizational tool Aperture is spot on and does its job well. Considering similar programs that do the same job cost about $500 as well, Aperture is certainly a viable option. However, beyond that the program falls short and will require a few updates before it is really usable.