Apple Aperture 2 is the best all-around photo editor available.
Written: Sep 19 '09 (Updated Sep 21 '09)
Product Rating:
Pros: Accurate RAW conversion, very fast, non-destructive, complete feature set, facilitates efficient workflow, stable, inexpensive.
Cons: RAW tags should be exportable (i.e. 16:9 aspect ratio).
The Bottom Line: Highly recommended to professional and advanced amateur photographers for its speed, superb workflow, complete feature set, customizability, and accurate RAW conversion.
jvandegr's Full Review: Apple Aperture 2 Full Version for Mac (MB673Z/A)
Introduction
Photo editing applications have come a long way in the last decade. Beyond just cropping and exposing, this software must now perform the delicate task of converting RAW files for the more serious photographers. Regardless of an application's technical ability, it must also be user friendly. For the novice, this typically means easy to use (and find) controls that do most of the work for you. For the professional, this means an intuitive control design that facilitates the development of an efficient workflow. This often results in novice applications not having enough flexibility for professional use, and professional applications having too much of a learning curve for novices. Many online reviews of Apple's Aperture bare out the latter as novices vent frustrations about the accessibility of Aperture. In the design of Aperture, Apple likely did not envision weekend flower photographers. Rather, this application is built for advanced amateurs and professionals who eat, sleep, and breathe with their software. That being said, a few minutes spent trying to seriously learn Aperture's functionality should be enough to make it approachable by most novices. So, what can it do and how well does it do it?
System Requirements and Performance
Apple's first version of Aperture was heavily criticized as being a memory and processor hog. It could eat through your system resources fairly quickly and still bog down. Apparently, Apple listened to the complaints because Version 2 is much faster than Version 1. That being said, this is still a professionally-oriented tool and as such, you should be using professionally-oriented hardware. Without question, Aperture runs most quickly and efficiently on the Mac Pro. Of course, this is the fastest commercially available computer, so everything should run faster. However, I've noticed no performance issues whatsoever using the slowest Mac Pro from the previous generation (a Xenon Quad Core at 2.8 GHz with 10 GB of RAM). I've also had no significant problems with speed on the faster iMac models, such as the 3.0 GHz with 2 GB of RAM, but images load just a little more slowly and some functionality requires a bit more processing time. On my MacBook with a 2.0 GHZ Core 2 Duo processor and 2 GB of RAM, operation is occasionally a little slow, but nothing that really interferes with my workflow in the field. Based on my brief experience with Aperture on the Mac Mini, well, let's just say I wouldn't want to use Aperture on the Mac Mini.
Here are Apple's official minimum system requirements for Version 2.1:
One of the following Mac computers: Mac Pro MacBook Pro MacBook Air MacBook Mac mini with an Intel Core Solo or Duo processor iMac with a 1.8GHz or faster PowerPC G5 or Intel Core Duo processor Power Mac G5 with a 1.6GHz or faster PowerPC G5 processor 15- or 17-inch PowerBook G4 with a 1.25GHz or faster PowerPC G4 processor
Memory requirements: 1GB of RAM 2GB of RAM for Mac Pro
One of the following graphics cards: ATI Radeon X600 Pro, X600 XT, X800 XT Mac Edition, X850 XT, X1600, X1900 XT, 9800 XT, 9800 Pro, 9700 Pro, 9600, 9600 XT, 9600 Pro, 9650, HD 2400 XT, HD 2600 PRO, or HD 2600 XT ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 or 9600 ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra, 6600, 6600 LE, 6800 Ultra DDL, 6800 GT DDL, 7300 GT, 7800 GT, 8600M GT, or 8800 GT NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 or FX 5600 Intel GMA 950 or GMA X3100
Minimum operating system requirements: Mac OS X v10.4.11 Tiger Mac OS X v10.5.2 Leopard DVD drive for installation 5GB of hard drive space for the application and sample projects
Apple's recommended configuration is perhaps a better guideline, in my experience:
Mac computer with a 2.0GHz or faster Intel Core Duo processor or dual 2.0GHz or faster PowerPC G5 processors 2GB of RAM
One of the following graphics cards: ATI Radeon X800 XT Mac Edition, 9800 XT, 9800 Pro, X1900 XT, X1600, HD 2600 XT, or HD 2600 PRO NVIDIA GeForce 6800 series, 7300 GT, 7800 GT 8600M GT, or 8800 GT, NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 or FX 5600
Using Apple's Activity Monitor on a Mac Pro Xenon Quad Core system with 10 GB of RAM and a ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT video card, I've compared the resource consumption of Aperture and Adobe Lightroom many times for the same tasks. When idle, Aperture uses half of the memory and processor as Lightroom. When exporting several large images, making complex image adjustments, or rendering many large previews, Aperture is always first to complete the task, and does not use more RAM or processing power than Lightroom. This seems to be evidence of what an Apple Store sales rep will try to sell you: Apple software is optimized for Apple hardware. ACDSee Pro, Adobe Lightroom, and even SilkyPix all seem a little slower on the Mac Pro. PC users are out of luck, as Apple seems to have no interest in making a Windows version, and more power to them. For a change, I'm happy to say that PC users are missing out on software. As a former long-time PC user myself, Aperture was one aspect of the Mac that enticed me to make the switch, and I have no regrets.
A word about stability: this application is a rock. I've never had a failure that caused the application to close. That being the case, I'll call stability a non-issue.
Photo Management
Aperture handles the task of photo management quite well. Users can organize their photos in “projects,” which are similar to Adobe Lightroom's “collections.” In my experience, Aperture's management is a little smoother than Lightroom's management. Both are non-destructive in that photos can remain where you put them on your drive, and the software just references that location. ACDSee Pro also does photo management fairly well but see little or no advantage over Aperture.
Aperture is not designed as an image browser. In other words, it is not designed to browse and sort two thousand photos at high speed. Actually, no photo editing application is. Lightroom is probably the worst of all the editors in this regard because it takes a lot of time to generate previews. Adobe's bloated routines are simply no match for Aperture here, and I'm always impressed by just how quickly Aperture can preview large RAW images with such minimal effort. Still, even Aperture is no match for the speed of CameraBits Photo Mechanic, which is a true photo management tool designed primarily to browse, sort, and provide basic exporting options. This is my browser of choice, and Aperture is my editor of choice. There is some overlap between the two, but not enough that either one can stand alone.
RAW Conversion
Accurate conversion of RAW files is critical in professional photography. Every photo editing application seems to interpret RAW files from different cameras in different ways. In part, this is due to the different proprietary RAW formats of each manufacturer. Usually, color is the most critical aspect of RAW conversion, although some shooters care more about sensor noise suppression and sharpness. Their argument is that color can be adjusted in post-processing, while noise and sharpness need to be handled correctly from the start. While this argument has some merit, I would argue that color is equally important and it can be extremely difficult to reproduce colors that have not been interpreted correctly by the software. Photographers who focus their work on tonality, as opposed to sharpness, understand this.
While SilkyPix likely remains the champ of RAW Conversion, Apple has proven that they can compete with the best. Aperture offers outstanding noise suppression without reducing detail (sharpness). Color rendition is superb, preserving most of the subtle tones of the best lenses (usually, Minolta and Leica). In comparison, Adobe Camera RAW (often referred to as ACR) is the worst RAW converter I have ever worked with. In Lightroom, it produces very poor color rendition, a noticeable increase in noise, and a slight loss of detail. Ultimately, this is what keeps me from using any Adobe photo editing application. If RAW conversion is one of your important criteria in choosing an editor, stay away from Lightroom and get Aperture. Beyond converting RAW images, I've noticed that images viewed in Aperture have slightly greater clarity, compared to Adobe Lightroom. This is not due to a manipulation of the preview image, as far as I can tell. Instead, I think Aperture simply handles image display better than other editors. Perhaps this has something to do with its relationship with the video card, I don't know. I have no quantitative evidence to support this, but I've noticed it on many occasions. It may also be a factor of Aperture's design, which is clearly built around images and not controls, unlike many other editors.
Features
Regardless of the photo editing application I'm reviewing, there are simply too many functions to review, or even list. For a complete listing, the manufacturer's websites are usually the best place to go (www.apple.com/aperture). In general, I've found Aperture's functionality to be excellent – all of the tools I need are included. For me, some of the most critical image editing features are highlight recovery, black point adjustment, noise reduction, precise white balance adjustment, and vignetting control. Of course, Apple also excludes an exposure slider and easy-to-see histogram, brightness and contrast control, and the usual suite of proportion controls: cropping, straightening, etc. Levels can be viewed and manipulated by composite RGB channel, or each color channel individually. Nearly every aspect of image adjustment can be accomplished with a qualitative slider, or a quantitative input field. Aperture's newest version of “spot and patch” works very well for removing sensor dust artifacts, and is a significant improvement over the previous version. I've also found Lightroom's dust removal tool to work very well, but I think Aperture's is even more efficient and the results are just as good.
Metadata viewing and editing are also critical aspects of a professional's workflow and again, Apple has thought this through. Every EXIF and IPTC data field that I can think of is easily accessible in the Inspector. IPTC modifications are easy to make. The bottom of the Metadata tab has buttons that provide for quick switching between EXIF, IPTC, Keywords, Archive, and other data.
Workflow
Of course, all the features in the world aren't of much use if the human interface can't keep up. Apple knows human interface as well as anyone, and it shows in Aperture. However, I didn't realize this when I first started using Aperture in an Apple Store. At first glance, it appears to have a relatively fixed layout, albeit an easy to use one. The interface is actually highly customizable, and more so than most photo editing applications. The Inspector palette contains a projects tab, an adjustments tab, and a metadata tab that contain the majority of the functionality used at any one time. Here again, Aperture's designers show that they understand the professional's workflow. These three tabs are exactly representative of the three aspects of my post-shoot work. The adjustments tab reveals a handful of the most commonly used image adjustment controls, such as a histogram and exposure control. However, if it doesn't display a certain control that I find myself using regularly, I can simply add this control to the palette by selecting the “+” symbol at the top of the Inspector. Apple seems to have figured out that too much information can be a bad thing in terms of usability, so they let the user decide what works best for them. That's good design work. This entire Inspector can be hidden at anytime with the click of a button at the top of the screen, or just a strike of the “i” key. A single strike of the “h” key turns the Inspector into a floating palette, or HUD. By default, this HUD is a very dark grey to help minimize eye strain and interference with the colors of displayed photos. Striking the “h” key again causes the HUD to disappear to allow for uninhibited viewing of the images. As in Lightroom, any image can be previewed on a completely blank screen, devoid of any controls or menu bars. Aperture makes this very easy by including a large “Full Screen” button in the menu bar. This feature helps me see global adjustments more clearly, while not neglecting composition.
Perhaps the most useful and unique aspect of Aperture's workflow is the Loupe. This large, adjustable magnification feature is borrowed from the days of film and lightboxes. It is a tried and true method of viewing small details with minimal effort. Adjacent to the “Full Screen” button in the top menu is a “Loupe” button (the Loupe can also be activated by simply striking the ` key, immediately adjacent to the numeric one key in the top left of the keyboard). This button immediately activates a simulated lens that allows for 100% magnification of any portion of an image, and in any viewing mode (browser or thumbnails). The loupe is large relative to the screen size, allowing for easy use. Magnification can be adjusted on the fly from 50% to 1600% for absolutely critical assessment of an individual pixel. What's so great about this? I no longer need to enlarge an entire image to 100%, then scroll left, right, up, and down to check focus, exposure, etc. Instead, one keystroke, then one slight move of the trackball, and I can see exactly what I need to at nearly any magnification level. Another key stroke and the loupe disappears. Kudos to Apple for this superb feature and making my workflow noticeably more efficient.
Dispelling Some Myths
Myth #1: Aperture is “dangerous.” I've seen a couple reviews that claim that Aperture is “dangerous” because it essentially mismanages your images, leaving them vulnerable to accidental deletion or irreparable alteration. Nothing could be further from the truth. Images can be stored in Aperture's library, or they can be left alone in their original location. I do not use any software to import my files from my camera's memory card, nor do I ever attach my camera directly to my computer. Instead, I simply eject the memory card and insert it into my card reader, attached by Firewire. I then use basic copy and paste commands within the folder structure of the operating system to transfer the files. For some, this may seem inefficient, and I can certainly understand that argument. Ingesting files with an application can allow for the automatic inclusion of metadata, which saves a little time later. For my workflow, it just hasn't been an issue. Accordingly, I just set Aperture to leave the files in their original location. Just for my knowledge, I once allowed Aperture to ingest files directly from my memory card and store them in Aperture's library. Everything worked great, no RAW data was altered (I carefully verified this), and I can see how useful this is for certain types of projects.
Myth #2: Aperture is slow. Quite the contrary. With just a little more speed and RAM than Apple's minimum requirements, this thing is the fastest editor I've ever used. Adobe Lightroom, ACDSee Pro, and SilkyPix can't keep up with it for preview generation, project management, and the image adjustments that I use regularly.
Myth #3: Aperture is a system resources hog. Again, quite the contrary. Because it was optimized for Apple hardware, it uses system resources much more efficiently than third party software. Most of the time, it leaves resources left over for my other applications. On occasion, like any photo editor, it can be forced to use all of one of my processors and all 10 gigabytes of RAM. This is the nature of professional photographic editing.
Myth #4: Aperture is expensive. Its price tag is $175, but an educational discount can provide it for as little as $79. That puts it in the same price range range as every other worthwhile photo editing application. Of course, you need a Mac to run it. The typical short-sighted argument is that Macs are expensive, and that ultimately makes Aperture expensive. How much is your time worth? How much is system stability worth? How much is system longevity worth? How much is resale value worth? Put all those together and you'll find a Mac is much less expensive than a PC. In the long run, Aperture will likely save you money. I know, I've made the switch from PC.
Conclusions
For the serious amateur or working professional, Aperture is the best photo editing application currently available. It offers a better combination of accurate RAW conversion, efficient workflow, intuitive interface, and greater speed than other photo editors. Just make sure your hardware is a small step beyond the minimal system requirements for maximum speed.
NOTE: This review is COPYRIGHT by the author and may not be reproduced in part or in whole for any purpose.
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