Aperture
Platform: Mac OS X 10.4
price £300 plus VAT
Company: Apple
Minimum specs: 1.8GHz PowerPC G5 processor, 1GB RAM, specified graphics card (see Apple site for detai
Pros: Fast integrated workflow for viewing, sorting and enhancing digital images, including integrated RAW conversions. Clever stacks sorting, and excellent print tools.
Cons: Pricey, demands top-powered Macs, no Windows version, slow imports, no offline tracking, noisy shadows when adjusting underexposed RAW images.
Its main function is speedy opening and processing of RAW-format image files from digital cameras, though it also works with scans and other image types. Adjustments are made non-destructively, so the original master images remain unaltered on your disk, but Aperture writes a database to keep track of how each file should be handled when they’re opened. This allows you to alter your editing or produce another version later.
You can import, sort, search, and view files, alter colour balance, white point, colour temperature, brightness, contrast, sharpness, noise reduction, crop, rotation and size. There’s a red-eye fixing tool and a tool to blur out small defects.
Aperture is a sort of turbo-charged iPhoto, but it’s certainly not Apple’s answer to Adobe Photoshop. Aperture isn’t a pixel editor – it doesn’t include brush tools or filters, it doesn’t use or display layers and it cannot output CMYK colour. Instead, it’s more like Apple’s answer to the Adobe Bridge file viewer and Camera Raw utilities included with the Adobe Creative Suite 2 bundle.
The Bridge/Raw combo is part of the Adobe Creative Suite 2 or Photoshop CS 2, while Apple charges £300 (and you’ll probably still need Photoshop). However, Adobe is sufficiently worried about the threat of Aperture that it is preparing to launch Project Lightroom, a fast image manager that matches most of Aperture’s features (see news for more).
Aperture really is fast: clicking on a RAW thumbnail displays it instantly in half-resolution, then loads the full-resolution image in a few seconds. Image adjustment sliders work in real-time, too.
Power hungry
This demands very hefty processing power. The minimum is a G5 desktop or iMac with a 1.8GHz processor and 2GB RAM, or a 15- or 17-inch PowerBook G4 with at least a 1.25GHz chip. However, Apple recommends a dual 2GHz G5 or faster for optimum performance.
Our dual 2GHz G5 handled Aperture perfectly well, but we also tested the software on a new Quad G5s with two dual-core 2.5GHz processors and 4.5GB RAM. Aperture is only fractionally faster to open RAW files on the Quad than the Dual G5, and no faster when importing images.
Aperture also ran on an 18-month old PowerBook G4 1.33GHz with 1GB RAM. File import and opening is a bit slower, but it’s not problematic – a 6mp RAW image opens fully in ten seconds on the PowerBook compared to three seconds on the dual G5.
Aperture’s user interface is similar to Final Cut Pro. It’s clearly presented, and windows are for the most part in shades of neutral grey, which is vital for accurate assessment of the colour. Aperture hooks into ColorSync for display and output and you can soft-proof the effects of RGB or CMYK printers.
The display is extensively customizable and can show thumbnails or filenames in a base window and a choice of enlarged images in the main view window – single, multiples, comparison pairs, sequences of three, or a light table of individually movable and scalable images. The metadata info and image-adjustments palettes can be shown or hidden to free up space (or dragged to a second monitor), while the adjustments menus can also be displayed as a semi-transparent floating palette.
When you first use Aperture, it offers to import your iPhoto library if you have one, and you can also opt to load images from any online folder or volume, or connected camera. This is a slow process – a 1,200-image library took more than an hour to import. Any metadata is preserved on import, but most EXIF exposure information is removed on export.
Aperture copies images into its own library as new master files. It can back up to multiple disks, but it can’t track images once they’re offline. You can still get at the original files inside the library to open them in other applications, though Apple doesn’t make it easy – you have to Ctrl-select the Aperture ‘aplibrary’ file and click on Show Package Contents.
However, Aperture will easily launch images straight into Photoshop (as PSDs), save as TIFs or JPGs, or launch into another image editor if you’d prefer.
Image adjustment controls are very clearly presented. They are similar to Photoshop’s RAW menus, but more intuitive. Once adjustments have been made to one image, they can be applied to other images using the Lift and Stamp tools.
The loupe magnifier works well to enlarge small portions of the image in real-time as you run the cursor over it. This works with thumbnail images too. Sharpening is a bit basic, as it’s missing a threshold control. It’s better than Adobe Raw but not as good as Photoshop Unsharp Masking.
A new and useful idea is Image Stacks, which will visually group images in the main view or thumbnail browser window. Stacks can be set up automatically, based on the time intervals between when they were taken, or grouped manually – you can have several stacks for the same image group. It’s easy to add keywords or star ratings to images or groups, and then search for them – search and display is fast.
Selected images can be displayed as a slideshow, emailed, converted to Web galleries, printed directly, or ordered as a book. The print menu combines page setup, colour management, layout, and preview in one, and includes automatic contact sheet creation.
So, what’s the all-important RAW conversion like? Sadly, it’s not as good as Adobe’s tools. If you try to adjust under-exposure, the shadows show ugly multi-colour noise (below, with Aperture's output on the left and Photoshop's on the right) that isn’t there if you do the same with Adobe Raw. There’s a noise reduction menu but that also blurs fine detail.
Aperture is a decent first attempt by Apple, but it’s expensive for what it does, computing requirements are hefty, file import is slow, and RAW conversion is suspect.
Article by Simon Eccles, DIGIT magazine © IDG 2006