Aperture - Do u use it ? why and how ?

[elchemor]

Been almost a month since i installed it, and untill now i still havent figured out the advantage of using it over lets say iPhoto... or CS2... or even Nikon View or ACDSee...., maybe some of you out there who attended Apple digital photography event, can enlighten us of things that can't be done with other tools... or maybe things which needs different tools to do it, and can be combined with Aperature......

[jmonfries]

I use iPhoto alot at work and found that it couldn't cope with hi-res files and large volumes of images. I assume that Aperture would be designed to solve this. I heard that it is a CPU and RAM hog.

[Magnus]

Okay, here's my personal interpretation of what Aperture is all about and what it's good at. I have a copy and I've used it a bit, not enough to say I'm an expert at it or even very good ;-)

Aperture is all about going through a lot of RAW exposures fast to get to the ones you think are good enough to take forward to further editing, etc. It's for a professional who after a shoot has a few hundred or thousands of exposures that they need to refine down to perhaps 10 usable ones.

At the core Aperture helps you import RAW shots from whatever storage media you use. You can them sort and manage the shots in different ways, but organizing them in stacks (a stack is a collection of related shots), contrast and compare them with each other, putting them on a virtual light table to see which ones look good together, adjust colors, levels, etc. Once you have gone through and found the shots you want to take further you can print them out in various formats, export them in whatever format you need to work on them further, etc. You can even from within Aperture send a shot for editing in Photoshop.

Unlike iPhoto, Aperture does everything in a non-destructive way. Basically, however many edits you make of a shot in terms of cropping, adjusting curves, sharpness, etc. you can always with a click go back to the original. Aperture saves whatever has been applied to the original shot instead of an individual copy for every step. At least that's the way I understand it. This makes it easy for you to work with the shots and adjust them because you never have to worry about over writing the original. In iPhoto this functionality doesn't exist. This is perhaps more important than anything when we compare Aperture and iPhoto.

Ghassan, Deputy GM at IMC said in an interview:

Well the Aperture is a tool that was created for photographers, because when the photography world went to digital there was no real tool for photographers out there. What happened was that most photographers adopted the existing digital tools which were created for designers really and not for photographers and they started working with them. And Aperture is the first software that was created for photographers so all the workflow inside Aperture was created to be used for photographers first and not for designers so now the photographers have to adapt to them. It's actually from scratch, from zero built up for photographers.

I'd say this is true with some reservations. The "existing tool" that photographers started working with is arguably Photoshop. Photoshop was and is a very good tool for pixel-level editing of photos. That's not something Aperture is concerned with, so there's no need to even compare the two really. Bridge would be more of a fair comparison to Aperture. I don't have much experience with Bridge but it has always struck me as a rather clumsy piece of software. That Aperture is the "first software that was created for photographers so all the workflow inside Aperture was created to be used for photographers first and not for designers so now the photographers have to adapt to them" seems a bit harder to understand and agree with.

I don't think you really see much of a value with Aperture unless: 1) you shoot at lot of exposures that you have to sort through, 2) you shoot RAW, and 3) a non-destructive workflow is absolutely critical to you.

[iDubai]

I have it, but I never understood the white balance! DuH!

+ What is non-destructive workflow? .. Man! I need a crash course..

[elchemor]

i shoot raw most of the time, and i never had the problem going through the photos to choose the best version...... well... i never thought of it as a problem !

yeah... what's destructive workflow ? the only software that i somehow suffered from its workflow (and that was due to inexperience) was Capture one from Phase One ! otherwise, u can always come back to the starting point !

[Magnus]

Again, I've not used Aperture that much, but it's main features come in when you're talking about a really high volume of exposures. Say you're a pro shooting a wedding. You can easily do a few thousand exposures. I'm an amateur at I've shot some 600 exposures at a wedding once ;-)

If you're talking that many exposures, and many shot with really fast one after the other, it's not easy to weed out the bad ones, and figure out which ones you want to continue working with. In Aperture there's are functions for putting exposures next to one another, look at details with a virtual loupe, putting frames next to one another, keeping the best one out of a sequence on screen at all times until you've gone through all similar shots, etc. All is meant to facilitate going through the shots to find the good ones. None of that is really available in something like iPhoto.

Aperture also automatically sort exposures into "stacks" where each stack is one particular setup. I think it figures out what goes in a stack depending on the time difference between shots. So if you shoot really fast, let's say at 10fps, a sequence of something, then Aperture puts all those frames in one stack. So shots are automatically grouped for you without you having to do anything.

There is a virtual light table in Aperture onto which you can put any number of shots, move them around, resize them, etc. to see which ones go together, etc. That way you can early on start looking at which shots fit together on the spread in a magazine, or on the cover of a book, or something.

Non-destructive just means that Aperture never alters the orginal whatever operations you do to it. In iPhoto, as an example, if you crop a frame, iPhoto saves over the original. You would have to make a copy of the shot, then crop one of the copies, to keep the original untouched. In Aperture, no matter what you do to a shot, you are only a few clicks away from the pure, original RAW copy, which came straight out of the camera. So there is unlimited undo I guess you could say.

White balance has to do with the color of light. Believe it or not every light, and light source has a certain "temperature" (measured in Kelvin - K). Different lamps, the sun, flashes, etc. all have a different temperature or color. In the good old days of film, people put different-colored filters in front of the lens to adjust for different colors of light. Now you don't have to worry about that because you can adjust it later in the computer, as long as you shoot RAW. If you shoot anything but RAW, e.g. JPG, white balance has to be set and you cannot change it later. If you have then shot with outdoor white balance indoors, the picture is going to look very strange because outdoor and indoor has different color temperature. Most digital cameras will have an auto wb setting which is good in most cases, but the more advanced ones have a manual setting. One nice thing about RAW is that you don't have to care that much about the wb because you can change it in the computer when you process your shots.

Apple has some pretty good resources online for Aperture.

[elchemor]

Originally Posted by EmiratesMac

Non-destructive just means that Aperture never alters the orginal whatever operations you do to it. In iPhoto, as an example, if you crop a frame, iPhoto saves over the original. You would have to make a copy of the shot, then crop one of the copies, to keep the original untouched.

am sorry emiratesmac, but i do strongly disagree in here...... iPhoto always save a copy of ur modified pictures, if u look to the iPhoto folder, you will see two subdirectories, once called "originals" with all the pictures u got.. and another one called "modified" with all the pictures that u did modify during the lifetime of iPhoto :-)

[Magnus]

Well, I wonder if we're not both right in a way ;-) I just tried iPhoto and it does keep the original, but it only keeps the latest edited version of each photo, not each step it has been edited. So if I crop a photo it saves the cropped version, and if I crop it again it saves that version over the previous one. Perhaps there's a setting where you can change that but I cannot find it. Aperture as far as I know only saves what has been applied to the image, not the entire image. So I wouldn't call iPhoto nondestructive, at least not fully nondestructive.

Aperture - Nondestructive Image Processing

More on non-destructive editing:

Non-destructive editing Aperture does not modify master files but stores all modifications as a separate parameter set. Thus, you may have several versions of an image (master file). This is not new in RAW converters (e. g. RawShooter offers snapshots for this task), but Apple extends this concept from RAW files to JPEGs and TIFFs, as well – it’s primarily intended to be used for files from your digital camera or scanner, but may be used for other files, as well. This, however, leads to some restrictions to image editing. There are no layers and very few selective corrections. For this reason, you may call up another image editor, like Photoshop, and a copy of your image will be passed along. The result will be taken back by Aperture and is handled as a new version of the image.

[Magnus]

More Aperture resources that may help those of you who still have questions:
http://discussions.apple.com/message...sageID=2193058
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/orei.../aperture.html

[Magnus]

After the recent discussions about Aperture I felt like I had to have a serious go at this software. I've had a copy of it since January and it's been installed since then but hardly ever used. Perhaps I was a bit confused as to whether it would do anything useful for me since I'm already a dedicated iPhoto user. But I gave it a good, honest effort and it turns out the more I use Aperture, I like it more and more.

What I realized after writing some was that I was pretty much putting together a review of Aperture. But it's not really a review, if you see what I mean.

For Mac users who never tried Aperture, the obvious comparison is iPhoto. Some of you probably say no, it's Photoshop, but it's not really. As Apple has said, Aperture is not about replacing Photoshop, no more than iPhoto replaces Photoshop. Sure there are things that Aperture does that Photoshop also does, but it does not replace Photoshop. So I'm going to use iPhoto as the comparison here, mainly because that's what most readers on this site are used to, so that's the common point of reference. Generally speaking, in many ways the apps are the same, or I should say the user can do the same things in both apps. But Aperture gives you more options, and more fine-grained control.

Let's get this out of the way first: Aperture is a professional's tool and Apple developed it squarely aimed at professionals and their needs. In the promotional videos for Aperture you can see professionals working high-end cameras and doing their Aperture work in front of mostly dual 30-inch Cinema Displays. Few among us can afford that sort of equipment, but it's in those settings Aperture can really shine. I should say at least I imagine so since I've not used it like that myself. The best I've tried Aperture on is a Dual 2Ghz G5 and 23-inch Cinema Display. Aperture is a professional tool and it demands professional hardware to run like it should.

So back to Aperture versus iPhoto. In an interview, Aperture Product Manager Joe Schorr said:

Let me also draw the distinction between Aperture and iPhoto. You can see a Raw image in iPhoto, but let's say you make an adjustment to the file, like changing contrast. In iPhoto, you now have an 8-bit JPEG. You've said goodbye to Raw. So the iPhoto choices are that you work in the world of JPEG, or you go back to Raw and lose all the adjustments you've done in iPhoto. It's a binary decision. Aperture never makes that conversion from Raw to JPEG. You crop it, you throw away pixels, and the original Raw image is still there. We're just applying instructions to it. You're never more than a click away from Raw. Every time we draw an image to screen, every time we're decoding the Raw file.

RAW Files and non-destructive workflow
With Aperture, Apple is focusing on photographers shooting RAW. Aperture can handle pretty much any other digital picture format but it's focus is on RAW. Why RAW? Because a RAW file is about as close as you would get to the traditional negative. It's the light that the camera captures without any processing applied to it at all. When you shoot a picture and the camera saves it as a JPG, the camera does all kinds of compressing, adjusting, color corrections, etc. before it saves the file to the memory card. With RAW, the camera just dumps the image data to the card without processing it. So it's "raw". This means you can do processing in the computer after the fact. You can set the white balance in the computer, regardless of what it was set at when you took the shot. A JPG already has the white balance set and you cannot change it in the computer. That's an example of the type of possibilities offered you by shooting RAW.

But I can work with RAW in iPhoto, you say. Yes, that's true to an extent. You can import RAW files to iPhoto, you can work with RAW in iPhoto, but as soon as you make any adjustments, iPhoto saves the resulting file as a JPG. And iPhoto only keeps the latest version of your shot while Aperture keeps all changes ever made to a shot so you can go back to any previous point. In iPhoto you do have the choice of going back to the original shot, but not any particular shot in between.

In Aperture you always have access to the original file (the "master"), in fact it is never touched. Whatever changes you make to a master becomes a "version". If you import an iPhoto library to Aperture and you've made changes to photos in iPhoto, they will appear as master and version in Aperture. The main difference between the two apps is then that you can have any number of versions in Aperture while you can only have one in iPhoto, and Aperture doesn't save a version as a separete picture file, it only saves what adjustments/edits have been applied to it, while iPhoto saved the edited picture as a separate JPG file.

Adjustments
The adjustment panels are similar in the two apps, but in Aperture you have more control over details. There are advanced adjustment-options like levels in iPhoto but certainly not to the extent of Aperture.

Smart albums
It's a similar situation with smart albums. The function exists in both apps but you get more control and detail in Aperture.

Lift and stamp
Lift and stamp is a feature we find only in Aperture. Say you have made some adjustments to one picture in a series of shots, for example levels, sharpening and white balance. You want to apply the same changes to a number of other shots. You then use the Lift and stamp tool to "lift" those adjustments from the first shot, and then "stamp" then onto the others, thereby applying the adjustments.

Reviewing photos

A very slick tool in Aperture that helps a lot with reviewing shots is the loupe. It works pretty much like a real loupe, you put it on your shots to see the details, whether an eye is really in focus or not, for example. You turn it on and off by pressing one key and it's always available. It's a really cool and helpful feature that saves a lot of time.

Another Aperture-only feature that helps in reviewing shots is the Light Table. Like with the loupe it works like it's real-life counterpart. Pros shooting slide file used to stack their slides onto a light table, move them around, check them with a loupe, etc. You do the same here but on the computer screen. You can resize pictures, put them next to one another to see which ones go together, print out the light table, and more. You can save each light table so you can quickly make some rough layouts up for a publication, for example.