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Thu, 01 Dec 2005
Quick Aperture Impressions

Here are some quick impressions of Aperture...

My hardware configuration is a 1.25GHz Aluminum Powerbook with an ATI 9600 Mobility GPU. This is the absolute bottom configuration that Aperture will run on. So far performance is acceptable but noticeably slow in a few cases -- I don't think that this is surprising given my hardware -- I already knew it was painfully slow at other tasks. I've put my Aperture library on a 7200RPM external disk, which is definitely helping.

I've been using iPhoto 5 til now. I haven't used Photoshop or any of the fancy RAW converters (or even Canon's DPP package or that matter). My general impression is that things are a bit more responsive than iPhoto on the same pictures.
Due to disk space limitations on my internal drive, I was copying off my iPhoto libraries to the external disk after burning them to DVD. So I've been importing these libraries into Aperture. It takes roughly an hour to do a DVD sized photo library full of Canon Digital Rebel XT highest quality JPEGs. The import can run in the background and doesn't totally pound the CPU, so I can still work while I am waiting.

The big issues being raised in the dpreview and Rob Gailbraith forums are related to the quality of the RAW conversion and the control of white balancing. I haven't gotten to the iPhoto libaries that have RAW images in them (iPhoto didn't support the XT RAW's until 10.4.3 came out), so I can't comment on these issues yet, and I might not be able to since I don't have another RAW converter to compare against. Some people are also complaining about the Aperture library "file" which is really an OS X package, which is really just a directory. So you'll be able to get stuff out of there if you need to, and it means that you'll be able to use UNIX tools and scripts to do stuff if absolutely necessary.

The organizing / rating / searching workflow is a lot better than iPhoto, and there are tons of keyboard shortcuts. The support for dual displays is nice -- I have it set to what's called Alternate, which shows a single image on the Powerbook display regardless of what I'm doing on the main display. I was hardly doing any adjustments to my pictures using iPhoto, and it seems that Aperture has all the adjustments that I actually know how to use. Not coming from Photoshop, I guess I don't know what I'm missing.

Things that I know I am immediately going to miss (and yes, these are not "pro" features, I understand that):

1. Frasier Spier's excellent FlickrExport plugin for uploading to Flickr. I guess I am going to have to figure out how to use the official Flickr uploader for a while.
2. Integration with the OS X screensaver

I got my copy through a friend at Apple, so I didn't pay full price. Given that my hardware is at the botttom of the pile, I'm pretty happy so far. It sure beats iPhoto, which is all I really have to benchmark against. I'll probably have to wait till tomorrow to get to my RAW's and see whether I can find any problems there. The big problem I really wanted solved is the organization/searching problem, and I think I'm going to be almost completely happy there. A secondary problem is the managing insufficient disk space problem, and here it's a sideways move. We'll have to see how that really turns out in actual usage. There's still a whole bunch of stuff that I haven't tried, so I'm sure there will be more posts on this.

[00:19] | [photography] | # | TB | F | G | 9 Comments | Other blogs commenting on this post









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Ted Leung FOAF Explorer

I work at the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF).
The opinions expressed here are entirely my own, not those of my employer.

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