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Digital Photography

Apple's Aperture 2 by Ted Kritsonis TGP Digital Contributor Ted Kritsonis reviews Apple's newest imaging software Article rating: 9.00

When Apple first launched Aperture two years ago, it was also a bit of a gamble from the start because the company had never really moved to connect with those who were serious about digital imaging.

Sure, iPhoto was a nice tool to keep things organized, but that was also its core function. The editing was to be done somewhere else.

Initially, Apple didn’t shy away from proclaiming Aperture 1.0 as a tool geared more towards the pro photographer and serious amateur. But with 2.0, they seem to know that there are more newcomers hungry for good imaging options.

This partly explains why the price has plummeted. Aperture 1.0 hit shelves at a very unattractive price of $500, whereas 2.0 starts off at $200 — a reasonable price tag closer to the range of Lightroom, Adobe’s competitor software.

Aperture 1.0 was sometimes difficult to get used to, thanks to a cluttered interface and confusing array of options. It seemed like there was a lot you could do with your photos, but the buggy performance and layout didn’t make much sense to novice users. Apple fixed a lot of that with periodic upgrades, but 2.0 represents more of a fresh start.

The palette structure onscreen looks cleaner and more refined here. A lot of what I ended up doing with my photos ran through the three key tabs on the left column: Projects, Metadata and Adjustments. Projects is very iPhoto-like in that it organized my photos in folders based on whatever criteria I’d given them. This can include separating them by ratings of one-to-five stars, by date and place or even under certain events. Metadata is nice because Aperture can read the data from each image and figure out which camera shot it and what the settings were (aperture, shutter, ISO, etc.). Adjustments is a series of editing and filtering tools like levels, colour balance, exposure and others.

The tabs aren’t inherently different from what Aperture 1.0 had, but they’re far more manageable now. I could flip through the tabs easily by just pressing the W key, or I could work in full screen mode and have the palette float above the main interface. To me, it’s a matter of preference, so I don’t know if one is better than the other.  

However, I’m not a big fan of fiddling around too much with my trackpad when working on photos, so it was great to see that I could customize (almost) every button shortcut. Under “Aperture” on the menu bar, I clicked on “Customize” and found myself looking at a keyboard layout with all the default ones already indicated through useful colour-coding.

QUICKER ACCESS TO YOUR IMAGES

In Aperture 1.0, you had to wait before all photos were uploaded before getting started. That’s no longer the case here.

I could upload as many as 500 images and get started on the first batch right away, while the rest uploaded in succession. And if I wanted to be even quicker, I could just click the “Quick Preview” button to skim through them. Quick Preview will place a yellow border around the images to indicate their status, meaning they can’t be edited while in this mode.

There’s some nice integration with iPhoto in that you can view your entire library on there and pick and choose what you might want to bring over to Aperture. It’s simple drag and drop, and it can include entire albums or just single images.

Naturally, working on RAW images is one of the pillars for Aperture 2.0. Coupled by the improved editing suite in Aperture, the possibilities of rescuing certain images greatly increase. Taking an under or overexposed image, for example, I could use the Recovery and Black Point sliders to bring out more detail in the areas that need them most. And by using the Vibrancy and Definition sliders, I can bring more out of specific areas, while avoiding human skin tones (you can work on that separately). I could also highlight “hot” and “cold” pixels, meaning ones that are completely white or black, and make adjustments to bring down their intensity.

I could do this with JPEG, TIFF, DNG or any other image format, but it’s a bit different when doing it with RAW because of the finer details. There is a Retouch brush like the one in Photoshop, though I found it didn’t work as well as Adobe’s.

My one gripe is that there’s no Curves palette. This is one of my favourite tools in Photoshop because of its range, so its omission here was definitely noticeable for me. There’s also not enough in Aperture 2.0 to tackle noise reduction. When you do try to fix the graininess in an image, you’re sometimes sabotaged when applying a sharpening tool to smooth it out.

Aperture 2.0 also supports tethered shooting — hooking up your camera to a laptop and having images upload immediately to Aperture after each shot. Apple has a list of supported cameras http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1085 and there’s also a third-party list of cameras that will and won’t work. http://www.20seven.org/blog/articles/2008/02/17/cameras-that-work-or-dont-with-aperture-20/

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT?

It would be nice if Apple could add curves and noise/sharpening controls to the existing Adjustments palette. If they can do that through an upgrade, much like they did recently with dodge and burn tools, then it would definitely help elevate Aperture 2.0 to an even higher level.

Except it’s hard to really make any foregone conclusions with software like this because it applies in so many different ways to photographers of all stripes. A seasoned professional making a living from his or her photography would likely nitpick more than someone who is just trying to get the hang of editing RAW images. For me, I’m somewhere in the middle. 

I will say this though: the heavy-duty editing is still to be done somewhere else like Photoshop. Aperture may have a lot of features, but it doesn’t have the depth or integration that Photoshop has. But as a tool to organize workflows and work on multiple images at once, Aperture 2.0 is worth a look.

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