It has been several years now that we have had Aperture 2 with important features missing or lacking and the performance wasn’t the greatest either. During this time Adobe’s Lightroom has leaped forward with version 2.6 and overall has had more functionality in my opinion than Aperture. Finally Aperture 3 (this article is about Aperture 3.01) is released with a list of features a mile long that are new.
NOTE: This is purely about some of the aspects of Aperture, not the low level changes. For an example of how amazing Aperture 3 is look at this post that shows a very neat but not very published feature: Aperture 3 Awesomeness
Are we going to use them all? Probably not, but here is a list of the ones that a lot of people seem to be really taken about:
Faces, face recognition like iPhoto
Places, Geotag your photos and see where your pictures were taken with Google Maps
Quick Retouch brushes, allows you to quickly and non-destructively add certain effects to the image like polarization and Dodge and Burn.
Library Management, finally an easy way to manage different libraries; yay for organizing!
Social Media Integration, Easy upload and export to Facebook, MobileME and Flickr.
(Aperture 3 Interface)
Now these are great features and I doubt that Lightroom 3 will have half of them, but are they necessary? Well sure they are cool and hip but from my personal experience there are some major caveats with each one:
Faces: well its nice but will not work on its own as well as iPhoto’s implementation. iPhoto found pictures correctly of my son all across my albums. Aperture found three and wanted me to confirm all the rest manually. There is no “auto” option.
Places: Great feature for organizing, but you need to be connected to the internet in order for it to work and even then some towns are not found (but they are in google maps). Also, apparently all locations are tied to libraries and sometimes even albums, so once you are out of an album and you go to all photos, they won’t show up. To be honest this looks like somene just hacked Google Maps into Aperture and allows you to add pins and meta info to the images. Probably a one day coding job.
Quick Retouch Brushes: These are great but are only available in brushes. Compare this to Lightroom that has had these for several versions, the implementation in Aperture is pretty bad. First in some cases they take a whole lot of resources, but even with that who wants to PAINT a Polarizer? Lightroom allows you to create “filters” and layer of filters with gradients over your images. Why can’t Aperture do that?<sarcasm> I need to use Nik Plugins suite to accomplish this amazing thing </sarcasm>.
Library Management: This was badly needed since many Photographers have different libraries for projects, clients or in my case, years. In Aperture 2, you needed to hold the Option key to launch a question with the library to use, in Aperture 3 it is a menu item. Excellent. The Catch 22? If you have your main library on an external disk and it is not present when you launch Aperture, it will create a new blank library. Not really a problem as you should have that anyway and then move between libraries. So far the best feature. Worth the 100 USD upgrade price? For some yes, for some no.
Social Media Integration: For professional use? I understand the spreading of Facebook et al but IMHO this is already a bit too much. I can be wrong though.
Overall Aperture 3 is much better and a leap like Aperture 2 was to Aperture 1. Let’s hope they take out a page from Adobe’s book and keep improving.
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Aperture 3 Awesomeness: Brushing curves upon curves! (look mom no Photoshop!) | Go DSLR...bringing Photography to the masses
[...] curves! (look mom no Photoshop!) April 10, 2010 flosse_r No comments Ok my ...
This is interesting information but some people might want the Social book mark integration. On the other hand, I prefer the brush method over the way Lightroom does it. To each his own but I think you are wrong about a few things.
James
Hi James, you might be right, but as you said to each his own. I think Aperture could have had a giant opportunity to take the market by adding the following:
Professional noise reduction
ND Grad filters with polarizing the traditional (layer way)
Now we will have to see what Lightroom comes up with.
//F
This is really an hilarious review from somebody that has no idea what he is talking about. I won’t say if Aperture 3 was worth the wait, but for sure this review was. Keep up the good work!
Hi Eric, I think you misunderstood me, I do like it and I think it is a great improvement but for some people it might be nice if they could at least remove the social media bookmarks on the top or maybe add the “filter” option instead of brushes. Overall I like Aperture much better but there are still some quirks, even 3.02 has not fixed or automated the faces part.