Apple Aperture 1.5 [Old Version]
by Apple
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Software Reviews of Apple Aperture 1.5 [Old Version]
Customer Review: Falling behind Lightroom fast...
Summary: 3 Stars
As a professional photographer, I was thrilled when Aperture came out. It was just the push I needed to finally switch over to Apple computers. I've spent the better part of 7 months using the product to manage workflow for sports and wedding assignments.
At first, using Aperture was helpful. It clipped large amounts of time from my workflow, and it has a lot of cool things like the Loupe built into it... but I found that a lot of them were just toys, not usable tools. The interface lacks that Apple intuitiveness and seems to always need more steps than necessary. Using it in conjunction with Photoshop slowed both programs to a standstill. Worst of all, it always wanted to create more thumbnails than necessary. I could understand doing a before and after thumbnail, but if I made an adjustment like a crop with their tools, then also a Photoshop adjustment, pretty soon I was looking at three thumbnails, not two, and to make it worse, if I had rated the adjusted file and then did a search by ratings, all I got in the search results were the unedited results, not the retouched versions. In addition, the internal image adjustment tools don't have the same crispness that the corresponding Photoshop tools have.
When Adobe Lightroom came out, it was a revelation. The image adjustment tools behave like the full Photoshop versions, it's faster, makes batch changes simpler to do, and it even allows you to work on the early files of an import from a card reader while the rest of the images are still uploading. When you consider that Lightroom is also PC compatible, it opens it up to a lot more users. If most of your adjustments are just color and exposure corrections, you'll never even need to open Photoshop anymore, instead of the co-existing that Aperture forces you into.
I've retired Aperture on my main machine, and installed Lightroom on both of my computers, one of which never had Aperture. My workflow now takes 1/4th of the time it did on Aperture. I realize that this reads as much like a Lightroom review as an Aperture one, but I don't think you can discuss the one product without comparing it to the other. If you need to, download the free demos of each of them and see for yourself-- Adobe beat Apple at their signature style: their product is simpler, more intuitive, and more elegant.
Customer Review: Better image management tools
Summary: 5 Stars
I've been working in both Apple Aperture and Adobe Lightroom, and though I really like Lightroom's simplicity and design, I have to say that Aperture wins out in terms of image file management, which is very important for me as a wedding photographer.
Aperture is a little harder to learn because it's more fully featured than Lightroom, at least for now it is. Both applications offer very similiar features, but the smart folder and keywording features of Aperture are for more useful than the Collection features of Lightroom.
Aperture is less linear than Lightroom. You can work in various different moduals without having to switch back and forth between gallery and digital development moduels like in Lightroom.
I also like what Apple is trying to do with the solutions workflow in Aperture. It's almost possible to complete an entire wedding project without having to leave out of Aperture, except to do additional enhancement work in Photoshop or for laying out an album. Aperture has an album layout and creation feature but its printed albums are not as high end as you find outside the program.
Both Aperture and Lightroom have their pros and cons, but for now Aperture is still head of the game in terms of digital asset management (or DAM, as it's popularly called.)
Customer Review: Great RAW Workflow Tool
Summary: 5 Stars
I've used just about all the tools out there and I have to say that this one is really, really great. Some people complain about the user interface, but it's the user interface that makes this a rock-star product to me. With no manual or instruction of any type, I was up and running with Aperture within hours of installing it and importing my 50+ gig worth of RAW photos. On my MacBook Pro (core duo), Aperture is acceptably speedy processing large RAW files from my Canon EOS 5D. I now take my laptop to the field with me and feel that my workflow has never been better or faster. I can't wait for version 2. It can only get better and better.Customer Review: Completely disagree with orangekay
Summary: 4 Stars
This is a powerful program with FAR more pros than cons.Customer Review: It's just sad really
Summary: 1 Stars
I wanted to like this product. I really, really did. The quickie demo movies all made it seem like it was a breeze to use, but for me, the reality is very different.
Out of all the Pro apps, this one has the most ill-conceived user interface. Even if you are very highly experienced with other raw conversion software packages out there (and I've used pretty much all of them extensively), very little is obvious, and the button tooltips are sparse and non-descriptive. Granted, it's a complex product that does complex things, but I have a hard time believing anyone on the engineering team responsible for this heap has any professional photography or retouching experience whatsoever. Logic and Final Cut have even higher feature densities, and they still manage to put the controls where you expect them to be when you expect them to be there. The obvious difference of course is that Logic and Final Cut were both developed by someone other than Apple originally, and those people knew what they were doing.
It's also very, very slow. Think you're going to whiz through adjustments like they do in the demo movies? Unless you've got a top-of-the-line Intel system, think again. Even with the loupe view active, on my G5 I get nothing but beachball cursors for anywhere from 10-30 seconds every time I touch an adjustment slider, and frequently the image just plain fails to update at all.
Probably the single biggest Aperture flaw however is its arrogant solipsism. Even though everybody knows this is not supposed to be a Photoshop replacement, Apple seems to have gone out of its way to pretend that Photoshop doesn't exist. Aperture cannot read or display anything but the absolute simplest of Photoshop files, so if you need to do some localized adjustments non-destructively with layers, you can pretty much forget about round-tripping them back into Aperture. They'll either display as absolute garbage, or as a simple white square with a text message alerting you to the fact that "This layered Photoshop file was not saved with a composite image" in multiple languages.
And of course, it doesn't support DNG files, tethered shooting or medium format backs, either. Isn't this supposed to attract the pros?
I have no doubt that some people will love this app, but every time I launch it I find myself wincing. Lightroom is by no means a perfect product and I have a great many complaints about the way it does some things, too, but at the end of the day, it does let me get my work done pretty quickly. I cannot say the same about Aperture, and its price tag is frankly just ridiculous.