2006-08-23
Apple came to Boulder today--within 10 mi. of Boulder, anyway--to run some 3-hour introductory sessions with Aperture, their high-end image-processing app. The sessions were at, of all places, the Butterfly Pavilion, which, in addition to having lots of butterflies, is full of bugs. I didn't see any bugs in Aperture, however.
One reason why I went is that it was the only practical way for me to check out Aperture without buying it. There's no test drive, as there is with all of the Adobe apps, with iView Media Pro, and with lots of other apps.
There were 3 or 4 people from Apple there, including one excellent trainer who did most of the talking, and a few people from a local camera retailer, Mike's Camera. There were 30 or so high-end MacBook Pros on tables, each in front of an invited guest. I was invited just last week by an email from Mike's that was indistinguishable from spam, except that it offered no mortgage, no porn, and no enlargement of anything but photos.
Anyway, here are some thoughts on Aperture, based on just 3 hours with it:
When talking about Aperture, you have to separate inside Aperture from outside. Inside, it's very slick, really well designed, and full of wonderful things that just work the way you hope they would. For example, you can add photos to a light table, move them around, resize them, etc., using an interface very similar to the one you use for laying out photo books and other display pages. Having laid them out, you can print the light table if you want. No artificial difference between "light table mode" and "photo book mode."
Another example: At ingestion time, if you move a time-interval slider to set the interval that determines which photos stack together, you can watch then stack and unstack in real time as you move the slider.
Another one: If you prepare a web album and then need to go back to adjust an image, you can just select the image on the album preview and go right from there to the editing tools. You don't go back to the browser, select the photo, edit it, and regenerate the web album. The album is integrated into a seamless whole, just as everything else seems to be. Any time you see an image, it's equivalent to seeing it in the browser.
In short, the user interface design and smoothness of the tools are outstanding. It's Apple at their very best. And, because there's only one platform to deal with and because they're Apple, the interface is very highly tuned to the Mac, especially the video cards.
(Apple's FinalCut Pro is so highly thought of that it's used for big-budget Hollywood movies, and so it sells Macs. I think that's their idea for Aperture. A long time ago, some of you remember that it was PageMaker that gave the almost stillborn Mac a heartbeat. But Apple knows that PageMaker wasn't theirs and they can't count on getting lucky like that again. They have to do it themselves.)
Imaging speed was extremely fast, because the MacBook Pros are fast, and because a lot of processing is done in the video card. (You can think of the MacBook Pro as having 3 processors, not 2.) Only recent, high-end cards are supported. My iMac G5 is just over a year old, but it's not on the recommended-hardware list. All Intel iMacs are, however. (The Compatibility Checker app you can download to test your hardware said Aperture could be installed on my G5. How well it would run I don't know. Couldn't try it, alas.)
My favorite feature was the way it handles stacks (based on shooting time, as I mentioned earlier, or on any other criteria you like) and versions, which are multiple XML modifiers (Adobe calls them sidecars) for the same image. (All editing is with sidecars, as it is with Adobe Camera Raw, although Aperture never stores the XML inside the raw, not even if it's a DNG.) You can completely control what's stacked or unstacked and which is the primary image.
The interface to Photoshop is very well done. If you want to go to Photoshop, Aperture makes you a PSD or TIFF file (your choice), and then knows about it after you come back from Photoshop. No need to re-import. You can even edit the PSD in Aperture later on if you want, although, of course, that will result only in another XML version, not in modifying the PSD.
I couldn't judge the quality of the raw conversion or of any of the other image editing tools, because I didn't process my own images, and, mostly, because I'm not qualified to make such a judgement. I understand from what I've read that Aperture 1.0 had problems with raw conversion, but 1.1 is much better.
At one point I asked the speaker why Apple kept saying that Aperture did nondestructive editing of raws, since that was the way I always work. I explained that when I open a raw from Bridge in Adobe Camera Raw and then edit it, I can reopen it in ACR later and even the cropping is still soft. Another attendee disagreed with me, saying the once you crop in ACR, your cropping is cast in concrete. He's wrong, of course, but I didn't press the point. I think Apple and this gentleman are confusing what I said with the workflow that takes you from ACR to Photoshop when you open a raw with Photoshop. In that case, what you do in Photoshop is indeed cast in concrete (the cropping, anyway... the other stuff can be in a layer). The Bridge/ACR workflow without the involvement of Photoshop is something I think they're not familiar with.
As for outside of Aperture--that is, its suitability in a DAM workflow--the news is not so good, because Aperture can't bring in any metadata from a sidecar when it ingests; it doesn't export the metadata when you export an image; it never writes metadata into the image file; and its XML is different from the XMP standard that Adobe supports, even for common data items like those for IPTC fields.
Contrary to what you might have heard, image files are not inserted into any database. They retain their identity as distinct files, untouched by Aperture except for possible renaming. They do look like they're hidden away, but that's because the folder they're in is inside what Apple calls a package. However, even the Finder lets you go right into the package as though it's a folder, which it in fact is.
The XML is kept in a separate file, too, in addition to being in a database. I understand (from reading about Aperture, not from today's session) that it's an SQLite database, which is what Lightroom and ImageIngesterPro (link at left) both use.
For a programmer, it's extremely easy to access the image files from inside the Aperture packages, to access the XML files, and even to access the database tables, so, even if the utilities to pull it all out aren't around today, they will very easily show up when and if they're needed. (I could write one in a day or so myself.) One such utility is already around, called Annoture, which moves metadata between Aperture and iView Media Pro. (I haven't tested it. It's shareware for something like $15.)
So, I wouldn't worry at all about your Aperture images and metadata being locked up tight in some wacko proprietary format. It's all very simple and open.
However, that's not to say that Aperture is integrated with anything other than Photoshop as it comes out of the box. It's impractical to use it with iView; ImageIngesterPro can't get metadata, Camera Raw settings, keyword, or catalog sets in; and you can't substitute your own raw converter. Nor can you make Aperture deal with files in your preferred physical structure.
Aperture processes DNGs, but only as just another raw format, not as anything special. It can't store metadata inside a DNG, doesn't update the JPEG preview (or even know it's there), or embed the original raw. (However, if you stay inside Aperture, you don't need the JPEG preview.)
One obvious superficial difference between Lightroom and Aperture is that Lightroom is divided into Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print, and Web, whereas with Aperture everything is integrated with everything else. If you see an image, you can take it right into the editor. But, beneath that thin external layer, I suspect the differences, especially in image editing, are vast.
As for iView Media Pro vs. Aperture, Aperture has no concept of a catalog file. It just has the images and metadata. So, an Aperture image database can't span drives, you can't offload images, and you can't create anything with thumbnails to send off to a client. (But, don't forget, Aperture is a complete system, whereas iView is a cataloging app. It does have a rudimentary, incredibly clunky, editor, but most of us have probably never even looked at it.)
Oh yeah... one more thing: Aperture will never run on Windows or Linux. iTunes runs on Windows because Apple's business model is to make money on iPods, not songs, and that way they sell more iPods. No such business model would apply to Aperture on Windows; if anything, they would sell fewer Macs.
(2023 Update: Apple dropped Aperture in 2014.)