At first glance, Aperture 3
Tuesday (February 9, 2010), Apple® introduced Aperture™ 3, a major release of its powerful photo editing and management software. Aperture 3 contains over 200 new features including Faces, Places and Brushes. Building on the innovative Faces and Places features introduced in iPhoto® ‘09, Aperture 3 makes it even easier and faster to organize large photo libraries. In addition, there are new tools for refining your photos including Brushes for painting image adjustments onto parts of your photo, and Adjustment Presets for applying professional photo effects with just one click. Also stunning new slideshows tools allow you to share your work by weaving together photos, audio, text and HD video.
I'm often guilty of dismissing a lot of features because they don't suit my day-to-day working needs. But I have to say, Apple does such a compelling job of integrating some of the features that I call "fluff," it's hard not to see where others will have a need for those applications. After all, the needs of a sports photographer aren't always the same as a portrait, wedding, landscape or glamour shooter.
At first glance, Aperture 3 delivers. But what I'd like to do over the next few weeks is blog about my personal experience as I work with the new version. Rather than crash in and give everything a cursory glance, I'd rather see how things unfold and give you feedback about what I like, what seems like overkill or how things perform in real-world use. Let's face it, many of us have a lot committed to our workflow. Programs like Aperture and Lightroom are so all-encompassing of our image management needs, they're like an independent operating system just for photos.
Just to end this entry with three "first looks," I have two likes and one "I don't get that."
Faces: I've been skeptical of this feature for quite sometime. Color me WRONG. I've got a hunch this is going to come in handy sorting and getting final images ready for keywords. It's not perfect. But the confirmation process puts overall control back in your hands and it's going to get some use.
Color tags: Another long overdue addition for sorting your images. Star rating still remains, but it's nice to have another tool for organizing images. With colors, you might assign a color to your action images from a shoot and then another color for atmosphere or people shots. I'm sure you'll come up with your own uses, but I think for me, this will come in handy when I want to group images without affecting the rating or adding a tag that may not have any relevance to the final output.
Reject, delete, empty Aperture trash, empty OS trash: HUH? Look… I know I take a few bad shots now and then. (ok, more than now and then) But do I have to kill them FOUR times to make them go away? Aperture now has it's own Trash. So now, if I pull up all my rejects at the end of sorting a shoot and delete them, they go into Aperture's trash. They're gone instantly, so that's a good thing. But then when I empty the Aperture trash, they get moved to my Desktop trash. I don't mind confirming a delete operation… but four times? So that one's kind of lost on me.
Stay tuned for more feedback. This isn't going to be a Lightroom vs. Aperture discussion. It's going to be about Aperture 3. I'm an Aperture user. This is where I live. So, hopefully I'll reveal some features and provide some tips that will help you become affluent with the program.
JT
Wednesday, February 10, 2010 | by John Thawley | in Aperture, Software | 9 Comments | Email Article | Print Article
Reader Comments (9)
I am looking forward to reading your impressions on Aperture 3! I've just bought it and it should arrive by the end of this week.
Nonetheless, I am already playing with the Demo version and I am pretty impressed! The only weird thing is that the Demo version does not allow me to open my Aperture 2 library... I am hoping this is a demo version limitation only.
Still, I am dreaming of an Aperture 3 version for the iPad. That would be my Nirvana! hehe
I’ve done this to try and fix it:
Reset printing services with Print Therapy
Removed all plug-ins
Deleted PrinterPresets.plist
Deleted Aperture preferences
Switched from 64-bit to 32-bit kernel
Tried a new User
Has anyone else seen this behavior? Know of a fix?
With 3.0 I'm really enjoying the ability to access a new library directly from the Aperture menu rather then close and open with an alias link on the desktop.
But over the last several years my shear volume of libraries have grown along with vaults on a separate drive so I'm a little nervous about flipping the switch and updating all my 2.1.4 libraries to 3.0. I've got one prior library at 127GB in volume that has me nervous on the update.
Thanks JT.
I'm updating libraries as we speak. It's gone fairly well. I run Time Machine as back up and that's were the real slowdown has come in. As you know, Time Machine only backs up what is changed. Well, with your Aperture Library(s)... everything changes.
JT
I've read in forums you need to have at least as much free space on your drive for conversion as the size of the library you are up-rendering so to speak. Do you know if that means on your desktop drive or the external drive the library may be on? If it's on the physical drive my library is stored - that's easy, but my desktop may be a bit tight given the size of some of my libraries.
Looking forward to hearing your progress. I'm itching at the chance to upgrade but would love to hear your thoughts on the process this go around.