Aperture is geared for this latter philosophy. Now, though, photographers can deal with batches of pictures: a photo shoot, a vacation trip, a wedding, a soccer match. In the old days, people edited photos one at a time. Finally, Aperture's basic video support means it's equipped to deal with photographers' explorations into cinematography enabled by newer dSLRs. On top are face recognition and geotagging-features that pay dividends later when it comes to locating or identifying a particular photo. At its heart are an improved image-processing engine that produces nicely toned photos and a new editing system that's powerful yet flexible. But Aperture is well matched to the photo enthusiast or professional-the sort of person who carries a dSLR and prefers the benefits of raw image formats to their inconveniences.įor that growing number of people, Aperture 3 has what it takes at a cost of $199 new, $99 to upgrade, or free for a 30-day trial. If you mostly take snapshots of smiling friends and the occasional outing, look elsewhere.
It's a slam-dunk upgrade for Aperture 2.x owners, an option worth investigating for iPhoto users, and a worthy competitor to programs from imaging powerhouse Adobe Systems.Īperture, like Adobe's Photoshop Lightroom, isn't for everybody.
With Aperture 3, Apple has dramatically improved its software for both photography enthusiasts and professionals. It hits the sweet spot of image editing for photo enthusiasts. The bottom line: Apple Aperture 3 breathes life into photos, handles cataloging well, and keeps Adobe at bay. The bad: Performance slows with large images or heavy editing no image stabilization for video easy for beginners to get lost in the interface. Face recognition, geotagging, and video support are compelling advantages. So in summary, "being different for the sake of it" is of major importance.The good: Apple Aperture 3 is a powerful, modern photo editor. 25 years ago you couldn't get a good printout from it, there was little support for hierarchical building of large plans, and it was difficult to debug typical problems like circular dependencies. Microsoft Project managed to get a near monopoly, and since then has done little to improve it other than adding cosmetic features such as a ribbon UI. Back in the 90's, there were several competitors. A great example of this is project management software for things like Gantt charts. Firstly, of course, there is the economic aspect - a single supplier can raise its prices and force through a rental model, particularly when a hardware change makes older software (including their own) not work. In my experience, having one supplier can be disastrous. You speak as though having two suppliers was pointless. Possibly that is not useful to you, but it was very useful to me.
Lightroom has improved a bit, but lacks some features - for instance while Adobe can work with GPS coordinates in a single shot, Aperture can preserve a GPX track which is useful for seeing the context of a series of shots. Bridge seems to have improved little since then. Well, real software like Aperture was roughly feature equivalent with clunky software like Bridge and Lightroom at the time, but easier to use.