Comments on: Apple upgrades Aperture ambitions to 2.0

No, the company wasn't letting its high-end photo-editing tool wither on the vine. With Aperture 2.0, Apple put the ball back in Adobe's court for raw image editing.

[keaggy220]

Nice upgrade, but

A little too late... I switched to LR. Not only is Adobe committed to
LR, but they've also demonstrated that it is a top priority.

I do believe Apple when they say that they are committed to
Aperture, but they've got a long way to go before I'll believe that
Aperture is a priority.

[Shankland]

Lightroom users get indirect benefits from Aperture 2.0

Even if you're a Lightroom customer, there are competitive implications to Apple's move. Most obviously, Adobe might lower the price of Lightroom 2.0 and its upgrade.

[Galaxy5]

Hobbyist market?

Schnoor said: "There's huge interest from the hobbyist market,"
said Joe Schorr, Apple's senior product manager of photo
applications.

Then add RAW support for prosumer cameras. I shoot with a
1DS MkII sometimes, and Aperture handles those files well. But
when I take my 'happy snappy' Fuji S9500 out - a prosumer
grade RAW-capable camera, I get no love from Aperture.

Living in Silicon Valley, I know it is normal for most 'hobbyists' to
have $6-8000 worth of DSLR equipment they don't know how to
use, but what about us semi-pros who have more than one
camera in our bag and who choose to shoot RAW sometimes? I
prefer to use my S9500 in situations where the 1DS might be in
danger; since the 9500 is ostensibly more of a 'hobbyist'
camera, why doesn't Aperture support it or many of the other
RAW-capable prosumer cameras?

[Shankland]

Adobe DNG bridges the divide

With Aperture 2.0's support for Adobe's DNG (Digital Negative) format, you now can use Adobe's DNG converter to bring raw files into Aperture if Adobe supports the raw file, and the S9500 is on that list:

http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/cameraraw.html

[Jonathan]

Canon EOS 450D / Digital Rebel XSi Support?

Yah it won't ship until April but does anyone know if Aperture will support the XSi? Frankly the lag between updates has me worried about this. This will be my first DSLR and I would love to use Aperture however its obvious Apple has other priorities *coughs*iPhone*coughs* that trumps Aperture. seriously its like Apple acts like there are 20 employees at that company working on all their wares. Apple has how many freaking Billion in the bank now....stop being cheap Apple and hire some more freaking team members to multi-task.

[Shankland]

Apple won't say, but...

If there ever was a camera to be supported, mainstream SLRs from Nikon and Canon are it. Note also that Apple managed to get support out for the Canon 30D on the day it went up for sale, indicating that at least some of the time they understand the priority, have engineers on hand to do the analysis and programming, and get the cameras in house early.

Note also that you can use Adobe's DNG converter to bring raw files into Aperture if Adobe's support arrives earlier than Apple's.

[shunchu]

Forget the price

What about some UI sugar? I hate the way Lightroom handles its "modules" based UI in 1.x. It totally slows down my workflow compared to using Aperture. I am hoping the "indirect benefit" is in the improvements of the UI... Hopefully Adobe will shamelessly borrow more than a few tips from Aperture. Seeing that it's the new Microsoft for web/design apps, I wouldn't be too surprised if they do for LR 2.0!

[paperscience]

Does anybody know.....?

I have Aperture 1.5 but don't use it because it doesn't appear to
fulfill my prime need which is to make a catalogue of image
thumbnails that I have stored on DVDRs. As far as I can see
Aperture 1.5 forces me to store all my images at full size on
HDDs of ever increasing size. I found that iView Media Pro (now
owned by MS and renamed MS Expression Media) does exactly
what I want - I can archive all my images to duplicate DVDRs
and then prepare a visual catalogue of what is on each one
without having to buy a new HDD every year. Does anyone know
whether Aperture 2.0, or Lightroom offer this feature in addition
to all the metadata and RAW processing features that are the
main objective of these two apps. It would be good to be able to
use a single app that does both cataloguing and RAW
processing.

[davidjschloss]

This is possible and easy to do.

paperscience,

Just a bit of background here, but Aperture 1.5 already does
what you want it to do.

Images in Aperture can live anywhere, including referenced
DVDs, while the previews of these images (along with your
associated data) lives in the Aperture Library files. You CAN opt
to have your image live inside the Aperture Library as well,
incidentally, which is the default behavior, but this is just one
way of working.

You could handle this particular situation one of a few ways, if
you're set on using DVDs as your storage medium (and
remember, that writeable DVDs do not have a very long shelf
life, we're talking decades at the most) you could either put your
images on DVD first, and then bring them into Aperture using
the option to leave the images in their current location. Aperture
will then create a preview of each image on that DVD, and then
you can go put that disc on a shelf somewhere. If you ever want
to do an adjustment to the image, the program will just prompt
you to insert it so it can reference the original raw data.

Additionally you could take images stored on a local hard drive
and reference them to a recordable DVD, burning that DVD at
the end of the process.

A primer on managed images (those stored in a library) vs
referenced (those stored elsewhere) can be found on our site
here.

http://apertureprofessional.com/showthread.php?
t=1668&highlight=managed

The great thing about the previews that Aperture creates is that
even with your original media offline on DVD or hard drive or
wherever, you can still do things with your files. For example,
my early photography is stored offline, but I can still make
keynote presentations, movies, podcasts and more without
having that referenced material. Soon as I need to an
adjustment, I just plug the drive back in and off I go.

This also makes it very flexible to work locally vs in the field.
Locally I have all my images on a drive, currently about 800GB of
images from a variety of cameras. My Library though is about
30gb. When I go on the road, I've got the previews of every
photo I've ever shot with me, and I leave that 800 gb of images
at home.

While sitting on a plane I can do keywording or captioning, apply
ratings and much more.

More info on these topics at our ApertureProfessional.com site.

[sparksdean]

Aperture not as good as Nikon CaptureNX for d300

I have been waiting for months for Aperture to support the new
Nikon D3 and D300 cameras with their new high dynamic range
sensors.

The first photo I loaded into Aperture 2.0 was a RAW format file
from my D300. It was taken at ISO 3200 with exposure at 0.8
seconds. The photo pushed the capability of the camera sensor.
Aperture did a terrible job reproducing the photo. The image
lacked the suble color variations of the same image opened in
Nikon Capture NX. The RAW files can be found at

www.gallagher.to/Candle

I don't believe apple tries to deal with sensor nonlinearities at
extreme operating ranges

[davidjschloss]

Before after

Thanks for posting those NEF files. Most people forget to when
talking comparison.

Can you post some before/after shots of the adjustment you like
in NX? Often this is a mater of different programs having
different default settings.

>>I don't believe apple tries to deal with sensor nonlinearities
at
extreme operating ranges<<

On the contrary, they spend a lot of time making tone curve
studies of each camera at each setting.