Fraser Speirs Cocoa and Photos

Aperture 2 First Impressions

As I’m sure you know by now, Aperture 2 shipped today. I’m playing with the trial right now, and it appears to be quite impressive. I have a few thoughts already:

The speed argument is over. Perhaps, though, I should say that it has just begun. Nobody argued that Aperture 1.5 struggled for performance whilst Lightroom does not. Aperture 2 certainly now appears to bear serious comparison with Lightroom 1.3 on performance.

Aperture 2 has a “Quick Preview Mode”. Basically, this appears to turn off the rendering of adjustments on top of the RAW file and instead just displays the JPEG preview. Adjustments are disabled in this mode but I can give you three words on this: Faster. Than. Lightroom. Quick Preview might well also be called “Laptop Mode”. It is an insanely fast way to do an initial one-to-two-star editing pass.

I shot a number of images today with my 30D’s picture style set to Monochrome. My understanding of this, when shooting RAW, is that it doesn’t discard RAW colour information, but it makes the embedded JPEG preview monochrome. When Aperture is in Quick Preview mode, and it hasn’t rendered its own previews, it uses the embedded preview in the RAW file. The images I shot using the Monochrome picture style were rendered monochrome in Aperture, even though the RAW data had colour information.

Lens Model metadata is finally here. Hopefully I can modify FlickrExport to automatically pick that up as a Flickr tag.

Many of the adjustments feel much faster. In particular, the Straighten adjustment has always been very slow on my machines. Now it’s like greased lightning. Lots of the new adjustments look good too, but I haven’t been into them deeply yet.

Aperture 2 supports background exporting, which means that there’s no longer any visual feedback on the operation. This also applies to export plugins like FlickrExport. I’m not 100% sure I like this but I’ll get into it more as we go and see what’s really going on.

There’s an image adjustment API in Aperture 2. If someone can persuade Imagenomics to port Noiseware Pro to Aperture, I will be a very, very happy man.

Overall, it seems like a very nice upgrade. I’ll be interested to see how it likes my master library of 30,000+ images, but it’s infinitely more usable on my MacBook Pro than Aperture 1.5 was.

“Lens Model metadata is finally here. Hopefully I can modify FlickrExport to automatically pick that up as a Flickr tag.”
This would be extremely awesome.

It’s looking good to me, but no curves? Can it really be that they shipped a major upgrade of Aperture without curves?

I guess it feels like 1.6 to me. I like it, I’m glad to have it, but I don’t think it’s really a 2.0 release.

The adjustment API is huge, I didn’t know that… I look forward to some actual plugins (like freaking CURVES).

Jeremey - The Aperture tutorial appears to indicate that this functionality is present as part of the Levels brick. I’ve used the Tone Curve tool in Lightroom with great success, but don’t see how to directly do the same thing with the Levels tool.

More experimenting with the demo is in order for later. My biggest overall gripe with Aperture 1.5 was speed, and that’s what sent me to Lightroom. Lightrooms develop tools kept me there. (Even though I could see some nice features of Aperture that I was missing out on.)

Aperture 2 may reverse that decision, but I need more time in the demo.

I am quite happy with the “Adjust time and date to correct timestamps on images”, after spending too much time with Timeature. Hurray for listening to feedback!

There is even a video tutorial on this! http://www.apple.com/aperture/tutorials/

I bought Aperture 1.5 for my MacBook last year, it was running with a 2Ghz Core 2 Duo with 2GB of Ram, performance wise my brand new MacBook stank. I downloaded the demo today and pushed it faster than what I did in 1.5 and it worked much better, I don’t see a speed difference between this and LR, its down to preference of options now and I’m leaning back towards the Apple camp.

But I think its important to learn the two programs as its important when looking for a job, you want as many skills as possible, students have no excuse with the cheap discounts offered and its will benefit them greatly.

Image adjustment API? Where? Where is it?

“Lens Model metadata is finally here. Hopefully I can modify FlickrExport to automatically pick that up as a Flickr tag.”

Ditto on that being awesome. Thanks for bringing up the API. Sounds like some great plugins will be on the way.

I know Curves are useful but Levels can do exactly the same (except for being limited to five control points:
http://elaura.tumblr.com/post/903935

While there’s no SDK for the API yet, I think the introduction of a plugin interface is perhaps the singular most important improvement here. I don’t care if it’s Noiseware Pro, NoiseNinja or NeatImage, I want an Aperture noise plugin.

I also hope there’s a way to get FlickrExport to grab the lens metadata, I’ve been manually adding tags to all my images.

Will the current FlickrExport for Aperture work with Aperture 2? (not that my Aperture 2 has even arrived yet…!)

“But I think its important to learn the two programs as its important when looking for a job, you want as many skills as possible, students have no excuse with the cheap discounts offered and its will benefit them greatly.”

Unfortunately, it looks like Apple’s student discount for Aperture 2.0 is only $20 off the $199 list price. I could be wrong, but I think that the student price for 1.5 was $149, or 1/2 off the list.

Jim - I’m not seeing curves-like controls. Aperture’s levels can approximate some curves adjustments, but don’t have anything like the flexibility or intuitiveness that curves have. It’s frustrating that Apple left that out given the number of people who asked for it.

Fraser, about background exporting: I can’t say for sure about exporting, but I’m importing my iPhoto library right now, and while this wasn’t immediately obvious, I was able to bring up an Activity window by clicking on the word “Importing” next to the spinner in the chrome beneath the main photo well. It’s also possible to bring this up by selecting “Show Activity” from the Window menu. Again, I can’t say for sure, but since importing shows up in there (with good details and progress info), I’d think exporting would as well.

Coming from iPhoto, with its modal export dialog with progress bar, I much prefer this arrangement.

I will echo Avi’s remarks and say that it applies to exporting as well. There is the cog spinning in the center and is says “Exporting”. You can also pull up the activity viewer as well.

On the Curves thing - Aperture Levels with quarter-tone controls enabled, is more powerful than you realize. It is able to do tonal adjustments that would require more control points to accomplish in Photoshop curves due to how the tonal region is altered by the various controls, which is why at first it looks like it has too few points to be of use.

I have written an adjustment tool guide (for Aperture 1.5) with a chapter specifically covering Levels and showing some Photoshop Curves/Aperture Levels equivalents. So far as I can tell, that chapter is still accurate for Aperture 2.0 so it may be useful to look that over. I’m in the process of updating that guide as well, and may expand even further on that point…

I’m not sure you can do everything in Aperture Levels that you can in Curves, but you can do most common adjustments for sure and even some pretty advanced stuff when you start to make adjustments not just to luminance levels, but RGB levels as well (which can be adjusted independently).

The guide is a free download (donationware) here:

http://insideaperture.com/Site/AdjustmentToolGuide.html

So far, I too have found Aperture 2.0 much faster and welcome the improvements to tools and the likelihood we could see plugins soon (I know the Noise Ninja people said that if they could do a plugin, they would). I also am looking forward to the sharpen on print functionality but I’ve not had a chance to try that yet.

Jerad - Not only that, but “Previous purchases of Aperture at an Education discount are not eligible for upgrade pricing.” So having bought 1.5 for what, $150, it will now cost me $180 to get 2.0? That’s weak.

@Albert
“Will the current FlickrExport for Aperture work with Aperture 2?”

I am currently using FlickrExportLite and it works just fine. Also from some of the tutorial on the Apple page they seem to work too.

So far I like it way better than 1 definitely snappier, not to mention the simplification of the interface makes things easier.

The thing I still didn’t find what hour minute and time in the file presets. I like my files named YYYYMMDDHHMM but at this point I can only do YYYY-MM-DD_HH-MM just like version 1

I don’t see anything in Activity Window during export with Aperture 2. Is this really working?

In addition, I am getting an error which I have never seen before. This is when trying to re-export a previous image. This is very flaky at the moment.

Aperture was not able to write image data to disk for “IMG_2273.jpg”. A file of the same name may already exist in the target directory (/Users/suraj/Library/Application Support/FlickrExport/ResizeCache/IMG_2273.jpg), or you may not have permission to write files to this location, or there may be insufficient disk space.

The export will be cancelled.