Apple Aperture 1.5

Average customer rating: 3.5

Switched From Lightroom
This is a dog
Best raw converter combined with photo organizer
Falling behind Lightroom fast...
Better image management tools

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Apple Aperture 1.5

Manufacturer: Apple
Product Group: Software
Binding: CD-ROM
ASIN: B000J1CIT6
2006-09-28

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Product Description

Using its comprehensive collection of tools, with Apple Aperture 1.5 you can easily import, manage, edit, catalog, organize, adjust, publish, export, and archive your images more effectively and efficiently than ever before.

Amazon.com Product Description

Designed from the ground up for professional photographers, Apple Aperture provides everything you need for after the shoot, delivering the first all-in-one post-production tool for photographers. And now it's fully compatible with Intel-powered Macs. With advanced RAW workflow, professional project management tools, advanced image processing, and versatile printing and output options, Aperture will radically simplify the way you produce and manage your photography.

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<small><b>Fine-tuned to maximize the advantages offered by Macintosh hardware and Mac OS X Tiger, Aperture offers breakthrough speed and quality -- whether you're working with RAW, JPEG, or TIFF images.</b></small></td></tr></table> And with the most powerful image processing in the world, Aperture is fast -- whether you're working with RAW, JPEG, or TIFF images. Aperture supports the RAW formats from all leading digital camera manufacturers (including Canon and Nikon) and provides optimized support for such market leading cameras as the Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II, Canon EOS 20D, and Nikon D2x as well as the highly popular Canon Digital Rebel and Nikon D50. It also supports the Adobe DNG format.

Whether you're a fashion, wedding, sports, portrait, fine art, commercial, or editorial photographer, Aperture's color-managed workflow and flexible design tools will help you easily create stunning prints, customized contact sheets, elegant books, and web pages as beautiful as the images you capture.

<b>Advanced RAW Workflow</b>
As a photographer, you know all about the benefits of shooting RAW. With access to all the data your digital SLR can record, you're capturing images of startling quality, great dynamic range, and virtually no noise. And now, for the very first time, you have an application that provides you with more control of the final image than you've ever had before. One that actually makes working with RAW files as easy as working with JPEGs.

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<small><b>The tools -- including Levels, White Balance, Exposure, Sharpening, Noise Reduction and more -- afford you the freedom to experiment without having to worry about damaging your valuable original images. View larger.</b></small></td></tr></table> Providing the very first all-in-one tool for your post-production needs, Aperture lets you work with RAW images through every step of the digital workflow without first having to convert your images into another format to make necessary image adjustments, eliminate red-eye, remove dust, crop, organize images, or print contact sheets.

Aperture provides you with the tools to do it all -- import, edit, catalog, organize, retouch, publish, and archive your photographs -- in a RAW-focused workflow that's the first of its kind. Rather than using another application to manage your images, Aperture offers built-in project management with robust and flexible tools that make it easy to handle thousands of projects.

They include a powerful suite of tools for editing a photo shoot. It's one of the most tedious jobs any photographer faces, and it's been particularly taxing when shooting RAW. But Aperture provides tools specifically designed to work with RAW files and to speed you through the process of sifting through thousands of images, culling the rejects, comparing the keepers, and identifying your absolutely finest photographs.

Nor do you have to convert your images in order to make needed adjustments. You can perfect them without having to leave Aperture, using a powerful suite of nondestructive image editing tools. The tools -- including Levels, White Balance, Exposure, Sharpening, Noise Reduction and more -- afford you the freedom to experiment without having to worry about damaging your valuable original images. That's because Aperture applies modifications only to "versions" of your images and never to the original "master" images themselves.

<b>Professional Project Management</b>
Aperture, the first all-in-one post-production tool for photographers, provides everything you need to manage your photo library: flexible organizational tools, comprehensive metadata support, and powerful search tools that let you find files instantly.

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<small><b>For easy organization and searching, Aperture comes with collections of associated Keyword Sets (and lets you create your own).</b></small></td></tr></table> Aperture lets you import photos from a wide variety of sources and preserves the method you used to organize files when you drag folders from your hard drive and drop them into Aperture. In fact, because Aperture supports both AppleScript and Automator, you can streamline many aspects of your workflow by automating those day-in day-out tasks you repeatedly find yourself doing.

Organize a photo library with thousands of projects any way you want -- in Projects, Albums, Folders, or any combination thereof. Create multiple Albums of related images within a Project. Or nest folders inside a project to organize albums, books, websites, and light tables. You can even have Aperture automatically group images together into Smart Albums based on defined criteria. With Aperture, you can work on multiple projects at once and freely copy or move photos among folders, projects, and albums.

Aperture lets you view, extract, and add metadata with unprecedented ease. On import, it automatically extracts all industry-standard EXIF and IPTC metadata. What's more, it lets you comprehensively add important metadata -- copyright, captions, keywords -- at the point of import.

As you work with images, you're never more than a keystroke away from seeing your metadata in, for example, the customizable Metadata Heads-Up Display, where you can customize the metadata to suit your needs. You can also choose what metadata Aperture displays with your images and what metadata to embed when you export images. And when it comes to keywords, Aperture significantly outshines other applications. It not only supports true, hierarchical keywording but also provides a number of intuitive ways to assign keywords to images.

For example, Aperture comes with collections of associated Keyword Sets (and lets you create your own). Call up the Wedding Set, for example, and you'll have a group of associated keywords -- bride, table shots, wedding party, vows, candids, limo, cake cutting -- any of which you can assign with a keystroke.

Using the Keyword Heads-Up Display, you can drag and drop keywords onto a single image or entire group of images at once. And, here's a real time-saver, once you've assigned a variety of keywords to an image, Aperture lets you "lift" them from one image and "stamp" them onto other images. Assigning and working with keywords has never been simpler or more rewarding.

<b>Powerful Compare and Select Tools</b>
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<small><b>Open any of the Heads-Up Displays (HUDs) available in Aperture to adjust levels, increase brightness, modify color temperature, assign keywords, straighten horizons, or make any other adjustments you'd like.</b></small></td></tr></table> It's the biggest, most taxing job you have as a photographer. You've finished your shoot. You've taken thousands of photographs. Now you need to quickly edit the shoot, reviewing all of your photos and identifying your very best. Aperture helps you accomplish this with powerful and flexible tools designed specifically to address the needs of the professional photographer.

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<small><b>Aperture lets you view multiple photos side by side, offering a great way to evaluate similar images or multiple versions of the same image. View larger.</b></small></td></tr></table> If you've shot transparencies, you're familiar with stacks. You've almost certainly created piles of similar images for fast comparison on your light table. In Aperture, you can employ the same technique with digital stacks. Aperture lets you create stacks manually, pulling images into Stacks from any album, project, or folder in your Library. Or you can have Aperture automatically create Stacks for you based on the time interval between shutter clicks (1 second to 1 minute). This provides a quick and easy way to compile a sequence of bracketed or sequentially shot images for review. To further aid image comparison, Aperture lets you quickly rate your images using a six-level rating system (1 to 5 stars plus "reject"). When you're finished, you can collapse the Stack to eliminate clutter from your workspace.

Of course, with that large, high-resolution screen right before your eyes, wouldn't it be great if you could take advantage of all that real estate and review your images full screen? With Aperture, you can. In fact, Aperture lets you view your images full screen as large as screen real estate permits. And if you have two displays, you can take advantage of Aperture's expansive full-screen mode on both of them to create an incomparable working environment.

Using the Filmstrip displayed along the bottom or side of your monitor, you can see thumbnails of all the images you're reviewing. You can navigate through them quickly and easily to find the images you want to see, even organizing them on the fly. Open any of the Heads-Up Displays (HUDs) available in Aperture to adjust levels, increase brightness, modify color temperature, assign keywords, straighten horizons, or make any other adjustments you'd like. Aperture also lets you view multiple photos side by side, offering a great way to evaluate similar images or multiple versions of the same image.

<b>Nondestructive Image Processing</b>
With Aperture, you never have to worry about retouching images or trying out different image adjustments because Aperture makes protecting your RAW images job one. Designed to protect your images from the moment they're imported, Aperture identifies your original images as digital "masters," and it has built-in safeguards to ensure that you can't accidentally overwrite or modify them. In fact, it's physically impossible to alter a single pixel of a digital master. Instead. Aperture takes a novel and completely nondestructive approach to image editing.

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<small><b>Thanks to Aperture's no-regrets retouching policy, you can experiment freely without fear or concern, creating as many "versions" as you'd like with different exposure settings, image croppings, color temperature modifications, level adjustments, or any combination thereof.</b></small></td></tr></table> Thanks to Aperture's no-regrets retouching policy, you can experiment freely without fear or concern, creating as many "versions" as you'd like with different exposure settings, image croppings, color temperature modifications, level adjustments, or any combination thereof until you achieve the exact results you're after. And you don't have to worry about making a mistake. You can modify or delete any adjustment at any time and with no consequences.

Unlike the duplicate files you need to create in other applications, image "versions" take up virtually no storage space, so you don't pay an overhead penalty. And Aperture automatically keeps track of all your image versions for you, sequentially numbering them on the fly and connecting them to the "master" image as part of a Stack.

Offering native RAW image editing and breakthrough speed, Aperture puts the most essential adjustment tools at your immediate disposal via either the Adjustments Inspector or the Adjustments Heads-Up Display (HUD). Using these tools, you can fine-tune exposure, use a Histogram to check and adjust levels, set white balance, or modify highlight and shadows. If you need to crop, straighten horizons, reduce noise, correct red-eye, or eliminate dust, you'll find intuitive tools available to you. In fact, if you use any of the adjustment tools to modify or retouch an image, you can use Aperture's unique "Lift and Stamp" tool to apply those modifications to any number of additional images.

<b>Versatile Printing and Publishing</b>
Using Aperture, you can produce high-quality prints and contact sheets, design customized books, and create impressive websites as beautiful as the photographs you take. Best of all, you can do it all with drag-and-drop ease.

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<small><b>Produce high-quality prints and contact sheets, design customized books, and create impressive websites as beautiful as the photographs you take.</b></small></td></tr></table> Once you select the profile for your printer, you're ready to take advantage of an Aperture feature you're going to use over and over again: Softproofing onscreen in the live Preview area of the application's robust and resizable Print dialog. If the image you see isn't perfect, fine-tune your output by making Gamma adjustments or by turning on black-point compensation.

If you've ever tried to print contact sheets using other photo applications, you're probably familiar with the expression, "there's gotta be a better way." Now there is. Aperture lets you print contact sheets more quickly and easily than you can using just about any other photo application available today.

There's more good Aperture printing news. In addition to helping you create your own color-correct prints, Aperture also provides an integrated print-ordering service that lets you order silver-halide prints directly from Kodak and Fuji at highly competitive pricing. Color managed for consistency, the prints assure predictable results and are available in standard sizes and large formats.

You can also depend on Aperture's built-in color management if you use a service bureau to print your photos. Aperture's Export Preset editor lets you simply select the ICC profile recommended by or obtained from your service bureau from a drop-down menu. Aperture embeds the profile in your files upon export, so you'll know what to expect when you get the photos in the mail. Beautiful, color-accurate prints.

Presenting prospective clients with a handsome, bound and printed Stock Book sends a powerful message. And Aperture makes the production of such high-quality bound books both simple and affordable. To help you put a unique stamp on them, Aperture includes a sophisticated book-layout engine that offers significant design flexibility.

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<small><b>Need to publish your photos to the Web fast? Aperture's WYSIWYG Web publishing tools make it easy. View larger.</b></small></td></tr></table> Want your website to be as beautiful as your photos? Aperture makes it drag-and-drop easy. No need to learn HTML or to use cumbersome wizard-based page generators. Aperture includes professionally designed Gallery and Journal templates to get you started. With the former, you can create pages of thumbnail galleries; with the latter, narrative-style web pages that mix photos with text and can include your own photos as custom headers.

Unlike other photo applications, Aperture templates aren't set in stone. Using the web gallery template, for example, you can decide how many rows and columns of images appear on each page, how large the thumbnails should be, and what metadata should accompany the images.

What's more -- and this is important -- Aperture's web-authoring environment is WYSIWYG. Any change you make happens on screen in real time, so you can see the effect right away. This offers a significant advantage over the many wizard-based applications that force you to step through one dialog after another. Cumbersome to use, they don't let you see the results of your changes until the very end. Aperture offers a welcome change, letting you see your site develop right before your eyes. <br clear="all">

Customer Reviews:

Switched From Lightroom.......2007-05-31

When I purchased my MacBook Pro I had not intention of switching to Aperture, but downloaded it and tried it out of curiosity. I have since sold my Lightroom license and am purchasing Aperture. There are specific reasons for that decision.

First, I really like the feel of Aperture 1.5 better than Lightroom, it is more intuitive to me, and the whole project thing with light tables works great. I have ~10,000 images that I never did get organized with Lightroom and was able to do so in the first few days on Aperture.

The intergration with other apps on the Mac is great - Aperture 1.5 (not 1.0) creates hi-res previews of all my images (see speed note below) and I can work away from my files to update my website, email proofs, design, etc. I keep all my photos on an external drive and leave them at home with me. When I am out of the house working, which is most days, I have my entire library with me without filling up my MacBook Harddrive. Once I need the hi-res file to either edit or send to a customer. With lightroom I was not able to work unless the files were with me.

I had expected Aperture to be slow, but it is not slow. It is very comparable to lightroom, really no difference to mention. There is ONE RALLY BIG CAVEAT ABOUT SPEED with aperture -- when I imported those 10,000 images, the import seem to go fast, maybe 20 minutes or so. BUT, it is not done at this point. In the background Aperture is creating thumbnails and hi-res previews (which can be shut off, but I need them). That is alot of processing for any program, and in the background it ran for HOURS, without me knowing. When I closed Aperture it paused the process, when I restarted Aperture it resumed the process, so for the first few days that I used it, the speed was slow. Then I realized what was going on -- look in the window menu for SHOW TASK LIST, and you will see the progress.

If others did not know this was going on and tried to get immediately to work in Aperture, they would think it was very slow. I wonder how many people have dumped thousands of photos in and used it for 30 minutes and then uninstalled it assuming it was slow? Lightroom handled this much better, showing the progress in the corner and also was faster by default with the 1:1 preview turned off.

In conclusion, Aperture works great for me on my MacBook Pro 17". I love it and I'm sticking with it. I do miss the vibrabce slider from lightroom, no question, and the develop module in lightroom is better, though not enough to stop me. I jump to photoshop cs3 when I need the vibrance controls.

The best advice I can offer when making the decision between Lightroom and Aperture (or others) is spend the 30 days with them and see which one gets you WORKING and getting things done. For me, that is Aperture.

This is a dog.......2007-05-13

Forget about this product. Managing photo collections is a horrible slow-motion experience filled with bombs, unexplainable occurrences and incredibe inefficiency. This program was not ready for release and it shows in almost every phase of the application. The interface is terrible and the results are inconsistent and amateurish. This program DOES NOT run like the Quicktime demos which Apple shows. In action the most consistent feature is a spinning beachball as the application plods through even minor tasks. Check back again in two years when Apple either "upgrades" this to a real product or allows this pig to die a well-deserved death.

Best raw converter combined with photo organizer.......2007-05-07

I wanted a raw converter that allowed sufficient control and adjustments so that I could avoid the use of another program for printing (e.g. photoshop). Aperture provided that and eliminated the use of iView Media Pro as my photo organizer. I tried Lightroom but Adobe cleverly left out some adjustment controls (sharpening) so that you still needed Photoshop. (Gee, I wonder why ?) With the demise of iView since it was bought by Microsoft, Aperture has filled the bill. I tried Bibble but it was not able to make conversions of high key photos.

Falling behind Lightroom fast..........2007-05-01

As a professional photographer, I was thrilled when Aperture came out. It was just the push I needed to finally switch over to Apple computers. I've spent the better part of 7 months using the product to manage workflow for sports and wedding assignments.

At first, using Aperture was helpful. It clipped large amounts of time from my workflow, and it has a lot of cool things like the Loupe built into it... but I found that a lot of them were just toys, not usable tools. The interface lacks that Apple intuitiveness and seems to always need more steps than necessary. Using it in conjunction with Photoshop slowed both programs to a standstill. Worst of all, it always wanted to create more thumbnails than necessary. I could understand doing a before and after thumbnail, but if I made an adjustment like a crop with their tools, then also a Photoshop adjustment, pretty soon I was looking at three thumbnails, not two, and to make it worse, if I had rated the adjusted file and then did a search by ratings, all I got in the search results were the unedited results, not the retouched versions. In addition, the internal image adjustment tools don't have the same crispness that the corresponding Photoshop tools have.

When Adobe Lightroom came out, it was a revelation. The image adjustment tools behave like the full Photoshop versions, it's faster, makes batch changes simpler to do, and it even allows you to work on the early files of an import from a card reader while the rest of the images are still uploading. When you consider that Lightroom is also PC compatible, it opens it up to a lot more users. If most of your adjustments are just color and exposure corrections, you'll never even need to open Photoshop anymore, instead of the co-existing that Aperture forces you into.

I've retired Aperture on my main machine, and installed Lightroom on both of my computers, one of which never had Aperture. My workflow now takes 1/4th of the time it did on Aperture. I realize that this reads as much like a Lightroom review as an Aperture one, but I don't think you can discuss the one product without comparing it to the other. If you need to, download the free demos of each of them and see for yourself-- Adobe beat Apple at their signature style: their product is simpler, more intuitive, and more elegant.

Better image management tools.......2007-03-28

I've been working in both Apple Aperture and Adobe Lightroom, and though I really like Lightroom's simplicity and design, I have to say that Aperture wins out in terms of image file management, which is very important for me as a wedding photographer.

Aperture is a little harder to learn because it's more fully featured than Lightroom, at least for now it is. Both applications offer very similiar features, but the smart folder and keywording features of Aperture are for more useful than the Collection features of Lightroom.

Aperture is less linear than Lightroom. You can work in various different moduals without having to switch back and forth between gallery and digital development moduels like in Lightroom.

I also like what Apple is trying to do with the solutions workflow in Aperture. It's almost possible to complete an entire wedding project without having to leave out of Aperture, except to do additional enhancement work in Photoshop or for laying out an album. Aperture has an album layout and creation feature but its printed albums are not as high end as you find outside the program.

Both Aperture and Lightroom have their pros and cons, but for now Aperture is still head of the game in terms of digital asset management (or DAM, as it's popularly called.)

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