The Aperture Blog

While I haven’t been using Aperture that much lately as I think it still has some serious bugs, I recently shot a wedding and tried to use Aperture to do the post processing. It was an interesting experience and It’s left me a little disheartened. While the display bug that is my personal pet peeve with Aperture 3 wasn’t too obvious on the type of images that I was working with, I did discover a number of other issues that gave me pause. I’m not trying to bash Aperture, but rather just report my experiences with it.

First, the positive. Organising the images is a joy in Aperture. Switch on fast preview mode and you can zip through images. I came up with my own scheme for sorting out shots using a combination of labels, ratings and colour flags. Keeping everything nicely organised in a project with albums and smart albums makes it very easy to find the shots you want. I had actually started this project using the Lightroom 3 beta and I found it’s organisation structure very frustrating. Firstly, in Lightroom when you flag, star or label images and then add them to a collection the collection doesn’t have the ratings applied. It looses them in the collection. I don’t know if this is a bug or I’m doing something wrong, but it’s very annoying. Also, because in Lightroom everything in the collections and file list is just text and generic icons, everything looks the same and it’s very hard to see where you are. It’s also frustrating that you have to deal with folders on the disk, and then collections as your project structure. Aperture is much smoother for sorting images. It’s also a lot faster once you have fast preview turned on.

Unfortunately, that’s pretty much where my positive experience ended. Once I started processing them I ran into a whole world of problems. First is performance. It may simply be that my system can’t handle the workload, but I found that Aperture constantly got so bogged down I had to stop and wait for it to catch up. I have a fairly recent top of the line iMac with the high end graphics option and my images are stored on an external fast firewire drive. When you start applying adjustments and pasting them to multiple images Aperture, for me, begins to slow to a crawl. Even just going through files and making adjustments. After a few it starts to become unresponsive as it seems to be endlessly “processing images” in the background. You can still work with it but it becomes very painful. Zooming in or using the loupe no longer works because it just displays a pixelated version while you wait for it to load. I’m not talking a few seconds either, I’m taking nearly a minute. I never experienced this issue with Aperture 2. Id work on three or four images then I’d have to wait for the software to catch up.

Again, perhaps I’m expecting too much. I am working with 21 megapixel files after all, but again, Aperture 2 didn’t slow down like this and Lightroom, while slow, is consistent and doesn’t bog down either. Another interesting thing I discovered is that when Aperture is running the finder’s cpu usage shoots up to 100%. I’ve no idea why this is doing this but a quick google search reveals others with this problem. I’ve talked about it before, but nothing seems to solve it. IT stops once you quit Aperture. In the end I quit the finder while I was working. This could well be a completely unrelated bug, but its something to look out for.

Another thing I found to be a pain after a while is applying presets, or more appropriately, the interface for applying presets. I quickly set up some presets for the various setups I was using throughout the wedding and it’s great that you can now do this in Aperture. However, as you step through images and go to apply presets, you have to go to the menu, then go to the sub menu (if you’ve organised your presets into sets). I know this doesn’t sound like that big a deal but after a while it becomes really tedious and really slows you down. In lightroom you just have to click a button. You can very quickly go through images and apply presets, whereas in Aperture it’s a repetitive chore. It would be great if Apple added something like the keyword bar for presets, so you could assign buttons to your preset sets.

Apple really needs to get the performance issues sorted out. I know some people will claim that they have no issues and that’s great, but take a trip over to the Apple Discussions and you’ll find lots of people who do. I love Aperture and overall I much prefer it to Lightroom, but in its current state I wouldn’t recommend it for a large project unless you have a very high end machine and you’ve tested it out extensively. You could argue that you should be using a high end machine anyway, but then you get back to the fact that Aperture 2 works fine. It’s not that Aperture is slow off the bat either, it bogs down after using it for a little while. I hope the can sort these issues out as it’s a shame to have to put such a potentially great piece of software on the virtual shelf.

(p.s. yes, I am using all the latest updates and system updates)

By now you’ve probably been wondering where I’ve gotten to and why this blog has gone quiet for so long? Apologies dear readers. Unfortunately a perfect storm of events has happened over the last little while that’s interrupted my blogging schedule. The first being that I’ve had to move apartment and unfortunately I’ve been without proper internet access for a little while. The second is that I’ve been doing some design work that had a tight deadline and that’s also taken up a lot of my time. The third and in the context of this blog, far more contentious reason is that I’m really ticked off with Aperture right now. I’ve detailed a particularly (for me anyway) annoying bug here before and despite three revisions it’s still there. I’ve blogged about my annoyances in more detail over on my technology blog.

I love Aperture, I really do, but for me this is a fundamental issue and I can’t continue using the software unless they fix it. Giving you an accurate display of what your images look like is a red line issue and until it’s addressed I’ll either have to go back to using Aperture 2 despite its limitations or switch to Lightroom when 3.0 comes out of beta. This is not something I wan’t to do but if you can’t trust Aperture to correctly display your images then despite every other function and feature the programme is useless. For those of you who haven’t experienced this issue or don’t think it’s a problem then good speed. I wish you well. In the mean time I will just continue to hope that Apple fixes it and I can get back to being enthusiastic about the software I love.

Apple has released a new Camera Raw update for Aperture and iPhoto.

It adds support for the following Cameras:

Canon EOS Rebel T2i / 550D / Kiss X4
Leica S2
Olympus E-450
Olympus E-600
Olympus E-620
Sony Alpha DSLR-A230
Sony Alpha DSLR-A330
Sony Alpha DSLR-A380
Sony Alpha DSLR-A450

It also addresses RAW processing issues for the following cameras:

Canon EOS 30D
Pentax K-x
Pentax K-7

Apologies for the lack of updates on the blog this last week. I have had a heavy workload and I’m also dealing with some health issues. I hope to return to regularly scheduled programming soon.

A Question from Nick:

Hi everyone.
Here is something I am unsure about so perhaps someone would be so kind as to offer advice.
I start a new Aperture library on an annual basis i.e. a separate library for 2010, 2009, 2008 etc.
Within each library I have a number of smart folders; quite a lot actually!
As you can imagine, re-building this structure for every library is a tad tedious.
Now, we can copy keywords into different libraries but is there a way we can copy the smart folder structure?
Perhaps I have missed the bleeding obvious?

Thanks.

Nick.

Answer:

Hi Nick

While you can’t directly copy and paste smart folders if you have Aperture 3 there is another way to achieve what you want to do. Select the project whose structure you want to copy in the Library tab and from the file menu choose “Duplicate Project Structure”.

This creates an empty copy of your project with all it’s smart folders intact. (This only works in Aperture 3)

Hope this helps.

Thomas

If you want a good place to check out some free tutorials, and lost of user created content created with Aperture check out the Apple Aperture channel on Vimeo. The channel contains a mix of tutorials, interviews and slideshows created with Aperture. It’s worth keeping an eye on as the collection grows.

When people talk about optimising their systems for Aperture they often talk about adding more RAM or, with a Mac Pro changing the graphics card. What people often forget about though is the hard drive. The speed of the drive onto which you store your images can make a huge difference to the overall performance of Aperture. Some people seem to think that unless you’re running video you don’t need a fast hard drive, but this isn’t true. Remember that, as today’s cameras use higher and higher resolution sensors, the file sizes have been increasing dramatically. Every time you go to work on a new image in Aperture it has to load that file, (it loads the preview first and then starts loading the full res version) and so drive performance is very important. I know this seems pretty obvious to most people, but it’s something that I’ve seen others gloss over.

If you want to get the best performance you should consider using some sort of RAID setup. This can be as simple as two firewire drives striped together using Apple’s disk utility or as complicated as a dedicated third party RAID box. On a portable, the standard drive is often slower than most desktop drives, so If you’re getting a new Macbook Pro consider getting the 7200rpm drive option or the SSD. Alternatively consider keeping your masters on a fast firewire 800 portable drive.

Another thing to remember is that drive performance decreases as your drive fills up. Not many people know this. If you want to keep your drives running at optimal efficiency you need to keep at least 20% free. This, of course, is not always possible, but if you notice a drop off in speed and your drives are almost full, this is probably why.

I know there’s lots more on this subject and I’ll go into it a bit more at a later date but for now I hope this is useful information.

Aperture 3 was such a huge update over Aperture 2 that it addressed many concerns that users had about the software. Apart from the software bugs that plagued the initial release, now that 3.02 is out, it seems fairly stable (although some people are still having issues). As always though, there’s always room for improvement. So how would you Improve Aperture (stability and performance aside)? What features would you like to see in the next release? Have your say in the comments below. To get the ball rolling here are a few of my own suggestions….

1. Fix the display over-sharpening bug. I know not everyone is having it but it’s still annoying for those of us who are.

2. Allow you to copy and paste brush strokes between adjustments

3. Have brush strokes automatically scale to the size of an Image when you paste them as part of an Adjustment Preset

4. Allow third parties to write Adjustment “Brick” plug-ins. (This could be a disaster for stability mind you)

5. Allow you to control the shape of the Vignette (so you can do more of a rectangular vignette)

6. The option to remove the cork board from the “Faces” display. This is Already there! Oops. Thanks to Thomas in the comments for pointing out that one!

7. Ability to add grain to an Image

8. Improve the web publishing section

9. An iDisk based online backup service (Yeah, I know – pushing it a bit – but how cool would that be?)

10. Output Sharpening when exporting Images.

So there’s my top ten. I could go on and on, but I shall pass the torch over to you readers. I know some will say that it’s only been a short while since 3 came out, but it’s just some harmless fun, and it’s always interesting to hear other people’s ideas.

Much was made of the recent improvements in Lightroom with regard to its noise reduction capabilities. With the recent release of the second beta, Adobe added some powerful luminance noise reduction tools to the colour noise reduction improvements it debuted in the first beta. This has caused some friction between the Lightroom and Aperture communities, with Lightroom fans claiming that Adobe’s tool has the clear advantage. However, despite it not being one of the headline features in Aperture 3, Apple did improve the noise handling with that release too. Now that Adobe have said that the current second beta of Lightroom is more or less feature complete (as to what will be in the final release) I thought I would take an objective look at the noise reduction characteristics of the two pieces of software.
Read more…

While my experience with Aperture 3 has for the most part been overwhelmingly positive, there’s one bug that annoys the life out of me. I don’t know how widespread it is, although I do know others have the problem. It’s not a show stopper by any means, but it is very distracting. So what is this little gremlin you ask? It’s the way Aperture 3 displays images. In particular images with areas of high contrast in them. When you’re looking at a Photograph zoomed out (i.e in the normal view) in some cases Aperture appears to be over-sharpening the image. It is very noticeable if your Image has an area of high contrast, such as a shadow beside a white area. In this case you get an ugly black line ringing the area of contrast. Here’s an example:

The following is a screenshot from Aperture:

Note the areas I’ve marked in red. These black lines aren’t in the image. If you zoom in, they disappear. Also, if you export the image they aren’t on it. It’s only the way it is being displayed in the Aperture interface. Here’s the same Image exported from Aperture:

Aperture 2 did not have this problem. I’m also not sure that this is happening for everyone either. It could be an issue with certain graphics cards. This may seem like a minor issue and in some ways it is as it’s not affecting the image when exported. However, if you’re going through images from a shoot it can affect your overall opinion of whether a particular shot is good enough or not as you’re seeing artefacts that aren’t actually there. It also does seem to affect the image if you use Aperture’s built in Flickr tool which is a shame. This is just one example too. I have lots of others in my Library.

If you’ve seen this problem yourself please add your experience in the comments below, and more importantly, let Apple know.