Aperture 4?

Ever since Adobe announced the beta version of Lightroom 4 a few weeks ago, speculation has understandably turned to the next release of Aperture. There has been a flurry of opinions on various blogs, but no concrete rumours. While some have questioned whether or not we will even see an Aperture 4, the general consensus is that we will. Derrick Story had an interesting podcast this week on the topic and you should check it out. Personally, I think we will see it and whats more I believe we will see it pretty soon. I went so far as to make a bold prediction on twitter earlier in the week that it would be released this Tuesday, but in truth I’m as much in the dark as the next person.

So, reading the tea leaves then, what do I expect will be in Aperture 4? I know I’ve done similar posts before, but since then I’ve honed my expectations. We also now have an idea of what the competition is up to, so just for fun I’m going to take one more stab at a guess as to what will be in Aperture 4. (Oh, and for those asking, I believe it will be called Aperture 4 rather than Aperture X, but I could be wrong – At the moment I’d give it 70 / 30 in favour of “Aperture 4”) I’m just going to pick a few possible major features. There’s lots of minor things I’d like to see, but as it probably won’t be long till we find out for sure, I won’t go into too much detail.

Essentials

1. Lens Correction. This is an absolute essential in my opinion. I’ve blogged several times about the importance of having lens correction and I think that if Apple doesn’t include it in Aperture 4 there will be a lot of disappointed people. What requires a lot of tweaking and the use of several plug-ins in Aperture can be done automatically on import in Lightroom, so this needs to be added. For me, personally this is make or break. As this is a feature I use all the time, if Aperture 4 doesn’t have lens correction I’ll probably move on to something else unless the other features are outstanding.

2. Multiple External Editors. This is another Area where Lightroom has the advantage. With so many cool photo processing Apps available on the App store it would be nice to be able to set up more than one external editor. In lightroom you can do this, so you can use apps like “flare” or “Analog” almost as a plug-in. I’m pretty sure this can’t be that hard to implement, and I know people are crying out for it, so lets hope Apple ave listened.

3. Better Noise Reduction Aperture’s noise reduction is ok, but it’s not great. It was good when it came out, but it doesn’t hold a candle to what the competition can do now, so lets hope this gets addressed.

4. Camera Profiles Lightroom has them. Corel’s new Aftershot Pro has them. With Apple’s history of developing coloursync and the colour matching workflow, it would be nice if they provided Camera profiles so that what was shot in Raw matched what you see in the Camera. There is no reason why they can’t do this, it’s down to a matter of resources and if they want to commit them to it, as it would require in-house profiling of every camera available. Unless of course they could buy this in. Anyway, fingers crossed.

Not Essential, But Would Be Nice

1. Better Raw Processing. I know some people will probably take offence to my suggestion that Aperture doesn’t offer the best RAW conversion out there, but, well, it doesn’t. Don’t get me wrong, it’s very very good. I would rate it in the top 3 but it’s easily beat by Camera Raw (in my opinion). Images from Camera Raw often address moire and aliasing issues that appear in Aperture. Aperture has problems with very fine detail too, which Camera raw renders much clearer. You can see this in particular in areas of fine foliage. I know for most people this is needless pixel peeping, but some clients and services (especially iStock) require pixel perfect images. Like I said, it’s not a huge issue – I just wan’t Aperture to be number 1.

2. Automatic Scaling Of Brush Masks. If you make presets or use presets a lot you will probably want this. One of the things you may have noticed if you use brushes in your presets, is that when you move from an image from one camera to another with a different pixel count, the brushed adjustments don’t scale, so you’re left with hard edges. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t worry about it. If you do, you probably want this feature too.

3. Better Vignette Controls. I love vignettes. They add focus and dimensions to images and used creatively they can be great. I hate Aperture’s vignette controls. They are basic and limiting and are not much use creatively. Compared to the vignette tools in virtually every other piece of software they are woefully underpowered. Hopefully Apple will add something comparable to Lightroom’s Post Crop Vignette or even better, Nik’s vignette controls (from its plugins)

4. Better Social Media Integration. I would love to see Aperture integrate better into the various social media sites. Now that Mobile Me is dead, I think it’s important that they add more sharing options. Twitter sharing is noticeably absent. Facebook pages need to be supported too. I would mention google plus support but I can’t see that happening. 500px support would be nice too. Of course the obvious thing to do would be to make the sharing section extensible via a plugin, which would solve all problems.

Long Shots but Would Be Awesome

1. iBook Authoring. How cool would it be if Apple took the book module one step further and enabled you to create photo books for the iPad directly within Aperture? Ok, I could be dreaming here, but it seems like the next logical step.

2. Extensible Rendering Engine. This isn’t going to happen but one could dream. Imagine the actual raw conversion could be given an Api and you could allow plug-ins to replace the raw processing part of the Adjustments tree. I know this sounds far fetched, but I don’t think it’s entirely impossible. As it stands, RAW conversion is handled by the OS so Aperture is calling those routines. Theoretically, it would be possible to allow a plug-in to do this. You’re probably wondering what the advantages of this are, but think of it this way: manufacturers could write their own Raw conversions engines. Cameras that weren’t supported could be supported by the developers themselves or by some third party. It’s highly unlikely to happen, but one can dream !

Anyway, that’s my thoughts on the subject for now. Feel free to chime in in the comments, or head on over to the Forums if you want to discuss it further.

More on this topic:

1. Editorial: Brushes, Aperture’s Secret Weapon
2. Aperture Road Trip (Or How I got on running aperture on a MacBook Air)