Aperture is one of Apple's newest and most hyped "Pro" Apps which is targeted primarily at professional photographers and advanced amateurs. If you use a digital SLR or high end prosumer camera and consider photography to be one of your main hobbies or profession, Aperture may be for you. Otherwise, you probably won't want to spend more for this software than you did for your camera! While mainly an image organization tool with meta-data support, Aperture also provides tools for the most common photo editing needs such as crop, free rotate, red eye reduction, white balance, sharpening, levels, exposure, blemish removal, and RAW adjustments. Like iPhoto, Aperture also includes the ability to produce photo books, order prints, and make web albums but all with more freedom and control. Basically, this is iPhoto on steroids.
Possibly the largest freedom which Aperture provides is the ability to edit your photos endlessly without worry. No longer will you have to think about saving copies, wasting disk space, or protecting the originals. Your master images (digital negatives) are always preserved and any and all changes you make to them can be undone or altered at any point in the future without sacrificing image quality. Instead of actually changing your photos and re-saving them (as you may have done with other tools), Aperture saves only the digital "recipe" used to make the changes. In addition to being able to easily undo your changes, this also means that extra disk space is not wasted when you make additional copies or edited versions of images. In the past, you may have restricted yourself to editing only those images in dire need of help, but it's so trivial to do with Aperture that you'll find yourself making small corrections across the board. The ease with which photos can be edited and organized in this program is phenomenal!
Other innovative features such as the ability to stack similar images on top of one another hiding all but the best (called "stacks"), and the integrated "vault" one-click backup system are a joy to use. If you really need Photoshop, Aperture even lets you send files to it for editing with one click, and as soon as you save, they come right back into Aperture with the changes! This software does so much and has so many innovative features that it would take pages and pages to even mention them all - instead, why not dive in and watch the online tutorials to get a feel?
At the time of this writing, a free thirty day trial version of Aperture is available for download from Apple's website. A discounted (half price) educational version is also available. Aside from the high cost, the only real drawback of this software is the required CPU and graphics horsepower. Warning: if you have anything older than a 1.5 GHz G4 with at least 1 GB of RAM, Aperture may cause excessive hair loss and fidgeting.
Adobe makes a competing cross-platform application called Lightroom, but if you're using a Mac, Aperture is probably the one for you. The author of this review has used both of them and far prefers the feature set and OS X integration of Aperture.
2 comments:
Your review told me what I needed to know about Aperture viz the comparison with iPhoto - Too bad it's sooooo expensive. Even worse in Western Australia. Thanks, Paul.
Aperture 2 is much faster than 1.5, so if the speed issue was slowing you down (ha ha) then re-consider with Aperture 2. I think it's worth the money.
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