Aperture 2.0 first impressions
Tuesday, February 12th, 2008
Apple just released the long overdo Aperture 2.0 and for those of us who have owned Aperture 1 for a while it’s a $99 upgrade. That’s not too bad for a high end pro product like this.
Because I use a 2.16 ghz MacBook Pro with 2 gigs of memory, I had a hard time with Aperture 1’s performance and decided to try Lightroom a while back: Aperture, Lightroom and Me.
However, I’ve been waiting for this upgrade as I’d be happy to move back to Aperture so as to keep my core software Apple brand (why I’m not sure).
I downloaded the Aperture 2 trial, got a serial number and re-imported about 40 RAW files I’d been working on recently in Lightroom.
This is a first impression after 20 minutes of use:
1. Aperture 2.0 is faster or at least feels faster on my machine. I had a hard time making it choke where I could easily choke Aperture 1 up pretty easily.
2. There are UI changes which look good although I’ve not used Aperture for a while so using any version of it now feels a bit foreign. Still, I think power Aperture users will appreciate and like some of the UI improvements.
3. There are some new tools for dealing with blown highlights, more accurate sharpening, better color balance and more. The spot and patch tools is improved as well (it was a disaster in Aperture 1).
If I had to choose a product right now I’d choose Lightroom and that’s saying something because I want to choose Aperture.
The one major problem with Lightroom is mode switching: where Lightroom has library, develop, and other modes that are major portions of the application that one must switch between, Aperture is modeless and this is an important distinction. However, it very well may be that Lightroom’s modes are what keeps some of the application out of memory giving it more performance on lesser machines with less memory, like mine. I don’t know. I do know that Lightroom feels faster to me and I’m willing to live with modes for more performance.
More importantly, using Lightroom has taught me a lot about using image correction tools and while most of those tools are available in Aperture 1 and no doubt all are in 2, they seem to be better realized in Lightroom. This could be just a familiarity issue and I’m sure some of it is, but some of it is also a simpler UI which I like.
I have 30 more days to make up my mind before I have to buy the Aperture 2 upgrade and I’ll be watching the Aperture Users group up on flickr for their take on this.
I’ve been playing with Aperture 2.0 for an hour and a half now Richard.
Here’s my take (and I’ll be doing a full writeup later).
The things that I like about LR is a short list:
1. Clarity tool. << Matched in A2 as Definition tool.
2. Recovery tool << Matched
3. Vignette tool << Matched and beats LR’s IMO.
4. Speed << Matched, maybe beat. I’m not 100% sure yet.
Improvements beyond LR.
A2’s repair tool is awesome. It’s like PS’s clone and stamp and allows you to choose the source location if you want. It then paints a mask on your image and boom, you’re done. No more switching to PS to fix a quick clone job. LR isn’t there yet.
All panels are now in the hud. I like that. It’s just a tab flip between meta and adjustments and works with the “w” key.
I’ve got alot more coming Richard. Go play with it, I have a feeling it’s going to grow on us.
Not sure about A2 repair tool being better than LR, are you sure you tested out the LR repair tool? It’s quite good.
Lens aberation control in LR is also quite good although I agree, A2 is more sophisticated but this means little to me (yet) as I don’t have anything that vignettes.
Recovery tool is certainly good in A2 although it’s fine in LR too.
I’ll be interested in LR2… that will be a fairer comparison. Remember, you’re comparing version 1 of LR with version 2 of Aperture which has been out a lot longer.
Time will tell, I’ll certainly test more and look forward to your tests as well as we have similar hardware.
Check this out.
http://www.piclens.com
This is one whole new way of seeing images on flickr. If you use firefox or safari its just great :-)
Are you referring to the spot and patch tool in LR Richard?
Dilip: Yes, I’m well aware of it, I’m a beta tester for them (Indian guys too FYI).
Greg: yes, that’s what I was referring to. I like LR better there even though A2 is much improved (A1 was almost useless for me).
Macworld has a useful initial overview: Apple releases Aperture 2.
[...] an NAPP member, I can now take advantage of the wealth of lightroom info and tips available there. A lot of people seem to be thinking the way I am and doubting whether they should upgrade or just switch [...]
I’ve only just downloaded Aperture 30 minutes ago so certainly just dipped my toes in.
The retouch tool is absolutely fantastic. I actually giggled at how easy it was to remove a chunk of log from a bird photo. So much better than the spot and patch tool… I’m wondering why they even left that in?
Overall speed in navigation… hard to tell. Changing projects is instant and smart groups also instant. However, what is strange, is that i get a draw delay as the thumbs are drawn out, starting with an empty dotted line. I thought maybe this would just happen the first time I moved into a new project and that after it would be instant due to caching. Not so. Weird. I’m not sure if this is perhaps because I’ve told it to use the embedded jpg preview when available?
I’m not sure about the changes in sharpening… I’ve grown very fond of Lightroom’s sharpening and noise reduction. Will have to play with this some more.
So far the biggest disappointment is the lack of change in the web gallery export as in they have not done anything there!! Same yucky templates. Lightroom’s defaults are much better and not only that but lots of users are creating downloadable templates… I found one for integrating PayPal and it looks great and seems to work perfectly. Fantastic for anyone thinking of selling images.
I am glad to see they have integrated with .Mac web galleries but still, that does not make up for the poor built in gallery publishing.
Denny, the lag may have something to do with how you’re having it build previews although I don’t know enough to know for sure. My guess is if you let it run unattended for a while it will do more preview crunching and then run faster later. Having it do stuff like that in the background while you work seems to slow it down (as it does lightroom but not as much.
Other than that, it sounds like you’re liking it. keep us informed, the more feedback you post here the better, not just for me but for a lot of folks who are tracking this trying to figure out what to do.
Thanks.
One thing people forget to mention is speed with large libraries. Wedding photographers will routinely come home with 2000 images from one shoot. Multiply that by a year, and you have a large working library. Granted, you can always archive and remove individual projects, but that defeats the purpose of using apps like these. Especially when you need to go back for an additional print order, or you want to quickly aggregate all your portfolio shots.
Aperture 1.x still had LR beat on speed after your library passed a certain number of images. Now, I have to say AP2 absolutely kicks a** on speed. I have over 35,000 images in my library with no slow down at all. Keyword searches and smart albums on the entire library take about a second. That’s the most impressive part of AP2 for me.
Hey Richard,
Well, it’s been about 24 hours and I’ve decided to stay with Lightroom and will probably go ahead and start moving the rest of my Aperture images over. There’s no doubt AP 2.0 is an improvement in speed of editing but I’m still seeing delays and the spinning beachball… less often of course but the fact that I’m still seeing it when I do not ever see it in LR says something about the basics.
In terms of RAW 2.0 in AP, the editing results are nearly identical with LR in terms of results. But, with the exception of the new retouch brush, it feels like more work in AP. With LR I seem to get slightly better images in much less time. That combined with the fact that browsing and searching with LR is still faster than AP and it’s a no brainer for me.
Oh, last, I cannot believe that Apple did not update the web publishing of AP aside from adding .Mac galleries. Amazing. The web publishing in LR is so much better, I can’t imagine being without that now that I’ve begun setting up online galleries with it.
One last thought… I can’t help but think that the slight drag I’m still seeing with AP is tied to Apple’s reliance on the graphics card for some (or all?) of the work. I’ve got a MBPro with 2 gigs of ram, Core 2 Duo and… well, it still just feels sticky to me.
Troy: Wow, that’s great news. I’d love to know what kind of computer you have, how much memory it has and what kind of graphics card and memory you have. I’m not seeing anything like that on my MacBook Pro.
Denny: I have an older version of the MacBook Pro with a core duo, not 2 duo. You’re right, Aperture puts a lot of weight on the graphics card for image processing and this is great as it allows the machine to multitask better: you can do other things while images are being rendered. The problem is us laptop users just don’t have the umph for that, it’s really meant for Mac Pros with plenty of memory and a high end graphics card.
I was at the 5th Avenue Apple store today and played with Aperture 2 on a MacPro and it really was fantastic. However, it feels nothing like that on my computer and given that I am really hooked on portable computers as my only computers, I’m going to always stick with the product that performs well on the hardware I have at hand. At this point it looks like Lightroom is it, and, like you, I’m comfortable enough with its tools that I can process images more quickly.
That’s my take today. Ask me tomorrow and it may change.