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August 15, 2007

ihnatko

Ihnatko: A love song for Aperture

Posted Aug. 15, ’07, 1:47 PM PT by Andy Ihnatko
Category | Ihnatko

Well, all right: clearly I’m getting into Aperture fairly late in the game. If you’ve been waiting for me to weigh in with my opinions on Apple’s professional (-ish) grade photo editing app all this time, I apologize and explain that I got distracted by a personal project.

And with absolutely nothing to show for it, might I add. It turns out that Guinness doesn’t even have a world record for Greatest Number Of Origami Birds Folded Out Of Beef Jerky And Eaten In One Year. Ha ha, the joke’s on me, I guess. I invite anybody and everybody even remotely associated with the creation and upkeep of Wikipedia to go straight to hell.

But the point is that I’m using it now, and I love it in a way that God never intended for a man to love a gender-nonspecific sequence of ones and zeroes.

Like all true, profound love, it’s based on a re-channeling of hatred for another individual: iPhoto, in this case. Oh, friends… the years I wasted in trying to make that relationship work. But you grow and you mature.

Well, one of us did, at any rate. iPhoto was introduced in 2002 but even then, it seemed as though it was perfectly attuned to the needs and interests of digital photographers in the year 1999. A modern user — anyone whose pictures contain so many pixels that they actually have to scroll the viewer window to see the whole image at full resolution, say — is forced to either accept all of iPhoto’s annoying weaknesses or learn how to work around them. Way back in the 20th century, digital photos were tiny and you could only take a handful in one outing. And there was precious little you could do with your photos once you’d taken them. In today’s age of seven-course food pills and nuclear-powered autogyros, an app that stores your entire library on your local hard drive, only allows a handful of editing tweaks, and prefers to steer you toward’s Apple’s own online printmaking and photohosting services seems downright antique.

In fact, I’d already largely abandoned iPhoto in favor of Adobe Photoshop Elements (which includes a basic but v.nice library tool) before taking Aperture for a spin. But Aperture is the real deal; it’s truly a photo app for the modern age. It’s a lot like Photoshop, really. Not in editing features — like iPhoto, its edits are limited to mushing sliders around and cropping — but in what it represents to the profession and the hobby of photography.

Photoshop brought traditional darkroom tools and approaches to digital imaging. The image is your negative and you manipulate it with a full arsenal of tactile hand tools. Aperture abandons the darkroom model entirely. Instead, the image is a pile of numbers and your tools perform adjustments on that data. That is, if you want to brighten just the skin tones in an image, you don’t reach for burn and dodge tools and scrub those faces directly. Instead, you adjust the brightness, luminance, and saturation sliders and limit their effects to just the reds.

But for a modern photo tool, managing the hundreds of photos you take is more important than editing. And this is where the Love came in. Few apps are its equal when it comes to culling 20 or 30 keepers from 200 vacation photo, and none can touch it when it comes to managing thousands of photos scattered across several drives and discs.

At last, I feel like I’m using the photo library and editing tool that I want, as opposed to one that I’m stuck with. Unlike iPhoto, it costs actual money. But look, all of the things about Aperture that make it worth double what you pay for it start with the phrase “Unlike iPhoto… ” as well.

1.5 was released back in the fall, and by now it’s been carefully reviewed by proper government-licensed individuals. So instead of a blow-by-blow analysis of its features and functions, I shall now slip into my brown velvet suit, sniff indulgently at a nearby lily, and reflect upon the larger lessons that an app like Aperture teaches:

Great apps need a chance to evolve. And the developers and users need to interact closely to make that happen. Aperture 1.0 was a bit of a mess. Its interface was too Star Trek and it was a phenomenal resource hog. In fact, unless you had a screen the same size and dimensions of the monoliths from “2001,” it was borderline unusable. All together, it alienated everyone who wasn’t a hardcore professional… and even those guys were pretty wary.

Apple wisely bit the bullet and did the same thing that the keepers of the Batman film franchise did when they realized that their Dark Knight was a guy in a rubber suit with molded-in nipples who drove a penis-shaped car: they called a do-over. 1.5 is only marginally similar to 1.0; even 1.53 contains little tweaks that continue to nudge it closer to the butter zone.

Making step forward sometimes requires taking a step back. Particularly where user interfaces are involved. Photo editing is a very fiddly process that creates huge UI problems. Users want to see as much of the photo as possible, and yet there are millions of controls to manage. Getting these features to work in a GUI usually meant more clutter or fewer features.

Aperture 1.5’s solution? A separate full-screen mode, and tool palettes that slide in and out with one-stroke function keys. Modality, inconsistent user experiences, and forcing people to remember keystrokes were precisely the problems that the chick with the hammer was sent to smash in the Mac’s original “1984” commercial… and yet here, it’s the best solution.

“Prosumer” is one of the most exciting words in the English language. It signposts a Third Age in personal computing. During the first age, we were pretty thrilled just to be able to write a two-page letter on the things. Then, hardware and software become sophisticated enough that professionals could lay out a whole magazine or budget an entire corporation or record and mix a whole album with them.

But today, due not only to more sophisticated technology but also to a whole new attitude, it’s no longer necessary to relegate consumers to special “dumbed down” apps. iPhoto is fine for birthday-party snapshots, but any shooter with an ambition to become a better photographer will quickly hit a glass ceiling. Fortunately, tools like Aperture are powerful enough for the pros, yet approachable and affordable enough for civilians who want to learn and grow.

Never forget that a key part of the Mac’s spirit is the way that it encourages its users to reach their full creative potential. In an era in which Apple’s future is becoming increasingly fed by iTunes — a nice little app, but one that only helps people to spend more money and consume more product — Aperture is a most welcome thing.

[Reprinted with the good permission of the folks at Macworld UK.]


4 Comments

Michael Long said:

The problem with Aperture is its insistence on maintaining one (and only one) library. I have family photos, professional photos, stock photos, and "art" photos/images, and I'd really prefer NOT to mix them all up into one "super" library. I also want to be able to create and store libraries and projects to locations of my own choice.

Unfortunately, this "mega-library" concept is spreading across more and more of Apple's products (like the master library of clips just added to iMovie) and it's just not going to work. Image files, audio files, movie files, tv shows.. all are getting to be too big and too plentiful to NOT be able to manage and allocate storage and space. They already overflow my hard drives, and I have TERABYTES of space.

And it makes using multiple computers (like a desktop and notebook) that much more difficult.

August 15, 2007 2:42 PM
eagleroc Author Profile Page said:

Come on now - full disclosure on what the cost of Aperture is please... $299.

If you didn't know that before reading the story, this sounds like a great app for those who feel bigger than iLife.

Now that you know the price - how good is it really?

Pro-sumer, yes - and, with the price tag to match. Funny how you can pick up a Pro-sumer Nikon for just about double that.

So, Andy, is the app $300 better than iPhoto?

August 15, 2007 4:00 PM
Chad Billington said:

I haven't had the chance to take Aperture for a spin yet (saving the 30 day demo for a project), but I've had the 30 day demo for Adobe Lightroom. My question is which is worth the $300. I'm convinced that one of the two is a long term purchase, but Adobe was so good, I'm wondering what Aperture will be able to do to top it.

August 15, 2007 5:07 PM
Daniel Harris said:

I am a prosumer-level digital photographer who has been using Aperture for about a year now. I have played with Lightroom, Adobe Bridge, and iPhoto enough to realize that they can't beat the workflow I have already got.

Nonetheless, Michael makes a very important point. The next Aperture update desperately needs more flexibility in terms of splitting up libraries and managing more than one at a time. The organization offered by having Aperture manage your photos for you is superb, but it's starting to get cumbersome now that I have a year's worth of photos built up. I need a practical solution which does not involve exporting my masters and then deleting them from my library (this seems like an organizational nightmare).

Yes, i have tried working with referenced masters, but I find that this eliminates many of the advantages of the Aperture library, especially when it comes to revisiting old photos for heavy editing (i.e. in Photoshop) and backup with vaults.

Ideally, I could split off all of my photos before time t, and put them in a seperate Aperture Library on an external drive for easy access later. Yes, there are ways of doing this manually, but they are resource and time-intensive. This is the single feature which needs to be in Aperture 1.6 (or 2.0, or whatever).

Anyway, I can't imagine going back to iPhoto, especially for anyone taking more than 100 RAW photos per week on a dSLR.

August 16, 2007 3:20 PM

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