Hoho's Log

Apple Aperture

No, this is not a review.

Earlier this month, I got Aperture from the Palo Alto Apple Store. After installing it on my 15" Powerbook, I started to import some photos that I took early in November.

Running Aperture on my 15" Powerbook with a 1.5GHz G4 Processor, 1GB of RAM and an ATI 9700 Radeon Mobility with 128MB of Video RAM is decent, not at all that bad. There are some delays in getting a tool to respond, but not all that bad.

I've found that Aperture greatly simplifies my raw workflow by putting all the tools that I usually use to select and generate final images for my projects. I do miss a few of the tools that I use in Adobe Photoshop, which means that Photoshop will still be a staple in my digital darkroom.

Two things that I would like to see changed in Aperture is the addition of curves and a more refined unsharp mask tool. With those two items added/updated, Aperture would definitely be a program that would be a bargain at the $499 price that Apple is asking for it. At this point, if I want to do any curve changes or do a better job of sharpening, I'd have to do it in Photoshop.

I've found that Aperture occassionally produces some weird results. Below is one of the images that I made some changes to, including a crop, the other images that I changed weren't cropped and came out ok.

As you can see the image's last few columns of pixels is stretched out. I have not been able to figure out what the exact settings were to be able to repeat this weird problem, as some of the other cropped images did not have this problem, only about 2 out of over 50 images exported with this project.