Macworld: Editors’ Notes: Close-up on Aperture — this was unexpected. Adobe cannot be happy about this — at all. When you analyze it all, though, it seems to be more of an advanced file system than anything else.
Aperture, which will be available in November for $499, provides tools for managing, sorting, comparing, editing, and publishing your photos. It’s aimed at professional photographers who need to manage hundreds — if not thousands — of photos from a shoot. The program supports most major file formats, including JPEG, Tiff, and Photoshop files. But its biggest selling point — 4and the one Apple is clearly proudest of– is its support for Raw files. By working with the raw data that the camera’s imager captures, you can delay essential photographic decisions, such as white balance, until post production, giving you more flexibility in refining the image’s color and tone. Aperture lets you work with a Raw file from import through printing without having to convert the data to another format and without permanently altering the original image. All of your edits are non-destructive, which means you can turn them on and off at will anytime in the process.
It’s not a photoshop killer — the only shot it has at it, is it’s advanced color correction capabilities, but photoshop for most of us is a layout and design tool. It has the potential to replace it, just as photoshop has the potential to advance it’s color correction and file handling to mimic Aperture… but it isn’t there. Those of us in the design world know that, so do the photographers, and the advanced users.
Either it’s as comprehensive and complex as Photoshop, or it’s not. If it is, then no one’s gonna take invest the requisite time to learn it. If it’s not, then it’s irrelevant.
Who, besides Apple I guess, claims this is a Photoshop-killer?
Is it just me, or does anyoen else see this as a digital photography niche product? For those photographers who need massive-scale file managment (and RAW capability) but don’t need all of Photoshop’s functionality, I can see Aperture being worth it. Otherwise, if the editing features in Apple’s new product leave much to be desired, Photoshop and Adobe Bridge will do the trick, don’t you think? Plus, a lot of people already have the Adobe products, whose upgrades are relatively inexpensive.
So Apple will have 3 types of customer:
1-People who buy Apple no matter what.
2-People who are just starting out or buying a new Apple computer.
3-People who don’t see the point of upgrading an Adobe program and are interested in trying something new.
Sure, assuming that Aperture continues Apple’s reputation for quality software (especially integrating it with the OS), the program will be a moneymaker…but it won’t be the death of Photoshop unless:
A) It’s available for Windows, and
B) The functionality is equivalent or superior to Photoshop.
I think the real question that will keep Adobe execs up at night is: What is Apple rolling out next?
Cool, I can’t wait to get the warez version via bittorrent.
Serously, does Apple really want to do this?! Considering you can get EVERY Adobe program for free, how does it even make any money?!
“Photoshop Killer” is a sensational heading but probably not an accurate description.
Derrick Story over at Mac Dev Center says:
“This is primarily a workflow environment that has editing capability. You’ll still want your favorite image editor in addition to Aperture”
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/wlg/8141
except for the ability to read the RAW format, i don’t see any advantage from this $499 tool over its FREE windows counterpart, PICCASA from google.
Considering how badly Adobe Bridge utterly sucks (believe me… it is so slow it is unusable in real-world situations), Aperture actually looks like a very interesting product to replace the Bridge / ACR combination. But in reality it isn’t Adobe that needs to really worry in this case, it’s a slew of third-party RAW converters that have just lost their whole future. If you are a good enough photographer to actually use RAW and know how to benefit from it, the price is high, but might be worth it just from a workflow perspective.
I am a full time professional photographer, and I can tell just by the demos that this is not hype, this is an actually useful product with features not available anywhere else. I shoot in RAW in studio all the time, and workflow is everything when it comes to productivity.
This might actually get e to switch to a Mac, which whenever I use feels like a highly limiting computer with “training wheels” compared to a PC, but as always, it’s not the hardware that matters… it’s the software that you run on teh hardware that makes the hardware useful.
It appears to be iPhoto on steroids. iPhoto already has the ability to open an external editor.
From Apple’s own tech specs for Aperature:
http://www.apple.com/aperture/specs.html
Seamless Photoshop integration
One-click export directly into Photoshop as .PSD or TIFF
Native support for flattened or single-layer .PSD files
Manage Photoshop-generated image versions
It is designed to integrate with Photoshop – not “kill” it. And anyone who already uses Adobe’s Creative Studio 2 (or CS 1, for that matter) would probably find it a “yawner”. But, for people who aren’t using CS already, it may be attractive.
It will be interesting to see if Apple can get any significant performance boost from its “Core Video” routines – which allow the recent version of iPhoto to use the video card to perform effects processing. Only problem is users of older/slower Macs won’t be presented with those options – due to hardware detection in the software.
I originally assumed that this would be a Photoshop killer, but as I looked into it further, it looks more like an ImageReady competitor, but for more advanced photographers. It may have no competition, but I don’t know the Apple space too well.
We’ll see. Apple tends to hit home runs and total misses.
I remember the talk that Garage Band was going to wipe out Protools and similar. Garage Band _is_ a really cool program but I’m not deleting my other programs.
The surprise audio editing challenger is Audacity an open source program. It’s not 1/10th the programming marvel of Garage Band but it is very funtional.
Why RAW? It has nothing to do with image size. It is actually failrly easy to explain. The final output for a client is typically JPEG, but it is how you arrive to that output that makes a difference. When you shoot JPEG in camera, you actually are shooting RAW and using a camera built-in RAW converter to save as JPEG. In doing so, you tie down the photo to the settings that you have on your camera, such as color space, sharpness , contrast and white balance. Once you apply those settings, there is no going back. And JPEG is 8 bit, while RAW is 12-16 bit, which means that you reduce the ability to adjust the image later.
When you save as RAW, you then generate a JPEG outside of the camera. This allows you to fine tune the image with minimum compromises, since nothing has been permanently applied.
Think of a JPEG image as a finished print, and RAW as a negative. If you need to redo the image by making some adjustments, would you rather use the original negative, or would you rathrr scan the print at a low bit density and then make adjustments to the resulting file?
I always deliver JPEG, but whenever I shoot in a studio or critical setting, I always shoot RAW and ‘step into’ the digital darkroom and ‘custom develop’ the negative that I created.
Another comparison: shooting JPEG in camera is like taking film to the supermarket to be developed and printed, whjile shooting RAW is like custom developing and printing the film yourself. The final output is the same size JPEG, but there is a HUGE difference in the final quality.