Category: Aperture

I’ve only had a couple of days to play with Apple’s new Aperture 3 – released earlier this week.

Overall, I’m impressed. Aperture’s new interface design is much cleaner and simpler than earlier versions – and the new Quick FIx adjustments and the Quick Brushes are great! The full screen browser does a great job on my Mac Cinema Display.

I’ve only got one frustration so far. Why is there no gradient tool in Aperture 3? For landscape photographers, the gradient tool in Lightroom has been an easy way to bring down the sky in a graduated fashion. It’s seems so obvious that Aperture 3 should have a gradient tool – but it doesn’t. Huh? How could a gradient tool not have been included in this major update?

Just looked back at my archives and noticed that last year in late March I attended Apple’s Aperture World Tour in San Francisco.

As I wrote at the time, the new Aperture 2.0 had become my standard photo management software again after a fling with Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom.

Later in 2008, Adobe introduced Lightroom 2 – and, most recently, Lightroom 2.3 – and I migrated back to Lightroom from Aperture. Frankly, Lightroom’s gradient filter and adjustment brush were the reasons I shifted away from Aperture 2.0 – as great a photo management product as it is – to Lightroom.

Because Aperture is so much more tightly integrated into other apps on Mac OS X (via the Media Browser), I’m hoping for an Aperture 3.0 announcement sometime this year with some great new features (like iPhoto’s new Faces and Places, for example!). And, naturally, I’m hoping that some of Lightroom’s adjustment capabilities also show up in a new version of Aperture.

Bottom line: I’d REALLY like to move back to Aperture – but Apple has work to do to eliminate the current feature gap between Aperture and Lightroom.

This post is for photographers – as it airs some “dirty laundry” that is more about personal preferences than it is about results.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been using Apple’s Aperture photo management software to manage all of my photography. I left iPhoto behind in 2006 and jumped on the Aperture bandwagon. I’ve been pretty happy with Aperture for photo management. It’s done most of what I needed it to do.

After my HDR session at Stanford in early September, I had lunch with a friend who was a real Adobe Photoshop Lightroom fan – another Canon shooter who also enjoyed HDR.