Aperture 4

Let me repeat: I have to add Lightroom to my workflow because most of the industry is using Lightroom. It's not a choice!

I don't understand. You like Aperture better but use Lightroom because others do? Who cares what others do if Aperture does what YOU need it to do?

Bob

Because I don't just work for myself. If I'm the sub-contractor on a job, I have to use what the contractor uses. This means that I have to be proficient with what the contractor uses. IOW: I have to be just as proficient with Lightroom as I am with Aperture. This requires practice not just an overall knowledge of the application.

DLS

Did I make clear that I'm not switching applications but just doing some of my work in Lightroom so I can retrieve those skills when I need them

Message was edited by: DLScreative

Yikes -- this soufflé has risen fast. I am still catching up to the action in this thread and on the forum after a week spent in an area neither remote nor well-served by Internet Service Providers. Such is, perhaps, life amongst the cornstalks.

I did take some photographs. 🙂

I am not disappointed in Aperture 3 -- I specified as much when I said

Aperture 3 continues to amaze me, and meets far more needs than I identified at the time I purchased it for $200 US.

I also noted that since I never used Ap2, I can't extrapolate on the direction Apple may take Aperture based on the trajectory from Ap2 to Ap3.

My disappointment comes from Apple positioning Aperture as a recommended upgrade from (and in that way a continuation of) iPhoto. The two applications are different, and the difference (afaict) is rooted in their being designed for radically different users. Hitching one to the end of the other, and enticing customers to walk the rattly plank between them ("only $80!"), as Apple has done since after the release of Aperture 3, tells me that this difference is going to be minimized (or burnished away, the way a clever grocer uses silicone, a rag, and careful arrangement to best show off his fruit).

I never liked iPhoto -- though I have always found it brilliantly conceived and executed. It's just a bad fit with my way of being. I want total parametric control. I want tools that do what I tell them to do, that do only what I tell them to do, and that provide complete, immediate, reproducible feedback on what they have done. I don't want magic anything. I loathe wizards. I don't like even Presets. For me, the imagined iPhotoization of Aperture (which, like you, I have devoted a lot of days to mastering) is like finding out that my favorite local farmers market has been purchased by Soylent, Inc. and will no longer carry craft cheese and craft beer and craft lamb but instead will carry only Kraft Food™.

I have to emphasize, however, that that is purely imaginary. I don't know and have zero insider knowledge about what Apple will do with Aperture. I love the program. I love what I can do with it. I would love for Apple to continue to develop it for sophisticated, skilled users.

You will, quite rightly, want to hear some specifics. 🙂. I'll post some of those as replies to other comments in this thread.

Message was edited by: Kirby Krieger

"...minimized (or burnished away, the way a clever grocer uses silicone, a rag, and careful arrangement to best show off his fruit)."

LOL

"Soylent, Inc."

ROTFL

You do have a way with words!

DLS

😝 It's a rich orchard. Swing a field mouse by its tail and you're likely to knock off something juicy.

Thanks for laughing aloud -- Cheers.

Toolbar (just to add to your comment):

No need to remove all icons. I almost always collapse the Toolbar in Aperture, using the dedicated gizmo.

Noise Reduction:

A few moments with Nik's Dfine 2 will show you what Aperture should have (iirc, you have the complete Nik plug-in suite). I rarely use it, because I don't like dams and locks in my workflow. I would use it all the time if it were part of Aperture's toolset. It should be. State-of-the-art NR should be added to Aperture as a free upgrade, imho -- cleaning the digital negative results in finer Adjustments further along the path (sharpening, for instance).

Lens Correction:

I agree with you (Frank). This is well served by plug-ins, and feels as though it is outside the remit of a dedicated digital negative developer. PTLens has ably meet my needs in this regard. I rarely need lens correction.

Straight Line Brushes (a/k/a Gradient Filters):

Again, a trip to Nik-land will show how this can be done (in this case, check out all the options in either the Graduated Neutral Density or Graduated User Defined tools in Color Efex Pro 3.0). At the least, Aperture should have an edge-to-edge Brush (a "Wiper"?) in addition to the circular Brush. I would like to see added to all brushes complete parametric control of the distance and "curve" of the edge fall-off (e.g.: the edge of this brush-mask should fall-off over 200 px with a very gradual fall-off over the first 8 px than rapidly increasing fall-off over the following 40 px then slowly decreasing fall-off ending asymptotically over the remaining 152 px.).

SQL:

Absolutely, totally, completely agree. At the least, Aperture should provide easy access to all metadata, and sophisticated boolean searches of that metadata.

Firstly, Final Cut Pro is NOT dumbed down. Don't believe the hype. It's a radical redesign which will take some time to get up to speed with features and adoption. Give it a year and everyone will be hailing it. Until then, major studios are fine with fcp7 and nobody's forced to upgrade until ready. So let's cut that nonsense.

Secondly, Aperture has never been slightly dumbed down and there's no reason to believe it's going to be. It's still the best DAM out there, and maybe second or third best as a RAW processor. It was never meant to replace photoshop. Meanwhile, Lightroom is still trying to figure out if it's photoshop or bridge and winds up being a complete mess. Two or three good features are no reason to believe that it will bump Aperture out. And while it's popular with the photo mills who automatically go with adobe anything, most independent pros are either using Capture One or Aperture. Like all things Apple, market share means squat.

Apple marketed Aperture as an iPhoto upgrade because that's exactly what it is in the product lineup. This was smart for three reasons: 1) it caters to the growing semi pro (or advanced amateur) base, allowing people who are not my mother to better manage large libraries. For my mother (and yours), iPhoto is still best. 2) it dumps more money into the Aperture pool, which is good for everybody, so that Apple doesn't cancel the project all together. Nobody wants that. 3) IMHO, OS X and particularly the Finder will eventually manage files the way Aperture does, as we're seeing in Lion with nondestructive versioning and autosave. Aperture was a great place to start with this since nondestructive is key with photo management. Eventually we'll have a central DAM which will either eliminate or encompass the Finder.

One of the key requirements in the Apple ecosystem is trust. Apple may not always seem to cater to pros at first, especially when things like corkboards and bubbly icons appear in our pro applications. But if you look at the larger picture, they make good business decisions that keep niche programs alive by getting the masses to drop some cash on a powerful app of which they'll only use 2% or less. That way the rest of us can use 98% without paying 1000% more. Face it, Mac users are still the minority, so we have to trust that Apple will keep progressing after we've invested time and money

(continued (what just happened there? And where's the edit button?))

...time and money in a professional application.

I have Zero problems with Aperture performance. I stick to a strict Doyle/Bergsma rotation cycle which keeps everything tip top and backed up. Aperture is a Pro App with a few optional semi pro features whic, in the Apple spirit of experimentation, may stick around or get the axe. In no way has this compromised it's power or usefulness, and I don't foresee it coming to that. FCP has gotten everyone into a tizzy, and it will come back down once the kinks are ironed out. Apple supports pros and consumers, sometimes by shipping them the same product. Nothing wrong with that. If one feels like less of a pro when consumers use the same tools, perhaps one should ask onesself what makes a pro, the tools or the work?

Oh, I forgot to add, A4 needs ABSOLUTELY:

-Noise reduction and sharpening that isn't a joke like the current crappy bricks (I refuse to exit the nondestructive workflow)

-gradient filters

-lens correction masking ala Capture One

I think those 3 are universal requests. In addition I'll add:

-better printing/output: 1) I still have to go to Photoshop to print. I don't want to do that. 2) FTP and archiving should'nt require a plugin. Once MobileMe is gone, there won't be any excuse not to include generic FTP options including zipping on export, custom galleries, etc

-dedicated iPad tethering app for capture and review (without getting bogged down trying to edit raw, not just yet). The iPad has so much potential here, and everyone seems to be sitting on their hands. Apple must do it or at least open up the CCK so someone else can do it.

Will there be an Aperture 4?

I would suggest they remove things like Faces and Places until they get them to work properly. I have 4gb of ram and can't use Faces. I would suggest there are a lot of computers out there with less than 4gb.

I would like to see a system where typing in the Metadata Field with more than one image selected changes the relevant caption/ keywords on ALL the images without having to go in to the Batch Change command which just seems a long way of doing a simple thing - Iview Media Pro worked like this years ago.

Aperture should work without eating all your computers memory, ie allow people to do other things at the same time.

Please can I import my images in the background while surfing the net or sending emails etc. At the moment it needs to be the prominent application.

I would like to be able to save my images sent to me in an email to Aperture with one click, just like iphoto.

Speed up everything. 5 Mins sometimes to email an image is too long taken out of my life.

Dodging and burning isn't as good as Photoshop - I'd like it to be.

I would like custom buttons on the top where you could add your own for your most used export options etc.

On Import I would like to import images by just selecting them, ie not having to deselect images I don't want followed by selecting the ones I do followed by clicking import. Select images - Import - Simple!

and finally I would like them to consign their spinning beachball feature to the bin!

PS there's probably a lot more but I can't think of them at the minute (luckily). Basically for it just to work properly with all it has at present would actually be a good start.

Armagh Mac,

You have some great suggestions!

I'd suggest you use the formal feedback mechanism. It's interesting for us users to see your opinions, but Apple needs them too. There is a feedback entry in the Aperture menu item which takes you to http://www.apple.com/feedback/aperture.html

Of course, you're asking for more function and at the same time, you want it to use less resources 😉

After all, this is a Pro application. I don't have a Mac Pro, but I do have 12GBs of RAM, and the performance is great

Most of these are performance issues, which John K. has responded to well.

I might be able to provide some help with one of them:

I would like to see a system where typing in the Metadata Field with more than one image selected changes the relevant caption/ keywords on ALL the images without having to go in to the Batch Change command which just seems a long way of doing a simple thing

First off -- it's not a simple thing. I, for one, can easily imagine the forum flooded with comments from outraged users who, trying to add or subtract a keyword, erased all keywords for all images in a Project.

There are, however, two other simple ways to add/subtract Keywords from all selected Images. One is to use the Keywords HUD (only adds Keywords, iirc), and the other is the Control Bar. The use of each if fully covered in the User Manual.

(There is also another less-than-simple way to add Keywords: use Lift and Stamp.)

Thanks John and Kirby,

I have used the feedback with these suggestions a few years now. I would suggest though that most of my suggestions rather than taking up more processing power would take up less, ie a new hud wouldn't need to be opened etc.

Aperture 2 and 3 were brought out when 4gb was regarded as quite a lot of ram, in fact if I remember they said you needed at least 2gb. I bought the top of the range imac at the time so I would have thought by maxing it out with ram there should have been no issues. Sadly they are endless. I even sent my entire 100,000 plus image library to Apple at one stage hoping it would help.

I would fear that Aperture 4 if it arrives may well need 16gb of RAM to work well and what happens then? I know it's a Pro Application but a lot of Pros still prefer to use iMacs and do like to use other applications at the same time.

Yes someone could accidentally delete their keywords/ captions but they could also do this with the batch command tool (as I have managed to do on several occasions!) I would suggest putting the Append/ Replace Checkbox at the top of the Metadata view.

Yes there is a simple way to add keywords, by using the control bar at the bottom of the open window but this keeps disappearing every so often for no apparent reason and I have to open it up again and again - Frustrating is the word I would use. Captions are my main issue rather than keywords as I would have several images with the same caption used.

My main PROBLEM is that I really like Aperture when it works well which is rare and whether I like it or not I am married to it for better and for worse as I have so many years of images entombed in it!

Clean up file naming. I hate when I edit an image in PS it has a different file name.

A burn to DVD button to back up projects

A master metadata folder or file template. When I create a new library it doesn't have the metadata and presets from my main.

When I'm done with a client, I export all of their images as full-size jpgs, delete all the RAW and PS files and re-import the jpgs. I'd love a clean up button or something that helps me reduce project size when I'm done.