Aperture 4 Wish List

A faster app!

A way to cleanly avoid duplicates being imported.

A way to identify unedited & clean up duplicates, once they've been mistakenly imported.

Hi DiploStrat,

Thanks for the advice. It appears that it may have worked. Tried to brush in some colors and a few different things and no beach ball. I will get a bit more serious later this evening and see if I can make things spin. 🙂

My pleasure.

Been doing a lot of playing with Aperture since I sprang for an SSD. Doing different things and watching the Activity Monitor I notice:

-- First pull of any image takes about 1-2 seconds. (I currently have large, quality 8 previews.)

-- Zooming to full res can take another 2-3 seconds. This is for a 10 MP NEF on a dedicated drive. a 100 MB TIFF takes a bit longer.

-- These speeds are largely constant, whether everything is on the SSD or on a conventional HD.

-- Scrolling 11,000 images in the browser takes less than 1 second per screen. Maybe a bit faster with the SSD. ALWAYS faster the second time. (Logical, given the way OSX and, by extension, Aperture caches. This is probably the reason that purging the caches helps; there is probably a lot of Aperture 2 routine still stuck in there.)

-- Brushing and sharpening a 100 MB file will get all of the CPU's engaged. These processes will also generate lots of HD reads and writes. Again, logical, as you are editing the Version file and then demanding that the GPU refresh the screen. There is usually a lagging "Loading" message (and a "Processing" message in the Aperture Activity Monitor. Again, logical when you consider how Aperture works. Surprisingly, running on the SSD does not make that great a difference.

-- RAM makes more difference than anything else. Paging is about the slowest thing you will encounter. In my case (and I usually have Safari and Mail open when I am using Aperture), going from 13 GB of RAM to 21 GB reduced paging to zero. At this point, I could see that things like brushing were limited only by the actual speed of the CPU.

-- Putting Aperture, the Library, and even some of the Masters on the SSD made much less difference than I would have expected. Again, tribute to OSX's effecive caching and a lot of RAM. With less RAM, and more paging, then the SSD would probably be a bigger speed boost. That said, the SSD is very nice for speed of boot, reboot, application loading, and other things. It is just not the panacea for Aperture speed that RAM is.

As always, YMMV. 😉

😕 I did not know a cat could scratch it's belly, and I am still trying to imagine this.

Hey Don,

are you talking about slow when making adjustments? Or slow no matter what you're doing in Aperture?

How many photos do you have inside of each project?

Agreed 1000000%. The SSD is great for booting and some tasks but as the read/writes are sequential it does not really figure into the equation. My entire lib is sitting on a Thunderbolt drive which is pretty fast in most case. I also have an exact duplicate of my library on a F/W 800 drive as a backup. I tried making adjustments with that as well and it does not seem to experience any "beach ball" behavior. I will continue testing. I am also considering moving away from my MBP and maybe purchasing a MacPro if Apple decides what they are going to do regarding the future. As it stands right now, things appear to be okay. I hope Apple adds lens corrections and a few more goodies that LR has.

Hi Waxycap,

Things seem to be working okay as of today. 🙂 Fingers crossed.

I'd like:

Lens correction

White balance brush

Graduated Filter

Custom Crop Presets

Improved B&W

Highlight & Shadows toning

Camera calibration

Improved noise reduction

Improved sharpening

Grain addition

Improved vignette tied into crops

Improved book features along with template sharing

Add Calendar making

Improved image stamping/sync'ing with previous button

Give a choice for editing in jpeg instead of just tiff or psd

Anything to keep me out of Photoshop and to be able to do non-destructive editing. I've tried LR4 and love a lot of the features but I like how the images look with apertures raw converter better.

Just tried LR 4, and my main wish for Aperture 4 is to match the new shadows/highlights tool of LR 4. I thought Aperture's tool was good, but the new LR tool is waaaay better.

Add in app support for Smugmug like Lightroom has done. I don't mind the plugin but it would be great if aperture would sync up with customer favorite albums and allow me to add new pictures to albums without going through the plugin.

My work in Photo retouching has me in Photoshop. Looked at Aperture and I cannot find anything for it to do. Aperture seems locked into amazing complex file something. Today I airbrushed out a gravel dump blocking a mountain view in PS. The work files in PS, others in JPEG. Same system back to a G3 Apple. I tried Aperture on the gravel dump and got a blurry mess and that was that. No time for face search or maps whatever.

Huh?

I tried Aperture on the gravel dump and got a blurry mess and that was that.

How did you do that? Repair?

Try it with "Retouch -> Clone" or "Spot&Patch"

I never have have trouble toget rid of garbage cans, cars, etc. with Apertures retouch tools ...

Charles,

Looking at this and your other posts, it is clear that you have not grasped the purpose behind Aperture, or Lightroom, for that matter. They are not pixel editors like Photoshop, but rather an alpha to omega photographic workflow tool.

These quotes, lifted from DPReview, are very relevant:

InspectorHud wrote:

I actually hated Aperture for over a year because I was fighting it and trying to dumb it down to my old Photoshop and folder method. One day it all began to make sense and it changed everything. I cannot believe it took me so long to accept the philosophy and the simplicity that makes it so effective, but it does take some time to fully understand the concept. So I have gone from swearing at it to swearing by it and I am now a huge fan of Aperture.

Najinsky wrote:

This is a great comment. A lot of the more heated discussions in the earlier days of Aperture V Lightroom V Photoshop threads were examples of people with different expectations and philosophies struggling to let go of old (previously necessary) habits.

Aperture liberated the raw workflow from a whole load of processes that previously got you bogged down in management processes and dogma. At it's old price it was invaluable, at its current price it's a steal.

I would add that Aperture starts with the issues of workflow, liberating you from RAW converters/file browsers and worrying about tasks like tracking multiple copies of the same image in different file formats. It is a fairly powerful image editor, but focuses on photographic tasks like exposure, cropping, etc. It is not the best tool for heavy pixel bashing, like getting Aunt Mary out of the picture or anything that requires layers, etc. For that, it is the perfect base for sending an image to Photoshop or similar and then doing all of the work of keeping track of the new file you have created.

If, on the other hand, you have a small collection of images, never need to worry about finding an old one, or actually like managing files, then you are correct, Photoshop is a much more powerful pixel editor. Most of us use both. It is just that with Aperture I need Photoshop for only about five in 100 images.

Best wishes,

--

DiploStrat 😉

Lens correction is the big one for me, especially since I have an Olympus E-M5 on pre-order. Some of the micro 4/3 lenses feature fun-house distortion that really needs to be corrected. Panorama stitching and HDR would be nice to have. The basic workflow is just fine.

—Andreas