Hi I use photoshop and find its just too powerful for my B/W work. Simple stuff. As I now use apple in the office I thought Aperture a good idea. I need to convince others and wanted a 30 day trial. Where can I get it???
Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.7)
Unfortunately there's not a free trial available.
If it's just for black and wite work there could be better options anyway. Aperture is primarily for asset management, the editing though very powerful is really a bonus. Have you tried the free trial of Nik Silver Efex Pro, which is designed for B&W work.
http://www.google.com/nikcollection/products/silver-efex-pro/
I guess William Lloyd is right that there's no free two-week or 30-day trial version of Aperture. Too bad. Apple's kind of stupid sometimes.
But I don't agree with Shuttleworth125 that "Aperture is primarily for asset management." It's a wonderful editor, too. For my black and white work, I often use Nik Silver-Efex Pro and I agree with Shuttleworth's recommendation of it. I have all the other Nik apps, as well. But not infrequently I'm very happy with what I can do in Aperture and I stop there.
Now, to get back to your question. Yes, download Silver Efex. But there are alternatives to consider. Have you tried Lightroom 5? There are some things about Lightroom that I like better than Aperture (and vice versa) but Lightroom 5 is quite good. One of the things I like best about Lightroom is the control I have over black and white conversions: powerful but easy to use. And there's a free trial.
Good luck,
Will
p.s. to Apple: MAKE FREE TRIALS AVAILABLE!
Hi Will,
What are the controls for grayscale conversion that LR has which Aperture lacks? How are they easier to use?
Not challenging your statement; genuinely curious.
--Kirby.
I stand by what I said, "Aperture is primarily for asset management, the editing though very powerful is really a bonus." It may be a wonderful editor but it has a fraction of the power of Photoshop. It however destroys photoshop when it comes to asset management!! Horses for courses.
It the OP is working with a number of ohter photogs then it would be interesting to hear how they handle asset management, Aperture (or Lightroom) could perhaps solve more than one problem for them.
Aperture is not a digital image manipulator like Photoshop, never was never will be. To compare Aperture to PS ( as far as image manipulation goes) is wrong and a waste of time.
Aperture is a digital image developer, It takes the Raw image from the camera and allows you to develop it to the best image possible for the capture.
If you want to remove Aunt Irma from the family photos get PS, if you want to develop the 'negatives' get Aperture.
I think that the feeling is that software that is less than $100 doesn't really need a free trial. It will cost much more than that in a pro's time just to do a proper evaluation.
In other words, it will cost far more in your time to evaluate Aperture than the cost of purchasing it.
Well, feel free to challenge! I'm not quite at expert level with Aperture yet. But yes, it seems to me that Lightroom has controls for grayscale conversions that Aperture lacks.
In Aperture, the Black and White tool panel has three sliders: for red, green, and blue. My goal here isn't to explain Aperture, so let me just say, the effect of moving these three sliders is not obvious or intuitive. The blue slider for example may have a large impact on a photo that has no discernible blue in it.
In Lightroom, instead, the black and white tool pane has eight color sliders: red, orange, yellow, green, aqua, blue, purple, magenta. This isn't a complete representation of the color palette, either, of course. But for starters, the sliders in Lightroom are intuitive in their effects. If you're correcting a photo taken outdoors on a green lawn, drag the green slider to the right and the green grass will get lighter (along with anything else that's green in the image). But even more useful is the Lightroom point-and-click selector tool. Just click on any point in the image and move the mouse up or down to increase the luminance of the underlying color at that point. I find this quite useful — and very easy to understand.
I don't doubt that somebody with a complete knowledge of how Aperture approaches things — somebody who really understand the interactions of the red, green and blue filters, for example — could do just about the same thing in Aperture as in Lightroom. I'm just saying that I find it easier to tweak a conversion in Lightroom.
Will
Kirby Krieger wrote:
What are the controls for grayscale conversion that LR has which Aperture lacks? How are they easier to use?
Not challenging your statement; genuinely curious.
Keith,
Perhaps you're right about the reasons behind Apple's decision not to provide a demo of Aperture. But I think this reasoning is faulty. A hundred dollars is a hundred dollars. And one doesn't always do a "proper evaluation." I rather frequently download free trials and play around with them for just an hour or two to figure out if they're worth looking closer at or not. I can't evaluate an app even to that extent from a couple of screen shots on the publisher's web site. And I'd rather not spend $100, then realize in the first fifteen minutes that the app has some problem that makes it simply unusable for me.
Now, full disclosure: I did buy Aperture when the price dropped to $75. I bought it, tried it, couldn't figure it out, and abandoned it. It wasn't until I went back to it many months later that it "clicked" with me. So their pricing policy didn't deter me.
But I think it does deter a lot of other people. And as a reviewer of software, I am less likely to recommend an app that does not have a free trial, because I don't want somebody cursing me later if they spend $50 or $100 on something they decide they don't like.
There are free trials available for Lightroom, Capture One, DxO Optics Pro, Photo Ninja, etc. There should be one for Aperture. Combine the lack of a free trial with the fact that Aperture (for no good reason, in my opinion) is Mac only, and it almost begins to look like they don't want people to use it.
Will
Keith Barkley wrote:
I think that the feeling is that software that is less than $100 doesn't really need a free trial. It will cost much more than that in a pro's time just to do a proper evaluation.
In other words, it will cost far more in your time to evaluate Aperture than the cost of purchasing it.
Shuttleworth,
I respect your claim and I believe I generally understand what you're saying. And I'm not trying to quarrel with you. But I do think that your claim that Aperture is "primarily" an asset manager, not an image editor, may be misleading to other, less informed users. I also think the claim is not just misleading but at least arguably mistaken.
Here's an example of a program that is (as you put it) "primarily an asset management program, not an image editor": Photo Mechanic. But comparing Photo Mechanic to Aperture tells you at a glance that they are very different types of programs. Aperture may be able to do nearly everything Photo Mechanic does but it does a lot more and those extra dimensions that Aperture possesses are not secondary, they are part of the essence of the program.
Yet I do hear people say what you said, and not that infrequently. I think this characterization (often applied to Lightroom as well as Aperture) is almost always made by people who are comparing Aperture (or LR) to Photoshop.
The problem is, this statement may be very misleading to people who do NOT compare everything to Photoshop and especially to people who are innocent of Photoshop. To say to a novice that LR or Aperture is "primarily an asset management program, not an image editor," is to suggest to them that LR or Aperture will help them organize their photos but they will need something else to edit their photos. And that is emphatically not true for the vast majority of photographers including the vast majority nowadays of professional photographers.
Now if "photo editing" is understood exclusively to involve the handful of things that Photoshop does that and LR and Aperture don't do — like layers, or cutting and pasting heads — then okay, you've defined your terms in a way that prevents you from being wrong. But most people don't understand the term "photo editor" that way. In addition to some fairly radical tools for initial raw conversion, color modification, sharpening, black and white conversion and the like, Aperture has tools that make it possible for me very effectively to
To name a few off the top of my head. With the help of a couple of the Nik add-ons I can do much much more. What's that leave me wanting in Photoshop? Not much. If I wanted to have a dinosaur chasing the bridal party, well, I'd reach for Photoshop. I don't want to do that every day. To be honest, I personally don't want to do that today any more than I did when I spent time in the darkroom.
So if you're simply saying, "You can't cut and paste in Aperture the way you can in Photoshop," okay, that's true. But that is hardly what photo editing is about for most people.
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And then there's the fact that both Lightroom and Aperture were designed from the get-go as replacements for Photoshop or perhaps it would be better to say as alternatives to Photoshop. The idea has always been that you will do most — if not all — of your post-processing right in Aperture or Lightroom, switching to Photoshop (or any other external program) only when you need to do some really special, something that goes beyond the ordinary or normal processing of a photo. The range of tools in Aperture and LR make it clear that they are both intended to be comprehensive tools. You ingest the images, organize them, process (edit, correct) them, and then—without leaving Aperture or Lightroom—you can print, or create a book, or publish to the Web. To say they are primarily about digital asset management simply because they do that and Photoshop doesn't (Bridge is not Photoshop) is, I think, to sell Aperture and Lightroom short and by a good bit. I can't come up with a good analogy, but maybe this would work: It's like saying that the iPad isn't "primarily" about content creation, that it's mainly a little tool that lets you carry around your vacation photos or surf the Web or read iBooks. Well that doesn't seem to be Apple's view of the iPad. It's pretty clear they're viewing it as a major content creation tool.
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Actually, I think the implied claim about Photoshop is the one that's wrong here. Photoshop from version 1 was not primarily a photo processing app. It was always a pixel-level image editing program that can do lots of stuff with photos but can also be used for creating icons, logos, buttons, drawings, etc. The "photo" application of Photoshop in the early days involved editing scanned photos, very often for publication. That was back when the photographer was shooting film in rolls and the images from a shoot were often numbered in dozens, not hundreds or thousands. Almost by definition, this kind of work was focused on individual images, one at a time, and not done in a hurry. Aperture and Lightroom, on the other hand, from the begining were not just primarily but exclusively designed for the management and processing of digital photographs — and for lots of them, as efficiently as possible. And the processing part is really the imporant one, because there were several apps around prior to Lightrooom and Aperture that were as good as they are at DAM.
Anyway, my five cents... ;-)
Will
Now, full disclosure: I did buy Aperture when the price dropped to $75. I bought it, tried it, couldn't figure it out, and abandoned it. It wasn't until I went back to it many months later that it "clicked" with me. So their pricing policy didn't deter me.
So a free trial would have detered you. "Many months later", the trial would have expired…
Many thanks to you all. Very informative indeed! I wonder if Apple are aware of the many perceptions of this software, my view is simple. If so many with knowledge of the software can't define it surely there needs to be a trial period.
Kirby,
What William cites for b&w conversion in LR must be the same as that found in CS5 and later. With PS CS5 as my external editor, I use this on the rare occasions when I convert to B & W.
Ernie,
I'm not using CS-anything, so I'm not sure, but the sliders in LR5 look similar to those in your screenshot. But not quite identical. Here's a picture from LR5 (although LR4 looked exactly the same, if memory serves). I've drawn a little yellow arrow on the screenshot to point (not very accurately I see!) to the small circle-within-a-circle button that activates the tool that lets you drag down or up on a point in the picture to decrease or increase its luminance.
GREAT little video here that shows you in a few seconds how it works. When I'm working in Aperture, this is something I miss. I can play around in Aperture with the RGB sliders until I get something I like the look of. But I don't really understand what I'm doing. In LR, I have the feeling that I'm manipulating the colors I want to manipulate directly and easily. Want to lighten that green grass? Click on it and drag up.
I also included the Split Toning panel, which is (conveniently) right below B&W. This is one of my least favorite tools in Lightroom. I've worked through tutorials on this tool repeatedly and I still don't feel comfortable with it. Seems to be quite powerful — but it gets my right brain overheating, as if I were using Photoshop. I'm not crazy about the color monochrome tool in Aperture, either, to be honest. Maybe this split-toning thing is just hard.
Will
Hi. I'm a pro photographer using Photoshop.
