I am trying out the trial version of Aperture 2, Apple’s photo editing and organizing software. To cut to the chase, despite being an outstanding program, it does not work for us.
We have been using Adobe Bridge from Adobe CS2 to work with Camera RAW files. (See Our Digital Photography Flow described in a previous post.) Basically we convert Camera RAW files from any camera to Adobe Digital Negative DNG and then do all the editing in Adobe Bridge. Our library has hundreds of photoshoots, each of about 150 to 200 pictures, and represents hundreds of hours of editing.
So I downloaded the trial version of Aperture 2 and spent one whole day trying it out. I went through Exploring Aperture 2 and the Aperture 2 User’s Manual. Aperture 2 looks great and is a pleasure to use. Being a Macintosh shop, I really wanted to make Aperture the centerpiece of our digital workflow.
Importing Existing Picture Library
So I decided to try and do some actual production work with Aperture 2. The job was to export JPEGs from a recent photoshoot with a logo watermark. I imported a folder with 185 DNG files into Aperture 2. These files were previously color corrected and tonal balanced with Adobe Bridge. Now I just needed to output JPEGs. Importing was very slow, as in start importing and then go to lunch.
The Showstopper
After importing completed, I looked at everything in the browser. Aperture did see at least some of the metadata that was added to the files. But Aperture did not see the ratings we assigned with Bridge. Even worse, Aperture did not see any of the color correction or tonal balancing–things like White Balance and Exposure–that has already been done with Adobe Bridge.
The is a showstopper, folks. We are using DNG format for our master library. We have hundreds of hours invested in editing this library. Obviously we aren’t going to redo all that editing. The only conclusion is that Aperture can not replace Bridge for us.
Adobe Digital Negative
This is very disappointing. We have standardized on Adobe Digital Negative so that no matter which camera we use everything is in a standard format. I thought that DNG files would be readable by whatever program we want to use. They are readable by Aperture, but all the edits are lost.
Maybe Aperture 3 will have the ability to see the edits made in other programs like Adobe Bridge or LightRoom. Until then we will be sticking with Adobe Bridge.
