My free trial of Aperture 2 has expired. My goal is to streamline and generally improve our Camera RAW workflow. After using Aperture 2 for a month, I decided not to purchase the program. We won’t be making it a permanent part of our workflow at this time.
Overall I enjoy using Aperture. I like the look and feel of the program. It was a little slow, but I thought the browsing and editing tools were excellent. The program has potential, but it needs improvement in a few areas.
Aperture 2 RAW Converter
I compared the RAW conversion with three other RAW converters. Although not bad, Aperture came in last place. From the default parameter settings, there were a lot of adjustments needed to tonal balance and color correct images. In fact no amount of adjusting could get the image to where I wanted it. My feeling is that if the white balance and exposure were correct in camera, then the RAW file should need no adjustment.
What is lacking in Aperture is camera profiles. Other RAW converters, like RAW Developer 1.8.5, have camera profiles and produce a correct image with the default camera settings.
What Happens in Aperture 2
There is the saying: What happens in Vega stays in Vegas. Well, what happens in Aperture seem to stay in Aperture. The edits are stored in a private database rather than in the DNG file or in a sidecar xmp file. This means we can’t start editing in Aperture and then finish in another program like Bridge another platform.
Collaboration and Division of Labor is Essential
Suppose I shoot 500 pictures for a customer’s project. They start out in Camera RAW format for whichever camera we used. Then they are converted to digital negative. Then I open them up in Aperture and perform editing on every file. This includes adding metadata like company name, address, email, telephone, etc. plus preliminary color-correction, sharpening and other image manipulations. At that point my contribution to the project is complete, so I’ll burn the modified masters to CD and send them to the customer. The customer passes them on to someone else that does further processing like retouching or compositing using whichever platform and programs they choose.
But with Aperture 2, none of my edits appear because the digital negative masters are never updated with my edits. The files I sent are just the original camera masters. What happened to all my work? It is all still locked inside the Aperture database.
Aperture documentation makes a big deal out of its “non-destructive” editing because they never write to the master file. But not adding the edits to the digital negative is what makes it impossible to move to another platform without leaving behind all your edits. With Adobe Bridge, each digital negative file is a stand-alone entity. It contains all the original data plus all the edits. However editing is still “non-destructive” because pixels are never modified. I can always go back to the original “As Shot” parameters.
Database Concept is Overkill
I think Aperture’s database approach makes a lot of simple things complex. For instance. I have a folder with JPEGs. I import the folder. Later I add some more JPEGs to the folder. But until I import the files, they don’t show up. Everything has to be imported and exported which is time consuming.
I use the OS to move files around. I have unix shell scripts that can rename files or move things around. This takes milliseconds compared to many minutes when doing the same task in Aperture.
Summary
- Aperture needs better RAW conversion that use camera profiles.
- Aperture needs to export the edits made to the RAW or DNG so the work can be continued in another program.
- The whole database philosophy needs re-thinking. It makes simple tasks complex. It would be better for Aperture to simply work as an image browser like Adobe Bridge. Forget about storing all the edits in some massive database.
An article by blogger Ben Long on completedigitalphotography.com titled Better Workflow with Bridge CS4 reflects some of my reasons against adopting Aperture. Ben is a way more knowledable with respect to digital photography than I am, plus a better writer. What he wrote is pretty much exactly what I wanted to say.
