Submitted by Because of the amount of controversy its review of Aperture received, Ars Technica have posted a follow-up to address some of the issues which were raised by readers. It includes a side-by-side comparison of Apple’s RAW importer with those of Capture One Pro and Adobe, which illustrates the difference in quality.
The RAW importer is not a unique feature of Aperture; it is an OSX component, which is being updated again with 10.4.4.
WTF cant Apple fans just accept the fact that not everything made by Apple is wonderful. They are a corporation, not everybodys friend.
No they can’t
For some very strange reason they think everything labled Apple is super duper.
Some weird curse or something.
I’m not a photographer, but the pictures don’t look so different to me. If the Aperture images are _bad_, I don’t see how the other two are much _better_.
Can someone explain.
Look at the picture of the parade. In the Adobe and Capture One Pro version, the policeman’s hat (obscuring the picture on the left), is a mixture of gray shades. In the Apple version, there are lots of red and green dots: like what you’d get in news-print. In the same picture, the traffic cone in the Apple version uses a very odd geometric pattern to create the orange colour, whereas the other two importers just use orange. These patterns are also visible on the jackets of the purple parade people. Lastly, in the Apple version, the face of the parade woman on the right is almost purple itself, wheras in the other two pictures it’s a more natural skin tone.
These are all serious deficiencies: there is no way you could ship this to someone.
Thanks Bryan-
That picture does show quite a bit of difference. I would have to say that Apple better fix it quick, if I were a professional photographer.
Aside from the raw import problem (and slow meta data manipulation), I’m really interested in Aperture’s workflow system. The review really didn’t get into that so much.
I’ve heard rumors that Apple may take a few ideas from Aperture for its next Finder implementation. Has anyone out there used Aperture and how is the workflow?
If you look at the flash one you’ll notice aperture seems to increase the effect of the light. Load it up on a CRT and turn off the lights; that picture is a lot brighter!
I don’t think they’re much different. But I’m not a photographer either; and I’m not trying to perfect that wedding picture I’m being paid $100 to perfect.
I actually thought the cat looked better under aperture than either of the other two. The colors seemed more vivid to me, but I don’t know what the cats actual coloration is!
Many people do like artifacts. But pros don’t.
So it is not about which looks more pleasing to anyone, particularly not about which is more pleasing to the non-professional casual viewer. Its about raw fidelity. Any more than it matters whether the casual non-programmer likes the look of a Ruby Rails demo more than he/she likes the look of a C++ demo.
This thing may not be a dog sometime in the future, and lets hope its not, lets hope it is so successful that they are driven to release it to other platforms, and make a lot of money on it by doing so, but right now….its a dog.
Time to move on.
Additionally to the RAW fiasco, Aperture does not support Curves. A Pro photo tool withour Curves, is simply, not Pro. And so at $500, it just doesn’t do what a professional photographer needs. And if you are not a professional photographer, Adobe’s PS Elements would be more suited for you at $80 bucks. And if you are a Pro, Photoshop and View Pro are better solutions. In short: if Apple don’t fix their app, there is no place for that app in the marketplace.
First, as a HUGE Mac fan I have to say that not all things Apple are perfect, but for those MS fans the inverse is also not true ie; “All things Mac do not suck”.
Secondly as a former pro photographer (shot for Benetton USA), the idea that an app without curves can not be considered pro is ludicrous. The levels funtion in Aperture has both quarter tone as well as 3 quarter tone adjustments. This gives me a lot of control and I have been able to handle a huge number of adjustments this way. If I need something more I transfer to PSCS… the way it is supposed to. Granted there are flaws, but this is a pretty darned good app at version 1.0 and WILL get better. For now it does exactly what I need it to do and what I understood it would do from all the info I got from Apple before it was released.
Does anyone else get annoyed when a description of a news article actually links you four different places depending what you click? All I want is the link to the article itself!
Touché, I totally agree, although I usually try to follow even through multiple links it would be so nice to only have one link.