Apple releases "Aperture" software for pro photographers.

although no-where near pro yet, i can vouch for frykes statement. two of my friends have comparable price-range cameras to me (all compact camera's in the the £250 range).

they both have far superior output resolutions (5.2mp and 6.1 mp compared to my 3.2mp ixus), but my ixus beats all their photos hands down, becuase it has a FAR superior lens. i will never buy another olympus (my first camera, and both of theirs are olympus, and all show the same traits: very grainy images, awful depth of field and focal distances, and slow to take. bulky too.)

my ixus 30 is just a tiny camera that takes incredible shots. it's just hampered by the low res images it produces (just stretches to a4 print quality)
 
I go to this site for ridiculously in-depth camera reviews. www.dpreview.com
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Hear Hear! dpreview.com is, in my opinion, one of the best digital camera review site around. Their reviews of most cameras run 10-20 pages, weighing up what every function and button is capable of, and their optical tests are extremely thorough. Their forums aren't bad either, if you want to learn a bit about photography equipment and techniques then they're the place to go.


i will never buy another olympus (my first camera, and both of theirs are olympus, and all show the same traits: very grainy images, awful depth of field and focal distances, and slow to take. bulky too.)
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Yes. My first digicam was an Olympus D-150, and it has just recently died. It had a shockingly short battery life. No, make that embaressingly short. The sort of camera where you'd take it out, put in batteries, ask your subject to say "cheese" and then say "ah, drat. Batteries just died."
The shutter delay was pretty awful too, as well as the power-up time. Yes, I know its a low-end camera, but this one was just ridiculous. Its sitting on my desk now and my only regret is that its not worth getting it repaired. Maybe I can hack it to do something really nifty.
Oh, and my Mum ended up buying the same model - I would have advised her not to had she asked my opinion. The sliding lens cover broke off. And I discovered that the Windows software for the Olympus cameras (Camedia master) is quite simply awful.
 
If anyone here who does semi-pro or rabid hobby photos gets Aperture, please let us know what you think of it.

I keep hoping for the Apple "Photoshop" to be announced so I can start selling my organs to buy it.
 
I definitely agree on the MP thing...my brother thought his 5MP was so much nicer than the 3.2MP Nikon 3200 I had bought (costed more) for the real estate gig 2 years ago. The Nikon blew it away as did his buddies 3.xMP Canon. So yea...I'll take quality any day over quantity.

Someone complained about Olympus and I have to agree it's sad to see they've gone downhill. The first digital I had was a 1.5MP D-320 and it produced absolutely amazing pictures...when I went to replace it I looked at Olympus's offerings in the 4 to 5 MP range and was put off by the low quality of their build and materials used, as well as the low quality images they took. So I bought the more expensive Nikon 3200.

I think a big difference in the Rebel XT and the D50 is the "kit" lens...Nikon is known for having good quality optics and it showed in the look and feel when I compared those two side by side at CompUSA (I know...but they were the only ones who had the D50 in stock) as well as from reviews and comparison images online. I'm sure the Canon is a capable camera...it's just I didn't want to spend a ton of money on replacing the lens, which I didn't have to do with the Nikon; and the Nikon felt better in my hand. Had I bought the Canon as a body only and bought a high-quality lens on the side, I would have wound up spending $500 more than the Nikon kit costed.
 
Thanks for the advice with the Digital Camera, a lot of people recommend the D50 to the Rebel. mdnky, i'll have to stop by CompUSA and play around with both camera's hopefully the one by me has them out as a demo. :D
 
The Canon is easier to use. A decent lense (not the kit lense) is a must. Wonderfully sharp pictures, easy navigation of menus and well laid out controls. In this price range the Canon (350D/Digital Rebel XT) is hard to beat. I'm also seriously considering Aperture. It looks amazing. Good colour correction tools, RAW workflow, Stacks, Loupe tool and best of all non-destructive editing. Only thing that is holding me back is lack of real-world printing results with specific printers (mine is an Epson R2400). The best way to get accurate colours when printing is to set everything (camera, printer, display and CS2) up for Adobe RGB (1998) and ignore coloursync. I currently use CS2 but Bridge is awful and RAW support is bolted on. Any more than a handful of high resolution pics and Bridge slows down to a crawl. I don't have a huge number of plugins for CS2, only a few actions and those could easily be automated in Aperture. It also looks a lot snappier than CS2, watching those raw files blaze past brought a tear to my eye:)
 
parb.johal@ante said:
what you have to remember is that this is for PRO photographers.

i work with some of them - and most that have have CS2 dont use more than 15% of whats there - its not within their remit to have it or use it. most have some version of photoshop - and for what they would need to do (i.e. - view / manage / group / organise / edit / comp / present / etc / etc) photoshop just doesnt cut it.

from what ive been reading about aperture - it blows adobe bridge out of the water for what it does at its core - and as a 'one-stop-shop'.

if your not the type of photographer who's going to take 500 / 600 / 700 / etc+ pictures in a days photoshoot and need to see QC on the fly etc then this app won't be for you - Bridge will suffice - and its a great hub for CS2.

also - its almost half the price of CS2.
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I hate to constantly nay-say, but I doubt Aperature will be able to handle 500-700 Raw files from professional cameras "on the fly"

And its not half the price of CS2.

And I still say Bridge does the job that Aperature looks like its supposed to do but with a lot less flash ;)

That being said, I'll wait and see, I'm not sold yet. :)
 
I hate to constantly nay-say, but I doubt Aperature will be able to handle 500-700 Raw files from professional cameras "on the fly"
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Did you even watch the live demo on the Aperture site? Its very clear that Aperture is phenomenally fast.
 
Fast yea, but then when you look at the requirements and figure they most likely had it running on a loaded Quad...that has to explain part of it.

As far as the speed thing with that many images...500 RAW images from my D50 is 2.6GB of info (5.2MB each on average); which is a lot of info to work with. Someone trying that with a RAW from a D2X (17.5MB each on average, for a total of 8.75GB) or similar camera would be really testing it out at those counts. Unless you were running high amounts of RAM I would expect a slow down...at least a bit of one.

The more and more I've looked at it recently, the more I want to grab a copy when I finally get my new desktop. It's looking to be everything I've wanted.
 
symphonix said:
Did you even watch the live demo on the Aperture site? Its very clear that Aperture is phenomenally fast.
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Yes I have.

I watched it once again just to be sure of what I'm looking at. And the *only* thing that I think is new and worthwhile over CS2/Bridge is the loupe function.

I'm not saying Aperature sucks by any means. I just dont see a reason to spend money on it, when one already has CS2. If I were choosing from a blank slate? I'd prolly still go with CS2 purely because it has many more options as an overall program.

I'm wondering what camera those raw files came from and what the system specs the computer running the demo is.
 
"Aperture makes RAW as easy as jpeg."

Apple have blatantly done some SERIOUS work optimising both the code, and with Core Image. maybe this is the potential of Core Image, making RAW files as fast and efficient as any other image. regardless of the data, it's just imagery at the end of the day. maybe it just thinks it's much smaller, until you actually use it at full size.

at the end of the day, it is supposedly LIGHTNING fast, i t looks so good, and one of the main tag lines is to do with eerily fast file opening/image viewing.

'RAW as fast as JPEG. Aperture. makes CS2 Bridge look like windows software.'
 
I'm wondering what camera those raw files came from and what the system specs the computer running the demo is.
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Can't speak for the system, but if you look at the EXIF data that comes up on the lower-right corner, you'll see the camera in use is a Nikon D1.
 
also- pro photographers / studios will tend to have maxed out dedicated machines just for a single task - running the likes of Aperture.

the issue of performance for them is therefore pretty moot.

as a designer i know that i 'have' to have a lot off apps stored / open - juggling which are open at any one time to have peak performance from my mac - so its an issue 'for the rest of us' - not for those running their machines to perform singular tasks.

btw - CS2 (prem) £999 / Aperture £349 (prices from UK applestore)
 
But you'd buy the whole Creative Suite, not just Photoshop, probably. And I wouldn't really compare the pricing of Adobe's whole CS to "Aperture", which really is for a very specific group of people...
 
symphonix said:
Can't speak for the system, but if you look at the EXIF data that comes up on the lower-right corner, you'll see the camera in use is a Nikon D1.
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Nikon D1 is a 2.6 megapixel camera.
 
In the video tour the picture of the Tibetan woman (in the red dress) is from a Nikon D2X, which is a 12.4MP camera (the file-size on that NEF says 19.11MB). There's probably pics in there from various cameras either supplied by their manufacturers or grabbed from stock photo sites.
 

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