Forget about Aperture’s ‘beta release’ – it’s all about iLife ’06! I installed the yearly update late last week, and good lord does it rock. The improvements to iPhoto alone are worth the price of admission.

My iPhoto’05 library was over 28k images. So I was surprised to hear various reports that the ’06 installment increased capacity from 25k to 250k. Hmmm – perhaps that’s why my old install was so sluggish – but never any errors or warnings about the size of ye olde library. Anyway, the new version is blazingly fast – like WOW!

It also upgrades handling of RAW images. In iPhoto5, your edits to RAW images were to a JPEG version. You could also edit in an external editor, but you were still working with the JPEG version. 2006’s version enhances this by letting you open the actual RAW file in the external editor. It doesn’t automagically import the RAW edits back to iPhoto (though I wish it would), but you can fairly easily re-import the edited RAW version.

technorati tags: ilife, iphoto, photography, mac, apple

Continue reading iPhoto ‘06 →

In an exhaustive review on ars.technica, serious concerns are raised about the RAW import/translation capabilities of the new monster app from Apple. While they rave about the UI and organization tools in Aperture, they point out that the output from the program includes far more noise than any professional would tolerate in the images. Basically, the program is getting hammered in reviews. Studio2f.com points to one commenter on Slashdot who said it like this:  ‘Photoshop is the darkroom. Aperture is the light table. If you don’t understand this, you’re not in the target market.’ While that sounds dead-on right, I’d have to say that crappy RAW handling is something that any pro-level workflow tool simply cannot have.

From the red channel framegrabs in the Ars review, I suspect that Aperture is using a JPEG as a transitional format for display purposes despite the fact that the source is a RAW file. iPhoto has always done this – claimed ‘RAW’ support but actually converted all the files to JPEG. Ars sums up the problem thusly:

The problems continue for basic features like Unsharp Mask combining with this type of post-import noise to produce lots more artifacts for basic editing tasks. Also missing are a true ‘curves’ tool – only a 4-step levels tool exists. And a pixel sampler is also absent, something most pros want to see in their basic workflow. To me, this app would need to provide the basic tools I need to import, ouptut galleries, prints, etc plus organize, do basic color and exposure correction, plus minimal unsharp mask tools. If, however, the RAW issue is pervasive and real, Apple may have jumped the gun on releasing this latest application. To sum it up, Ars closes as follows:

Ouch! Even with all these problems, if Aperture helps deal more fluidly with the  22k+ images in my iPhoto library, it will be a godsend.

technorati tags: apple, mac, photography, RAW, aperture