Aperture 3 first impressions
I have been using Aperture for a little over a year now and have come to rely heavily on it for my post processing workflow. Suffice it to say, I was extremely excited to see Aperture 3 announced last week and I immediately purchased a copy. My upgrade disc arrived yesterday and I spent most of the night installing and playing with it.
The install went very smoothly. Took 30 minutes to get the app loaded and for it to convert my Aperture 2 library over. Face detection on the other hand, took a while longer.
One of Aperture’s new features is that it will scan all of your photos for faces and try and match them up into sets. It took close to 3 hours for it to finish the scan. The results are mostly good, but it certainly has some room for improvement still:
The new editing/developing tools are incredible though. The biggest addition are all the new adjustment brushes. On Aperture 2, you only had a healing/cloning brush for localized fixes. Anything else needed to be exported to something like Photoshop. Now, any adjustment can be tied to a brush (dodge, burn, curves, vibrancy, etc). Not only that, each brush supports edge detection so you don’t have to be super specific about where you use the brush. It does a surprisingly good job of figuring out where the borders are and staying within them.
But the coolest brush, by far, is the skin softening brush. Pick the brush, tell it how much you want to soften and then just paint it into the photo. It only adjusts skin tones and it doesn’t make a blurry mess of it… just softens and smooths things out. There are entire software packages out there to do this kind of stuff.
Here is my first experiment playing with the new tools in Aperture:
And here is the original file, straight from the camera:
It took me maybe 10 or 15 minutes to make those adjustments. Smoother skin, improved lighting, a slight crop… quick and easy with good results.
Now, the not so good things….
- Aperture 3 runs in 64-bit, but all of the old plug-ins (including the one I use to export to Flickr) run in 32-bit and require a restart of Aperture to work. Thankfully, it looks like most of these plug-ins are updating to 64-bit pretty quickly.
- Noise reduction still sucks. Aperture 3’s noise reduction doesn’t seem to be improved at all from the previous version. Looks like I will continue exporting to Noise Ninja to clean up noise.
- Despite running in 64-bit and supporting OpenCL (which should take advantage of the GPU), I don’t think Aperture 3 really runs any better than v.2 did. I was hoping for a performance boost, but I’m not really seeing it.
Overall though, I am happy with the upgrade. The new editing tools are fantastic and will greatly reduce the times I need to export to Photoshop. Throw in other features like geotagging, face detection and style presets.. it’s a hell of a big upgrade.
If you have a Mac and are even mildly serious about photography, I think Aperture is definitely a worthwhile purchase.
