Aperture 1.0: the Ars review

Introduction

Check out our review of Aperture 2.0

Aperture
Developer: Apple (product page)
Price: US$499 (shop for this item)

Apple has cojones. Let's not pretend otherwise. Jumping headfirst into the fully mature digital imaging market requires the shameless bravado of a one-legged man at a butt-kicking contest or any number of contestants on So You Think You Can Dance? What's at risk is not only cold, hard cash, but more importantly, their reputation as a software innovator. With Aperture, Apple is clearly hoping to have the same success it has had with Final Cut Pro. Plus, becoming a household name in imaging can't hurt the bottom line for hardware sales.

Aperture hopes to do this by edging its way into the workflows of professional digital photographers by being basically an iPhoto Pro. Leveraging Core Image, a very powerful and very fast way to use modern 3-D cards for near-realtime processing of images, and as someone that's played around extensively with the Core Image Fun House when Tiger came out, there's no denying that Core Image is fast:

Apple also wants to instill the idea that Macs are for professional imaging and if you don't use one then you're missing out on all the gooey goodness and your Powerbook-toting friends should rightfully laugh at you.

But that's only half of the problem. They still have to make a program that will meet the demands of people who aren't willing to trade quality for speed. Aperture touts fidelity and nondestructive editing as its main selling points, so it's clear Apple understands the professional buzzwords but does it do enough to warrant a US$500 complement to Photoshop? Well, I'm assuming that's why you're here. Without further ado, let's see if Apple can dance.

Test hardware

• Dual G5 2.0
• Nvidia 6800 Ultra 256 MB
• 4.5 GB RAM
• OS X 10.4.3
• Lacie Electron Blue 22 monitor with Blue Eye calibrator

Apart from the RAM, this is pretty well the base recommended system for running Aperture. Since it uses Core Image for image processing, it requires a hefty graphics card and won't work on anything less than an ATI Radeon 9600 card. Those of you hoping to shoehorn it into a floral G3 iMac aren't going to have much luck as it won't even install if the installer detects incompatible hardware. You can check if your system is compatible with the Aperture Compatibility Checker.

Note that while I'm not a professional photographer, I work with high-end digital and scanned images as a commercial retoucher and formerly as art director for a fashion magazine. I also shoot as a hobby and often use the RAW format for maximum control over images, so I understand the needs of a professional digital photographer.

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Why a new image program?

With Aperture, many people are wondering if Apple is trying to cut itself out a portion of the image editing program market. Let's get this out of the way early: Aperture is not a competitor to Photoshop. Unless you bought Photoshop exclusively for the Camera RAW plug-in or the Bridge program, Aperture cannot replace Photoshop. It doesn't work well with CMYK source images (it outputs back to RGB), it doesn't composite images, and the full list of its available filters is at left.

Still, in this review I'll be referring to similar tasks or tools in Photoshop and you might be thinking, is that fair to compare this app to the industry-standard program that's now in its ninth version? Well, Apple is clearly positioning Aperture to be the one-stop shop for your RAW editing and high-fidelity image adjustment needs, and at US$500, they are basically saying that this is professionals-only, so it should have pro-quality tools. Photographers are a finicky lot. If you think you can razzle and dazzle them with hype only, you're insane.

Also, it's bound to get asked, so let me set the record straight: Aperture is a PPC-only app:

I'm sure it will be made a universal binary by the time x86 Mac machines capable of running Aperture ship.

The interface

Similar to other Apple professional apps like Motion and Final Cut Pro, Aperture sports a dark grey background and buttons. Despite the continuing legacy of the OS X Finder to disappoint new and old users, Apple knows how to make you drool with the look of a program. Like the newer version of iTunes, the bezels are cleaner and there is no brushed metal. This is almost definitely where the OS X Leopard interface is going and for the most part it's a welcome change.

It's tidy and can be rearranged, with the different elements hidden or shown with quick key commands. They can't be closed, or torn off manually though, despite my best mouse button mashing. The adjustments palette is available as a separate floating palette and there is a nice professional-looking black full screen mode that still lets you work very comfortably.

My only real gripe with the Aperture interface is the tiny type used throughout, like in Final Cut and DVD Studio Pro. Everywhere you look, in the dialog boxes, contextual menus and filter/keyword panes, it's a veritable 8-point type party. They try and make it less illegible by bolding up the fonts but it's really fuzzy and on my 22" monitor at 1600x1200, I'm constantly squinting to read things (and I have near-perfect vision). Maybe things look better on the twin 30" LCD setups that you see in all of Apple's user profiles but we can't all be Kevin Bacon's wedding photographer.

"Ok great, now give me Footloose! Ok, now Quicksilver!"

The wealth of cheesy classics that guy has done is astounding.

I think Apple is assuming that everyone is running on larger monitors now but they forgot about that resolution thing that also increases, nulling any increase in physical scale. There isn't an option in the application preferences to change the type size and I don't think I'm alone in suggesting it's something that should really be addressed in all of Apple's pro app line. The legibility problem gets even worse with the new-fangled white text on dark grey dialogs introduced with Motion. While on first impression they look slick, it's a generally known thing in publishing that reverse type (white on black) is not easy to read, and so if someone is going to be spending a long time in front of a long article, reverse type is usually avoided. How Apple figures that having small antialiased reverse type is any more tolerable is beyond me and I hope it doesn't become a trend.

I tried to alleviate the problem a bit by disabling anti-aliasing on small font sizes but even after relaunching Aperture, the change in the System Preferences had no effect. Apple should be smarter than to kid themselves about the failed ergonomics of gimicky slick stuff like this. And if they insist on keeping these catchy-looking sales tools like jamming the interface full of tools by using smaller fonts, then at least give us the option of turning them off. That or put some magic sharpening spectacles in the box. Or better yet, two 30" monitors (it would need a bigger box though, so that might not be an option).

Importing, the stork of imaging

Aperture has created a new interface for importing images and it's very sleek. There are general options for rename on import and you can command and shift select different items to import as you would expect. There's a scalable thumbnail view or a list view with extended information about each image. The list view looks a lot like the Final Cut interface, showing an exhaustive list of metadata that is impossible to fit in the width of the my 1600 pixel-wide screen. The interface is animated and there is an arrow showing source and destination for the project. I like that functionality but the slow sheet animation gets a bit tired after you've seen it 40 times a day.

The file part of the import pane is column view only. This works fine when you only have one folder, but if you are importing your images from other folders, you'll have to do it with the column view. For most things, this should be an issue but my existing folder structure looks like this:

Beyond the basic import options, you can change the name, add ratings to files and add metadata info and keywords in a batch.

I didn't have any problems importing images (Canon RAW, DNG, TIFF) and all metadata was intact, but I've heard of other people getting mixed results. To test the additional metadata import, I used iView MediaPro 3 to embed some fields into a 16-bit TIFF and it properly imported them with the file. Once you start importing, the browser pane genies back and you watch an animation show the import progress:

Stacks

If you look at the bottom of the import pane, you'll see a slider for auto-building what is called "stacks."

Stacks are a tool exclusive to Aperture where you can group multiple related items for better sorting and clean organization. You can select multiple images, right click them and build a stack, which can then be expanded and collapsed by clicking the number field in the corner of the top image in the stack:

The auto-stacking seen in the import dialog and elsewhere in the interface uses capture date info to group items into stacks. It's a handy feature, especially if you have a ton of images in a single flat list that aren't related.

The main problem with the import pane (other than column view-only) is that it doesn't show file extensions, even if you've checked "Show all file extensions" in the Finder. So if you are wondering which is the img.CRW, which is the img.DNG and which is the img.JPG, you're .SOL. That wouldn't be so bad if it weren't that it didn't also show all three files as one file in the import list:

Importing the mystery file revealed that it was Canon RAW it liked. Sorry, DNG and JPG, you just aren't Aperture material.

That's not too far from the truth apparently. There are many people reporting problems with DNG images from many different cameras and Aperture. To be fair, Aperture isn't the only app to have these problems but for a brand-new program, it's a bit painful to see.

That's pretty well it for importing. There is also the ability to import your iPhoto library but I don't use iPhoto so I didn't test it out.

Like iPhoto, Aperture stores all imported images in a central folder but with Aperture it appears as a single file (~/Pictures/Aperture Library.aplibrary). I'm personally not a fan of centralized databases but I know many people like this so I won't say this is a bad or good thing. Still, the sight of a giant single package file is a little gross:

You can change it's location but there is only one location officially supported in Aperture. Some people have found tricks to use symbolic links to store their library in multiple locations. Try that at your own risk.

Keywording, ratings, and metadata

If you have a wackload of images, clients and projects, metadata is key to organizing finding and picking the right images for a job. If you take a lot of shots to be used as stock for other projects, tagging images with common keywords is a must since trying to find stuff by trying to remember what ISO you used can take a little time.

For metal gig photographers, remembering anything is going to be difficult so they especially need a short route to finding stuff. "Find pants. Search for name of sleeping girl next to me."

On top of the standard EXIF and IPTC metadata tags, Aperture has a rating system for isolating pics. Once you've set some ratings and keywords, sorting through the items is very elegant and well thought out. If there's one thing Apple knows how to do, it's help you find things easily.

Modifying the metadata is surprisingly slow though. To add this info to 14 images, it took 45 seconds:

I relaunched Aperture and tried again to see if it was just a bug but it look just as long the second time around. Apparently, I'm not the only person with this problem and in this thread, someone writes "I tried to update the timezone setting for 200 pictures, took around an hour." Ouch, hopefully that's going to be fixed.

Metadata is visible throughout the interface or as an overlay on your images and if you hit "T" when mousing over an image, you get a nice pop up with extended info:

You cannot edit the basic embedded EXIF info. To some people this is to be expected: it's not meant to be changed. Well the option to make changes should be there for any program that works extensively with metadata.

Metadata problems

As long as you are in Aperture, things run relatively smoothly with metadata and you would think that with the prominence given to it throughout the program, Apple would realize that it is important to the identity and archiving of an image. Unfortunately, the problems start when you hit export. IPTC info tagged in Aperture exports okay but EXIF data is stripped completely.

There's not much contention about that. It's not good. But it also highlights a major oversight in Aperture. While the merits of having a centralized copied database have many people on either side of the fence, there's no denying that archival output is important to images. Standards like IPTC and DNG were established to provide a long-term and open standard for working with and providing info about images, long after they've been taken. But in Aperture, there is no export of DNG files. The best option is 16-bit TIFF and this doesn't contain the RAW data from the original image. Whether by oversight or strategy, Aperture forces you to stick around if you want to get the whole picture. Why would you need to go elsewhere? Any backups you do will be with the built-in Vault. Once an Aperture user, always an Aperture user, right? Well, lock-in wouldn't be such a big deal if it weren't for one problem...

Aperture's RAW importer

Aperture includes a bunch of book and web gallery options but if you're looking to purchase Aperture, then chances are that these aren't the selling features, they're perks. You can get a bunch of capable and free web gallery programs already, and if the basic conversions aren't good, then chances are you're not going to using it for much book work.

The selling point for Aperture is as a powerful tool for RAW image workflows, preserving the maximum amount of quality by constantly using the RAW camera data, instead of a flat 8-bits-per-channel source file, which degrades little by little with every change. In Aperture there isn't a one-time RAW import like with the Adobe Camera Raw plug-in or applications like Capture One; it's ostensibly always reimporting the RAW file. Everything is live like a filter in After Effects, but faster. That has a lot of appeal for professional photographers who are going to consider that more than the metadata editing and sorting features of Aperture, which programs like iView MediaPro already do very well.

I chose a number of RAW images to see what kind of output Aperture could produce, trying to get a decent match for results produced from the same file with Adobe's plug-in, itself a well-respected RAW converter. When shooting RAW, it's always best to fit your image in the upper 75% of the histogram since the noise and accuracy gets worse as you head towards black, in any camera's CCD. You then use a RAW converter to spread that high fidelity information across the full width of the output image's histogram, getting a final image with maximum quality. This example image is from a near-perfect exposure at 50 ISO so there should be little noise and not much tweaking going on to produce a wide, high-fidelity final result.

Keep in mind, I'm not saying I like this one or this one. Obviously this is a bit like comparing apples and oranges so we're restricting our criticism to pure fidelity. There is bluish banding in the dark areas of the Aperture image and a lot of noise as it heads to black. I've done no sharpening on it, so the noise it's picking up is completely Aperture's own algorithm. It looks like JPEG compression, but it's not. That was exported as a 16-bit TIFF. The problem becomes really apparent when you look at the individual color channels.

The problem is not as apparent in the mid tones and highlights, but the artifacting and noise is still worse overall. I managed to reduce it with the noise reduction filter but it still looked "junky," like a bad scan and the bluish tones in the shadows were still there. I couldn't remove those since there is no selective color or curves adjustment in Aperture. I tried many times with different images to produce better results, but even with the high-end source files from the tutorial DVD, it still produces poor images when compared to the Adobe plug-in. There are many threads on the Apple Aperture forum that back up my finding: Aperture produces sub-professional output when compared to most industry-standard converters. For some, the problem is even worse.

Many of you probably are hearing the alarm bells and you should. The whole premise of this program, and the RAW format itself, relies on quality input for quality output. If the RAW converter in Aperture is no better than shooting in JPEG format, then it has little appeal over iPhoto as a professional's tool. This isn't something that can be fixed overnight either. Adobe's Camera Raw and other programs like Capture One have been years in the making and unless Apple buys up some quality RAW technology and drops it into the 1.5 update, you're not going to see Aperture rival the professional RAW apps any time soon. But it may not be as easy as that, judging by the results from the next section.

Aperture filters and adjustments

The list of available filters for Aperture is pretty sparse, but if you're going to do any serious editing on a photo, chances are you're going to use Photoshop to do them. So what's available are some common adjustment and retouching tools seen above.

If you want to apply changes to multiple images, whether adjustments, cropping or metadata information, batches are applied with the lift and stamp tool.

You lift the changes from the filtered image and stamp them onto the other images, which are then further adjustable for each image. Every change remains live.

In Photoshop, you would do this with a combination of actions (for filters) and adjustment layers (for adjustments). It all works pretty nicely. Let's get into the adjustments.

Highlight and Shadows adjustment

If you have an image with too much concentration of information in the darks or highlights, then you can use this filter to lighten and deepen these areas. In the shot below, the iris in the girl's eyes are almost lost and the overall balance is dark but you can pull up both while still preserving the saturation of the image with the Highlight and Shadows adjustment:

This was a major addition when it came to Photoshop so it's nice too see a professional-grade version in Aperture. It's a crucial tool and the Aperture results are very good.

The Red Eye tool

This one pretty well works as advertised and remains live as well. Adjust your radius, click and be off!

The Monochrome mixer

The trouble with RGB to grayscale conversions is that they often look flat. Everything comes out medium and gray so professionals often do multi-channel tricks to get a punchy final grayscale image. In Aperture, Apple has included a nice monochrome mixer that lets you accomplish the same results with a single filter.

The sepia tone and tinted color monochrome filters also produce very professional results and of course can be stacked after the punchy monochrome conversion:

Noise reduction

Noise reduction is an obviously essential part of digital shooting and there are a lot of third party plug-ins for Photoshop that do it well. The one in Aperture is pretty basic and doesn't give you much control over what gets filtered. For images with a lot of shadow noise, a very typical problem, Aperture has to filter everything. In a case like this JPEG image, it's impossible to filter out the shadow noise while preserving the texture in the green:

Noise is also most prevalent in the blue channels so most professional filters give you an option to filter each channel separately. In short, Aperture's noise reduction filter is no Noise Ninja or Grain Surgery. It doesn't even have a goofy name.

Aperture's Sharpen

Like the noise reduction, the sharpen filter is sorely lacking. It?s a basic unsharp mask without a threshold option, so it?s possible to pick up a lot of noise. for a program with a noisy RAW converter, that's not something that should be omitted. A threshold option is not a good thing to leave out.

It would have been nice if Apple had used this opportunity to say "we know what's up in imaging" by providing a world-class sharpen filter like NIK Sharpener Pro that get much better results than the typical unsharp mask, which tend to get halos when you need to sharpen a lot:

Realizing the need for a higher caliber sharpener, Adobe recently added a smart sharpen filter to Photoshop CS2:

Smart "deblur" algorithms are one of the common features of pro sharpening tools and it's nowhere to be seen in Aperture.

Unfortunately, things don't get better when you consider what else is also missing...

AWOL features

Curves

As I mentioned in the RAW conversion portion earlier, there is no curve adjustment in Aperture, only levels. Granted, the levels palette lets you have 4 sliders for more accurate control, but it's still not a sufficient replacement for the subtle control afforded by the curves controls, which let you very accurately pinpoint spots in the color channels. In the Aperture levels palette, like any levels palette, the points are set and so it's not possible to control the dark shadow areas without subtley affecting the lower midtones.

This is a glaring omission and even if there was a technical explanation for it being missing, it's not much of a professional-grade application if it doesn't have a curves tool. In my Photoshop imaging workshop, this was my main complaint about Photoshop Elements' not being a capable editor. Fortunately there is a free plug-in for PS Elements. But without a plug-in architecture for Aperture, this is going to be missing for a while and it severely limits the application for high-quality adjustments.

Eyedropper tool

In the course of making tweaks in Aperture, I went to reach for an eyedropper tool to check my pixel values and was pretty shocked to see that there is no numeric readout of RGB pixel information available. This is so profoundly basic and essential a tool for a professional that I don't know what Apple was thinking to leave it out. I can just picture the outtakes from this Aperture Richard Burbridge Aperture profile:

Add that to the growing list of "things to add to Aperture 1.5"

Filtering verdict

You probably see a pattern forming in the Aperture adjustments and filters: things are missing and what's there is often limited. There is no chromatic aberration filter, no vignetting adjustment, no selective color adjustment, no RGB eyedropperb and no curves. But I'm not so convinced that it's simply a problem of ignorance on Apple's part.

The lack of any of the fun filters from the Core Image demos make sense when think about them in a professional context: no one uses a giant blob of realtime twirling in commercial photography and if they do, they should be publicly shunned. But when you look at the challenge of delivering on Aperture's promise of incredible speed and incredible quality, things start to add up: These filters and adjustments might be missing by choice.

Core Image is fast but it's not magic. Stack a number of basic filters on a ten megapixel image and it's going to slow down. I did a number of filters and adjustments on one of the 1512 x 2038 (3 megapixel) Tibet tutorial images that came with Aperture and it didn't take long to get it to slow to a point where feedback took upwards of ten seconds. See the filter stack.

In the scope of potential things to do for minor retouches on an image, that's not a lot. Filling the gaps in the filters while maintaining the already debatable speed is not going to be fun. This could also be an explanation as to why the RAW converter is limited. It's not a nice accusation to say that the lackluster RAW quality and filter limits was a choice on Apple's part, but Aperture is a program based on relatively new technology and I'm sure there were feature trade-offs made for speed. In time, we'll hopefully see the same thing we saw in OS X: it will get faster on the same hardware as well as have more robust features. Here's hoping.

The speed gets worse when you start stamping them onto other files. After stamping the batch of changes to sixteen other Tibet portraits from the stacked edit, I got tired of waiting for feedback and went back to writing a different part of this review. After five minutes or so, I saw some master thumnails update and then the grid view. Whether this is a bug or just a speed problem is hard to say. I also monitored CPU usage closely during this whole review and made sure that background processes weren't the cause.

I could make similar adjustments to a batch of images Adobe's Camera Raw plug-in and it would take roughly five seconds to get feeback on all of them. Sure, I'd still have to save them out to have a finished file, but it would still take less than five minutes. While you may be thinking "it's got to be faster on a quad G5," you're probably right, but it's still using my relatively high-end AGP Nvidia 6800 Ultra card to do much of the heavy lifting. Although the Quad has a PCIe graphics card, you aren't going to see a three-fold increase in speed for most operations.

Bugs

Aside from the things mentioned, there are some pretty significant outstanding bugs with Aperture. Thumbnails and main images go out of sync and there isn't any "rebuild thumbnails" option to correct the problem. Relaunching the program doesn't do anything, but sometimes you get lucky and they just decide to change.

Patchy 8-bit TIFF output

If you export an image—edited or not to 8-bit TIFF—the shadow areas get patchy and turn to lakes of black.

That's definitely a bug since it's not hard to produce a simple gradation like that in 8-bit.

Overoptimistic histogram rendering

When I started doing really harsh edits in Aperture to test its RAW image controls, I was impressed that everything it did always resulted in a clean histogram. Sure, you could clip the whites and black to ruin an image, but you couldn't do much to get stepping in the transitions of the histogram. So I tried the same thing with an 8-bit per channel JPEG just to see if I could get some gaps indicating lacking fidelity. Trying to spread very little input in the shadows to fill out the midtones is not something you should try but the histogram in Aperture makes it seem like it ain't no thang:

Even in the individual RGB channels, the histogram steps cleanly with no breaks. So I exported the image to Photoshop to see if there truly was witchcraft in them thar Apple code.

Those wide gaps are important because they tell you that the image is lacking good gradation in tone. If you read the Aperture histogram, you would think that the image had enough transition in the darks to print with no worries. "Well, perhaps Aperture is bumping down to a worse quality on export," you say? Well if you reimport the same junky exported file, it renders the histogram the same as the tweaked master image. Not good.

I was really perplexed as to what it was showing in the Aperture histogram, so I brought in another, all gray-noise image and did the same harsh levels tweak and found this, and it all became clear:

Aperture takes its histogram reading from a smoothed sub-pixel rendering of the image. If you take a screenshot of the loupe area and paste it in Photoshop and check the levels of the area, you get this:

This anti-aliased histogram reading is the software equivalent of selling you nose plugs for your body odor problem. It doesn't do you (or anyone around you) any favors. There is no way to export an image that uses that smooth data, so it's pretty pointless to show you it in a histogram. Whether you want to put on a conspiracy hat and say that Apple is doing this to mask just how lossless the Aperture edits are is up to you, but either way, it needs to be addressed in future versions of the software.

Conclusion

It saddens me to say that Aperture's innovations are only skin deep. If it could deliver on the promise of being both fast and produce flawless results, it would be the dream package. At this point it is an expensive and questionable alternative to Camera Raw, a free extension to Photoshop, and Adobe's Bridge which can batch produce better quality images in arguably less time. For US$500 (Photoshop itself retails for US$649), there is no excuse not to be aware of professional needs like a high-quality sharpen tool, DNG exporting or more basic things like curves, a sampler tool for RGB pixel readings, or retention of EXIF data on output.

I'd like to get excited about things like instant books and the light table, but if the base technology in Aperture is flawed, it can't be the high-end imaging hub it wants to be. The quality of Aperture's RAW converter is bad, and for an application that's selling point is iterative nondestructive RAW editing, that's like building a house on a plate of Jello. It doesn't matter how nice the Ming vase looks next to the Fabergé eggs, or how fast the place heats up; it's all built on a bad foundation so the chances of anyone wanting to live the good life there are next to none.

It is also disappointing to see form beat out function here, but hopefully this will be Apple's software equivalent of the G4 Cube. They have only themselves to blame: they set themselves up for a big fall by attempting to dig themselves a chunk of the pro market by purporting to have the lossless holy grail of imaging. The trouble with that is they obviously didn't have the engineering or expertise in RAW processing to pull it off or, if they did, they chose not to include it because of speed constraints due to Core Image. For things like the 8-bit TIFF export problem, which can be fixed with a 1.01 update, it's not a complete dealbreaker but Aperture's faults are many and can't be fixed overnight.

Maybe by 2.0 Apple will have the foundation sorted out. At this stage Aperture is a big, expensive misfire and considering the hefty price tag, I can't think of a reason to recommend it. Reading this review, you may think I sound jaded, but I am genuinely angry for those who shelled out US$500 for a program that promised professional results and failed to deliver. Thanks for coming out Aperture, now get off the stage. 

Pros

• Well organized interface
• Professional looking full screen mode and slideshow
• Nondestructive live edits and versioning without using a ton of hard drive space
• Good rating system and easily accessible powerful search field
• Red eye filter works well
• Professional-quality Highlight and Shadow filter
• Nice sepia tone and multi-channel monochrome filter
• Well-thought-out Stacks feature for organization

Cons

• Tiny fonts and reverse type throughout the interface are hard on the eyes
• Column view only for import and no file extensions in import pane
• Cannot edit base EXIF data
• Poor RAW conversion
• Strips EXIF data on file export
• Extremely slow batch metadata editing
• No DNG export
• Has only the most basic sharpening and noise reduction tools
• The loupe tool doesn't tell you what zoom ratio you're at
• No curves adjustment
• Buggy 8-bit TIFF export
• The spot tool is very basic compared to the spot heal in Photoshop
• No per-pixel RGB information
• Inaccurate histogram
• Many outstanding bugs
• Price for the performance

Update

Be sure to check out our follow-up to this review.