Paul Inskip Photography

I wanted to carry across my extreme excitement at the launch of Aperture 3 across to some initial comments and input for anyone that’s interested. I’ve had an intensive play for the last 2 hours with the occasional dip into the manual. My first impression after reading the list of new features was WOW…that has continued into the actual practical use as well. The feature list only tells half the story because there are so many thing different in Aperture that it does feel almost like a brand new piece of software, its a much bigger step than we had going from 1> 1.5 > 2.

It almost justifies the 2 year wait because in many small ways it feels like the Aperture team almost started again after Aperture 2, kept the basic heritage but did what they wanted to do with it even if those changes were quite fundamental. INTERFACE
There are some big changes ion the interface the most noticeable are the colourful, child-friendly icons, makes it feel very iphoto like, not to my taste and not a deal breaker, the second, is an odd one, and thats the fact that they’ve increased the font size, the net result of these is everything feels a bit more clunky in places and clild friendly, slightly less ‘pro’. It also eats up a bit of extra screen space at times and pop up dialogue boxes seem huge now.

On the good side however the whole interface has been cleaned, trimmed, and sharpened, needless bars, line and bevels have been removed for cleaner panels. its certainly an improvement over all but 2 steps forward one step back :)

IMPORTING
The new import window will take some getting used to but the applying presets and the other controls are fantastic, makes it very slick, gone are the needless eye-candy animation, replaced with everything at your finger tips.

The other big difference is that where as before Aperture 2 used to fill up a new project with 3 images at a time, low res previews of your images…ALL you images, appear in the project instantly, its one of the big changes in Aperture 3 is that it wants to feed you your images faster, let you get on with work while it processes and queues processes up in the background.

However I did find that importing and adding my presets (via lift and stamp like i did in Aperture 2) actually tool longer than in Aperture 3, I think its because of the way Aperture seems to be rendering thumbnails which it seems to do after almost every change, this seems to be an additional process (at least visually) to what Aperture 2 used to do. I think that applying the presets on import would speed this whole process up and bring it back to being faster than Aperture 2.

BRUSHES
The little drop down of brushes (dodge etc.) was a bit disappointing but then I realised what the brushes can REALLY do and i was stunned. The real power of these brushes is in the “brush in” and “brush away” commands on the adjustments bricks:

These allow you use these adjustments like layers in Photoshop because you can have multiple adjustments on every image! multiple sharpens with different settings on different parts of the image, multiple curves or colour corrections, almost endless possibilities. These new functions are still sinking in because for me they are HUGE because at the moment it looks very much like this could replace Photoshop! For me thats huge!! I will be testing more to see whether its practical, but early impressions are very very good!

The edge sharpen somehow seems to have been improved and the ability to stack sharpening is fantastic!

PRINTING

When there were multiple additions to printing i was hopeful but IMO Aperture hasn’t hit the mark again which is a real disappointment :( you can do a lot more with it but for me I’ll unfortunately still need to go to PS for printing! One simple omission is being able to lay up multiple photos of DIFFERENT sizes onto a sheet rather than all the same size. OTHER TWEAKS

There are a lot of small changes, I’ll list a few that I came across: 1) incremental zooms rather than just fit or 100%

2) Great little expanding mini zoom window when you roll over it

3) Colour labels add a whole new level of ranking and organising files, this will be fantastic for weddings

4) They do seem to have changed the processing slightly, zooming into an image takes slightly longer to render and then the processing dialogue re-generates the thumbnails, doesn’t seem to slow down just odd

5) Saving and applying adjustments on import will be fantastic 6) No way to view the area that you’ve adjusted (like sharpening) would be useful to be able to cmd slick to show an outline

7) Lifting and stamping ‘auto’ adjustments will be handy, not a straight + or _ but auto to the image 8) Preset adjustments is SOO slick…presets will be used ALOT

CONCLUSIONS Aperture 3 is an amazing update and is a massive step forward from Aperture 2 in pretty much every area! It feels fresh, new and fast. The new tools are fantastic and feel well implemented and slick to use, there are some typically wonderful Apple-esque touches to the way some of the tools, previews, transitions work that do feel very good.

Its a no questions upgrade from Aperture 2 and for people doubting Apertures future this update has provided us with a platform that if we have to will last us another 2 years. Everything that was great about Aperture 2 has been tweaked and improved on. Everything (well almost!) that we wanted, demanded, dreamed of has pretty much been added in Aperture 3 and in many places exceeded expectations (well mine at least) I’m going to attempt to jump into Aperture 3 fully these next few days with 17 baby shoots lined up between now and the end of Thursday!! I’ll then pick myself back up off the floor on Friday and post some more feedback…72 hours on…to see what else has appeared.

One thing that struck me with this release is that finally I feel that Aperture is a much deeper program, there are so many little hidden tweaks and tools that it feels very much like photoshop where you constantly find new ways of doing things and new tools, it feels like it will take me a good few weeks to master everything that Aperture 3 has to offer whereas Aperture 2 was much more no-nonsense and simple. Aperture has been re-born :) Let the good times roll!!!

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