Aperture 3: Day Two
I started the day happy with Aperture 3’s performance from the day before, I created a brand new library and addd my serial number to Aperture as i purchased the serial online last night (two impatient to wait for the boxed version) A slight side note here, many people don’t seem to realise that you can buy a serial number by clicking on the ‘BUY” button on the Aperture 3 trial startup screen. I carried on where I left off yesterday with back to back shoots, Aperture 3 took it all in its stride with not a single crash or hang, I was running the libraries wirelessly again to the MBP. I was pleased with how solid and responsive AP3 felt running on both machines. NEW WORKFLOWS
Aperture 3 does require some changes to my usual workflow and that started to evolve today bit by bit, Firstly the presets on import is a big time saver and the custom profile I created is automatically applied on every import now. I love the fact that I can now see all the photos straight away as they are still downloading, I can start to sort the photos, save time while Aperture is still working in the background and does it all without any drop in speed or responsiveness. That’sThat’s one of the big improvements in AP3 it seems to be able to efficiently multitask, in AP2 when it was busy you had to wait, now it seems to manage the tasks effortlessly. The real workflow plus with AP3 is its potential to replace Photoshop for my studio work, typically I take a shot into Photoshop and paint a 255,255,255 white layer around the background, add a curves adjustment layer masking it where necessary to make sure I have a pure white background. I also use smart and unsharp sharpening on the image. The new brushes allows me to create the same effects and end result, its done in a different way and will take a bit more practise and working out the best process but it has great promise. BRUSHES
The first thing I did was use multiple versions of the edge sharpening, one as a primary for the whole image and one where i painted it into the eyes and areas of the image that I wanted to increase the sharpening. I still find the edge sharpening in AP3 an improvement of AP2 and the ability to stack the sharpening further improves this. Next I experimented with using a curves adjustment to over exposure they background and then either paint in the adjustments or paint out the effects (I played around with both) the brushes were slick and responded well, they work differently to the photoshop brushes especially when using reduces opacity, you can brush various opacity brushes on top of each other, they seem to almost paint opacity onto opacity, what I mean here is that if you use the brush on 50% opacity, then change it to 40% it seems to paint 40% of the original 50% rather than giving you 90% (I hope that makes sense) You can see this in action if you use the colour overlay or one of the other brush overlays. I need to approach these brushes ignoring what i’d usually do in Photoshop. Unfortunately using these brushes did prove to be a problem and I had my first crashes :( Three in total and all while doing lots of brush work (both in and out) all 3 were straight crashes with the submit to crash report dialogue. on two of the occasions it removed/forgot the brush adjustments i’d made on the curves. It was disappointing that this caused Aperture to crash as it had been so rock solid up until then. I’m not sure if it’s a graphics issue or just a bug but it allowed me to prove to myself that with a little work (and hopefully a bug fix from Apple) Aperture can finally provide me a one-stop solution for editing saving me the round trip to Photoshop, despite the crashes i’m even more excited now about using Aperture 3.
COLOUR LABELS
A quick note on the new colour labels, a tiny new feature in the list of 200 but already proving very very useful. I already use the star rating in every viewing and use them differently for studio work and weddings, the combination of the star rating and the colour codes allow for a whole new level of customisation and sorting, particularly useful for sorting images that have the same star rating into certain groups for different people, this is one of the many areas of AP3 that will develop for me over the next few weeks. FINAL THOUGHTS
The second day with Aperture 3 wasn’t without it low points (the crashes) but I still feel that Aperture is so much bigger and better than Aperture 2 with so much more depth that the way I use it in a couple of months time will be totally different from the way I used AP2 now, its a very exciting time and In My Honest Opinion WELL worth the wait!
Aperture 3 does require some changes to my usual workflow and that started to evolve today bit by bit, Firstly the presets on import is a big time saver and the custom profile I created is automatically applied on every import now. I love the fact that I can now see all the photos straight away as they are still downloading, I can start to sort the photos, save time while Aperture is still working in the background and does it all without any drop in speed or responsiveness. That’sThat’s one of the big improvements in AP3 it seems to be able to efficiently multitask, in AP2 when it was busy you had to wait, now it seems to manage the tasks effortlessly. The real workflow plus with AP3 is its potential to replace Photoshop for my studio work, typically I take a shot into Photoshop and paint a 255,255,255 white layer around the background, add a curves adjustment layer masking it where necessary to make sure I have a pure white background. I also use smart and unsharp sharpening on the image. The new brushes allows me to create the same effects and end result, its done in a different way and will take a bit more practise and working out the best process but it has great promise. BRUSHES
The first thing I did was use multiple versions of the edge sharpening, one as a primary for the whole image and one where i painted it into the eyes and areas of the image that I wanted to increase the sharpening. I still find the edge sharpening in AP3 an improvement of AP2 and the ability to stack the sharpening further improves this. Next I experimented with using a curves adjustment to over exposure they background and then either paint in the adjustments or paint out the effects (I played around with both) the brushes were slick and responded well, they work differently to the photoshop brushes especially when using reduces opacity, you can brush various opacity brushes on top of each other, they seem to almost paint opacity onto opacity, what I mean here is that if you use the brush on 50% opacity, then change it to 40% it seems to paint 40% of the original 50% rather than giving you 90% (I hope that makes sense) You can see this in action if you use the colour overlay or one of the other brush overlays. I need to approach these brushes ignoring what i’d usually do in Photoshop. Unfortunately using these brushes did prove to be a problem and I had my first crashes :( Three in total and all while doing lots of brush work (both in and out) all 3 were straight crashes with the submit to crash report dialogue. on two of the occasions it removed/forgot the brush adjustments i’d made on the curves. It was disappointing that this caused Aperture to crash as it had been so rock solid up until then. I’m not sure if it’s a graphics issue or just a bug but it allowed me to prove to myself that with a little work (and hopefully a bug fix from Apple) Aperture can finally provide me a one-stop solution for editing saving me the round trip to Photoshop, despite the crashes i’m even more excited now about using Aperture 3.
COLOUR LABELS
A quick note on the new colour labels, a tiny new feature in the list of 200 but already proving very very useful. I already use the star rating in every viewing and use them differently for studio work and weddings, the combination of the star rating and the colour codes allow for a whole new level of customisation and sorting, particularly useful for sorting images that have the same star rating into certain groups for different people, this is one of the many areas of AP3 that will develop for me over the next few weeks. FINAL THOUGHTS
The second day with Aperture 3 wasn’t without it low points (the crashes) but I still feel that Aperture is so much bigger and better than Aperture 2 with so much more depth that the way I use it in a couple of months time will be totally different from the way I used AP2 now, its a very exciting time and In My Honest Opinion WELL worth the wait!
Posted on Friday February 12th
About me
Life, the universe and everything....will be skipped to make room for clumisly written waffling about photography, Macs and other bits and pieces.www.mep-photography.co.uk
www.thosepreciousmoments.co.uk
www.aipix.co.uk
www.paulinskipphotography.co.uk
