Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Great application BUT, 28 May 2007
read on for the BUT below. First let me cover the good stuff, because there is an awful lot of good stuff and only a fraction of it is covered below.
It's Apple, so it combines a great looking customizable interface with functionality. Anyone familiar with using iPhoto will see initial similarities. Fundamentally, Aperture is a RAW processing program and it does exactly what it says on the package - you can make a whole host of basic adjustments without degrading the image and you can have mutiple versions of the same image all with different adjustments, without having to save several different copies under different names taking up inordinate amounts of space. Aperture just has one actual copy of the image and then saves all the different adjustments, taking up a fraction of the space. You can also have the same image in a number of different Albums or Books and again it's just the 1 copy of the image taking up space on your hard drive. Aperture is packed full of excellent tools and features. Special mention has to go to the monochrome mixer which is superb, I virtually never use the mono tools in Photoshop anymore, the quality in Aperture is far superior and much easier to use. Editing and sorting your images is quick, easy and fully customizable. The book publishing tool is also a great feature of Aperture (also available in iPhoto, but this is much better).
Overall, Aperture is intuitive, powerful and great value for money...
BUT, and here's why it only gets 3 stars: you need a very fast computer to run Aperture effectively. There's a reason why the graphic on the System Set Up page of the manual shows a Mac Pro, because that's what you're going to need to avoid excruciating thinking-time after each click of the mouse. But how many of us can really afford to buy a new computer just for the sake of one application?? I recently bought a 20" imac intel duo-core and have both Aperture and CS2 installed and when both are open (which they are most of the time) I have to close all other applications, including Mail, and my mac slows to a crawl. Simple tasks like selecting an image to work on requires an average of 30 secs thinking time; opening an image to use in CS2 can take around 1.5 mins (40MB tiff files). Applying adjustments in Aperture is stymied by 30 secs + of thinking time, which is incredibly frustrating as everytime you tweak the slider you're waiting another 20 secs to see the result. Aperture open on its own (and I mean on its own, close all other apps incl. iTunes, Mail, Safari) works tolerably well, thinking time is much reduced.
I saw Aperture being demonstrated at this year's Focus on Imaging and the speaker kept saying the words "instant" and "bang" e.g. "using Aperture, adjustments can be applied instantly, just move the slider and, bang! the adjustment is instantly applied" and in the demo it was. In reality though and without a Mac Pro, doing stuff in Aperture is far from instant, more like instant + some thumb twirling (+ tea break, if you have CS2 open too).
So to summarise: excellent program but you need the hardware to match, which let's face it, is on the pricey side. If you're prepared to put up with the thinking time, buy it, or if you have cash to burn, buy it and a nice new Mac Pro to run it on.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Great software, 2 Dec 2007
I bought this to use with my Canon EOS 400D and I have to say this is a good piece of software.
It makes downloading the pictures from the camera and organizing them very easy, no fiddling with different tools to do your work. Also reviewing, rating and rejecting pictures is very easy and intuitive.
The stacks feature is neat, meaning that you can stack multiple shots you've taken from the same subject and then pick your preferred one. The others will be kept in the stack as reserve/fallback shots. Work that would take me hours before (comparing the shots and selecting the best ones) I did in minutes with Aperture.
The editing tools are intuitive and easy to use and it integrates with the Mac apps and .Mac to allow you to publish the pictures very easily. It won't give you advanced image editing tools like Photoshop does, though, so depending on what you have to do you will still need Photoshop (I'm running PS CS3 now), but it does minimize the need for it in a great deal.
I'm running it on a MacBook Pro with a Core 2 Duo 2.6GHz CPU, 4GB RAM, the NVidia GeForce 8600m GT GPU and a 7200 RPM 200GB hard drive and it performs well, even though my laptop gets quite hot and noisier than usual with the fans working full time. It is not sluggish though and considering that this is a laptop after all it is pretty good performance.
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