Just seen that Apple have released a major upgrade. Can't wait to get it - some of the things like the new retouch and clone tools look really good.

http://www.apple.com/uk/aperture/features/100.html

I may even be able to ditch GIMP now and just use Aperture for all my retouching, fingers crossed !

Unfortunately the upgrade path on the website doesnt work for me, will have to pop in Apple store tomorrow and see if they're selling it in the store :)

Grrr its not in the store and they're not entirely sure when it will be in. Ordered it by calling the Apple store helpline - £67.94 including delivery - couple of quid cheaper than doing it online via their store (which is now fixed) - not sure why. UPS should be leaving it with a neighbour in next couple of days. Yay :)

I am so tempted to get a Mac Mini to try Aperture on... I doubt it will / can be ported to Windows.

At the moment I use Lightroom, but the interface / tabs / just feel so clunky, nothing like Rawshooter which I was using until they sold out to Adobe.

Reading up on Aperture I just know I should make a trip to Meadow Hell on Friday evening after work ;)

What hardware / spec. are you running it on Grissom, how does it perform?

Got a 24" iMac with 2GB RAM. Gets a bit slow once in a while - but that is when I am cloning out say 50 dust spots on an image :P

They say the new version is more streamlined and runs faster. Will see in couple days :)

Just having the new tools and not having to open external editor such as GIMP will save a fair bit of time when fixing pics...

I will be interested to hear your experiences...

Have you tried LR? if so how does it compare with Aperture 1.5?

I will be interested to hear your experiences...

Have you tried LR? if so how does it compare with Aperture 1.5?

The problem with Aperture 1.5 compared with Lightroom was the overall speed (and the price differences).

Lightroom just seemed a whole lot snappier.

In terms of features, Aperure 1.5 and Lightroom balance out pretty well.

But with Aperure 2's performance increase (it is really noticeable), its new feature set and the new price, I'd put it ahead of Lightroom at the moment.

I'm running Aperture 2 on a couple of machines, a Mini with 2GB RAM and a Core Duo 1.6GHZ and a MacBook with 4GB RAM and Core 2 Duo 2.2GHZ. Obviously the MacBook has the better performance, but I've noticed a decent increase with the Mini, 1.5 felt quite bloated, but 2 seems to chug along quite nicely.

Bearing in mind that my Mini is on the Core Duo, and the new Minis are the Core 2 Duo chipset, it should be more than useable on a new machine.

If you are seriously thinking about a Mini with Aperture, then I'd take a trip to Meadowhell and see if they can give you a demo of it running on a Mini, see if the performance is something you'd be happy with, although the Aperture site does give the impression it should be fine on any current Mac (You'd ideally want 2GB RAM though).

Another point to consider is if you shoot RAW. On a Mini it would be a no-go, its just to slow to be anything but painful. For regular JPGs/TIFFs, you should be fine.

Wow, Aperture 2 is great :) Totally love the Retouch tools, and the Vibrancy tool is fabulous, using that in conjunction with a bit of saturation and contrast and many of my images dont need much more adjustment to have good look.

The RAW 2 engine is great too - the sharpening levels for my camera are much more appropriate, and I am doing less work on each image. Lovely stuff. Nice and quick too :)

Was hoping to get across to Apple store at Meadow Hell, looks like I will now go on Sunday.

Thanks for your thoughts.

I downloaded a trial version to see if it was worth using.
Not really sure if it is, as I couldn't import images. Well I could, but only one folder at a time. I couldn't just chooose 2007 folder and all subfolders. And as I was never gong to import all my images one folder at a time I didn't any point in going any further.
So if anyone knows how to enable importing of subfolders....BTW the Subfolders dialogue in import is greyed out and set to none.
Though the fact that it ignores your folder structure and doesn't seem to import both Jpegs + RAW are also deal breakers for me. And as for having to have a .mac account to make a web gallery!! :rant:

Part of Apertures performance increase is due to the fact it initially uses the inbuilt JPEG previews for first render [copied from PhotoMechanic], which allows you to sort through images more quickly.

I downloaded a trial version to see if it was worth using.
Not really sure if it is, as I couldn't import images. Well I could, but only one folder at a time. I couldn't just chooose 2007 folder and all subfolders. And as I was never gong to import all my images one folder at a time I didn't any point in going any further.
So if anyone knows how to enable importing of subfolders....BTW the Subfolders dialogue in import is greyed out and set to none.
Though the fact that it ignores your folder structure and doesn't seem to import both Jpegs + RAW are also deal breakers for me. And as for having to have a .mac account to make a web gallery!! :rant:

Part of Apertures performance increase is due to the fact it initially uses the inbuilt JPEG previews for first render [copied from PhotoMechanic], which allows you to sort through images more quickly.

You can import folders and sub folders - have a look at page 138 of the Aperture 2 manual (http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/Aperture_2_User_Manual.pdf) - the manual takes a while to load though !

I always made web galleries using jAlbum or RapidWeaver - much more flexible for what I wanted to do :)

EDIT - forgot to say on page 111 it says you can import the following file types :

Aperture is a QuickTime-compatible application, so it supports standard
QuickTime-compatible still-image file formats, as well as some other file formats
and file types. The following file types and formats can be imported:
 GIF
 JPEG
 JPEG2000
 PNG
 PSD (8- and 16-bit)
 DNG
 RAW files from a variety of supported digital cameras
TIFF (8- and 16-bit)

I currently have Lightroom, but am considering Apperture 2, so would welcome any feedback regarding the two.

You can import folders and sub folders - have a look at page 138 of the Aperture 2 manual (http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/Aperture_2_User_Manual.pdf) - the manual takes a while to load though ! Ta for link. Though with dial up speeds, it certainly does take a long time. Effing Virgin media!

I always made web galleries using jAlbum or RapidWeaver - much more flexible for what I wanted to do :) That's always been Apple's weakness, flexibility.

But with Aperure 2's performance increase (it is really noticeable), its new feature set and the new price, I'd put it ahead of Lightroom at the moment.Even with the reduced feature set Aperture has compared to LR? Web + Slideshow production are very poor in comparison. And no develop presets!?
And worse no fill light!
At Focus yesterday, the Aperture demo boasted how you do things in any order you wanted, therefore there was no need for a history facility. Wow, looks like Labour's spin doctors are working for Apple now.:hihi:
The price drop is commendable though. It was £500 when it first appeared - a little ambitious.

LR could do with smart folders though, daft not doing that as Adobe Bridge has that feature.

You can import folders and sub folders - have a look at page 138 of the Aperture 2 manual (http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/Aperture_2_User_Manual.pdf) - the manual takes a while to load though !
Nope, sadly Aperture cannot do it. It can only import the images, not the subfolders that contain them.
I have a well defined and easy to use folder heirachy that will survive any OS or Database, but Aperture ignoring that it is idiotic. But unsurprising as file management not Apple's best point.

OK spent a couple of hours with a Mac Pro on Saturday, my first thoughts...

Things I didn't like, that really thin aluminium keyboard (I prefered the older clear plastic type with white keys) and the mouse takes some getting used to with its pea size track ball. Two things which can easily be changed.

The build quality of the Mac Pro is excellent, the thing is well thought out, cables are kept to a minimum, only the optical drive using a ribbon cable, The four SATA drives plug straight into the motherboard. RAM is on two daughter boards making adding a doddle... remove the daughter board add memory plug board back in, no fiddle inside the case. Unusable for someone coming from a life of PCs it is the RH side which come of a MAC Pro rather than the LH side on the majority of PCs.

I thought it would take a while to find my way around the OS I asked the guy in the shop a few questions and away I went. Didn't find it difficult at all, obviously in the time I had I concentrated on playing with Aperture and Lightroom.

Lightroom worked as I expected, obviously I didn't take a big Lightroom library with me to test so it may grind to a halt even on a fairly powerful Mac, although I doubt it. As for Aperture I like the way I am able to do my work in one screen (much like Rawshooter, sadly sold and lost to Adobe). I can see a need for both Aperture and Lightroom. (I tried RAW images from three different Canon DSLRs 30D, 10D & 1DmkIII)

After working on the machine for a while I thought it was either a 3 or 3.2 Ghz 8 core model loaded with RAM, I was shocked to see it was an older 2.66GHz model with 2Gb of RAM!

Will I go the Mac route? I cannot see a reason not to, to build an Intel based work station to run Windows XP or Vista would be more expensive than the cost of a similar spec. Mac Pro, plus I can get a three year hardware warranty on Mac for about £160, obviously if something like a main board fails in a Mac I cannot simply buy any replacement motherboard.

Things I didn't like, that really thin aluminium keyboard (I prefered the older clear plastic type with white keys) and the mouse takes some getting used to with its pea size track ball. Two things which can easily be changed.
The wire on the wired mouse is a bit stiff and quite annoying to use as a result. So I recommend against that.

The build quality of the Mac Pro is excellent, the thing is well thought out, cables are kept to a minimum, only the optical drive using a ribbon cable, The four SATA drives plug straight into the motherboard. RAM is on two daughter boards making adding a doddle... remove the daughter board add memory plug board back in, no fiddle inside the case. Unusable for someone coming from a life of PCs it is the RH side which come of a MAC Pro rather than the LH side on the majority of PCs. Very nicely constructed, though very limiting when it comes to adding internal hard drives. I have 8 inside my PC and you can only fit 4 in the Mac.

I thought it would take a while to find my way around the OS I asked the guy in the shop a few questions and away I went. Didn't find it difficult at all, obviously in the time I had I concentrated on playing with Aperture and Lightroom. Some things are much better than PCs, somethings are much worse - dual monitors are a real pain on a Mac, but viruses are less of an issue.


Will I go the Mac route? I cannot see a reason not to, to build an Intel based work station to run Windows XP or Vista would be more expensive than the cost of a similar spec. Mac Pro, plus I can get a three year hardware warranty on Mac for about £160, obviously if something like a main board fails in a Mac I cannot simply buy any replacement motherboard.From a cost point of view you can buy a PC with way more memory, same chips, way more HD space, a large high end monitor and with a 3 year gaurantee, so not exactly a bargain. But If you want to be able to use both platforms, a Mac is your only option. But if you know what you are doing on a PC, there's no compelling reason to swap as once you are in most apps, they function almost identically. They look pretttier, but my PC is in a nice aluminium box [which predates Apple's metal box] and the OS is skinned to look like OSX.

Wooohoo - Aperture 2.1 is with us already - available by doing Software Update - the two new things I like are :

Dodge & Burn Plug-in. A sample plug-in is pre-installed, taking advantage of the Edit API introduced in Aperture 2.0. The plug-in adds brush-based tools for Dodge (Lighten), Burn (Darken), Contrast, Saturation, Sharpen and Blur.

Flip Images. You can now flip images horizontally or vertically within Aperture.

These two mean I can do most of what I want to do directly in Aperture now :)

Will be good to see what other plug ins they bring out.

Detailed documentation here (http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/Aperture_2.0_lbn_z.pdf) or the update

Not an Apple fan JezzyJJ?

I've downloaded the trial version of Aperture to give it a whirl, but I can't really see that it'll do anything Photoshop won't. I do get lost in Photoshop fairly frequently though (:

I've now got my nice new (expensive) Mac, Lightroom installed together with a trial copy of Aperture.

So far I prefer the cleaner uncluttered workspace of Aperture, although I've not had too much time to spend processing images, Aperture seems to do everything what to do to my images. (I prefer to keep all my post processing within one image processing application, I don't for example tend to use Photoshop).

This weekend I hope to go back to a few sets of images and process them in Aperture to see if the pplication suites my way of working and most importantly give me pleasing images.

As for this new Mac, I don't know why I didn't look at Macs ages ago, it really does just work! I work on a daily basis with Microsoft based machines, and this Mac is exactly what I need at home (working with my photos etc, not fixing Windows).

OK, so a few days living with a Mac and Aperture isn't really any measure of how everything will perform in the longer term, I will report back in future....

Now who has that Mac memory in stock ;)

Now who has that Mac memory in stock ;)

I've always found it cheapest to buy direct from Crucial. They make decent RAM that works well in your Mac and they usually deliver the right type. Whatever you do, don't buy from dabs!

My first purchase when I get a job next year is a new Mac. My MacBook is lovely, but it struggles a little, and there isn't enough storage space on it! (:

Not an Apple fan JezzyJJ?More not a fan of rabid Macolytes. Apple do some very good things and also some very bad things [just like MS], yet you'd never guess that from many sychophantic Mac users. Both systems are good and bad, albeit in different places. I find it annoying using either as I always miss the good points of the other system. And Apple stuff should be much better than a Windows box as Apple control the hardware and software, yet I find there's sod all difference. Leopard was not exactly short of bugs and much needed service patches.

I've downloaded the trial version of Aperture to give it a whirl, but I can't really see that it'll do anything Photoshop won't. I do get lost in Photoshop fairly frequently though (:Aperture or Lightroom are not PS replacements. They are designed to do quick global editing on large no.s of images.
PS is better for more detailed work on fewer images and LR/Aperture are both good at dealing with large shoots quickly, in theory. The reality is that you need a very fast machine + lots of memory. More so than for PS in fact.

So far I prefer the cleaner uncluttered workspace of Aperture, LR has a interface that completely disappears. If you want it to. the 'F' key cycles through the full screen modes and 'Tab' key hides the panels, just like in PS or Bridge. Or you can elect to show/hide whichever panels you want.

This weekend I hope to go back to a few sets of images and process them in Aperture to see if the pplication suites my way of working and most importantly give me pleasing images. I've tried Aperture and it's awful file handling of your images, means I won't even bother seeing how well it processes the images, as file handling is more of an issue than slight differences in processing. Having said that, Aperture is still lacking comapred to LR/ACR, even if Aperture has copiedsome features from ACR/LR.
And you cannot even use the web galleries unless you pay for a .Mac account.:rant: The other main reason I dislike Apple - control freakery.

As for this new Mac, I don't know why I didn't look at Macs ages ago, it really does just work! I work on a daily basis with Microsoft based machines, and this Mac is exactly what I need at home (working with my photos etc, not fixing Windows). Macs have problems too. OSX recently lost one of my storage hard drives, well Finder did. It was still there in PathFinder and even a complete reinstall didn't fix it. I had to wipe HDs and start over to sort it. A 1 week old machine!
Also most peole I know with Apples have had to return them fo some problem or other. I need to take mine in as the DVD drives makes an awful racket.

Some useful info here about Aperture 2.1 and the various plugins available for it.
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/content_page.asp?cid=7-9308-9356

Now this is where Aperture is currently better than LR, but I imagine these facility will have to come to LR. It's already there to some extent. I already use plugins for web galleries.

As for this new Mac, I don't know why I didn't look at Macs ages ago, it really does just work! I work on a daily basis with Microsoft based machines, and this Mac is exactly what I need at home (working with my photos etc, not fixing Windows).
Well since I've had my Mac I've had no end of problems. Finder Crashing, graphics card problems, idiots on the Genius Bar putting my memory in the wrong riser,which caused memory issues which I was told by another Genius [who missed the previous Genius's error] would be solved by buying more memory. It was solved in one sense as then I realised the mistake made by the Apple 'experts'. Also the machine is slower if I leave the old memory in due to way Macs use Memory, so I only have 4G rather than the 6G I own. Hard drives vanishing at random. Computer locking up, mouse randomly flicking cursor all over the place, it's the most unreliable machine I've ever purchased.:rant:
I was also informed by one Genius that he wouldn't touch a new OS version untill an x.5 update, which indicates a very difference attitude to the 'no problems' mantra of the sales staff. And which is of no help when buying a new machine as you get what comes with it. 10.5.3 certainly fixed a lot of bugs in Leopard. Apple advertise their product as being better than PC as they just work. Complete BS as most Apple users I know have had problems.
Screenshots below are of LR going mental [top] and PS having redraw issues[bottom ], on different occasions
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3224/2618092829_3af5566878.jpg