Aperture 3 - what's it like?

Aperture 3 in action.

The new Aperture looks more like iPhoto, which comes installed on every new Mac as part of the (available separately) iLife '09. iPhoto is also Mac only, too, of course. But Aperture is the next step up for those who want to go beyond iPhoto – it's the Apple alternative to Adobe Lightroom, which is Mac and PC.

So the new Aperture 3 has Projects like iPhoto's Events, complete with skimmable stacks, a left side-bar where your albums can sit and so on.

Two of the standout new features of the latest iPhoto (iLive '09 version), Faces and Places, are another two iPhoto-derived features added in Aperture 3.

You can see the point immediately – professionals can run up huge catalogues of images of people and having to deal with 'You took a photograph of my Aunt Agnes a few years ago; can I have another copy please?' could entail laborious searches through databases or worse, yer actual filing cabinets. Places, likewise. A mate of mine, photographer Sean Craig, travels about taking pictures. He's one of many professionals who would, I'm sure, appreciate an instant search tool for finding all the pictures he took of that Ford Mustang in Invercargill using Places, or Kevin Rose bungie-jumping via Faces.

Aperture 3 also makes it easy to use an iPhone snap as the location data for a stack of pictures – take your high-res versions, and one iPhone snap to locate it, click on Places on the left and choose 'Import GPS Data from iPhone Photos ...' from the GPS menu at bottom left.

Of course, you can do this manually as well – simply click on Places in the left sidebar of Aperture in Library view, then drag the photo to the spot on the map where you shot it. A pin appears. Clicking on a located image along the bottom activates its pin in the map – you can right-click on the pin to get options including Move Pin.

Clicking the Faces icon under the Library tab on the left, then click Show Unnamed Faces presents all the faces in your collection which have not been tagged – Aperture 3 tries to ID the photos in your collection with faces in them, or you can manually assign names to them just like you can in iPhoto. Aperture uses your (free, Apple) Address Book contacts database to speed things up, making suggestions once you've started typing just as iPhoto does.

After you've named a few, Aperture starts asking you to confirm additional picks. After a certain point (often just 3-5 correctly labelled photos), Aperture assigns the correct name on subsequent imports – photograph that person again, and they're automatically added to their stack, even if they're part of large group photos.

Aperture 3 actually picks up existing Faces data from current iPhoto libraries. iPhoto supposedly handles a quarter of a million images, Aperture one million.

Names added to faces become converted to standard keywords when exported; if you publish the images straight to Facebook (another new feature), entering the corresponding Facebook IDs for images means they get automatic notification once they're in an online gallery.

Among the other new features, the new full screen browser is pretty cool. This works according to what button you press first, so if you click on Browser then press Full Screen at upper right, you get a full screen of thumbnails on a black background.

If you click on Viewer first, then Full Screen, you get thumbnails along the bottom of your monitor, but only when you move your mouse down there, like a Dock with disappearing turned on.

Any selected photo fills the screen. This works elegantly and lets you concentrate nicely on the images – you can also flip through them with the arrow keys on your keyboard if you don't want or need thumbnails. This really suits focused (ha ha) camera pros going through their collections. Just press the Escape key to get back to normal.

You can now customise the simplified Import browser to show only the import settings you want to use. Hiding unneeded options allows you to create a simpler, uncluttered Browser window.

You can also automatically apply adjustments to images as they are imported using new adjustment presets. You just have to make the preset first – but what a time saver if you know exactly how a certain camera shoots.

Adjustments have a few added twists, like brushable adjustments, but this is a bit of a coarse tool, even with Detect Edges turned on. I imagine pros will most likely use this as a quick look at enhancements they might then do later in Photoshop, turning them off in Aperture before saving the image out.

Not every Adjustment category lets you 'brush' – you click on the little Action icon in each palette (under Adjustments) but some, like White Balance, only offer Remove this Adjustment and Remove from Default Set, whereas Chromatic Aberration, Devignette, Noise Reduction, Enhance, Curves, Highlights & Shadows, Levels, Color, Black & White, Color Monochrome, Sepia Tone, Sharpen, Edge Sharpen and Vignette all let you brush.

Also, of course, accuracy would be a lot better if you used a tablet instead of a mouse.

You can apply multiple adjustments of a single type of adjustment to different parts of an image by creating multiple adjustment bricks for each adjustment.

For example, set one Levels adjustment for the sky, and another Levels adjustment brick for skin tones. To add a new instance of an adjustment, choose the Add New option from the Action pop-up menu in each adjustment brick, but once again, only some of the available adjustments have this feature.

Some preset brushes for common tasks (ie, skin smoothing) are also provided, under Quick Brushes, the top option under the menu that lets you turn Adjustment 'bricks' (or panels) on and off.

If you hold down the Shift key while moving an adjustment slider in the Adjustments HUD, the HUD vanishes, giving you an unobstructed view of your photo as you make adjustments. (These being the Heads Up Displays you turn on in the Window menu.)

Aperture 3 offers eight slideshow themes, including six from iPhoto '09 and two new themes: Watercolor (sic) Panels and Photo Edges. Choose New> from the File menu and choose Slideshow. These look really slick.

Books, like the excellent iPhoto books, are available too. You can choose a new 13x10-inch size (33x25.4cm) in any Aperture book theme, of which Photo Essay and Journal are new themes, making 11 in total.

You can see them all on the Aperture 3 page at Apple.

Performance

I found the previous Aperture (v2) quicker and more stable on my MacBook Pro, but it is a three-year-old MB Pro, with a bigger hard drive than standard and 4GB RAM.

But the 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo CPU has plainly seen better days, especially when compared to the latest. I had a couple of crashes with Aperture 3, and zooming into photos could be really slow. The video that shows on launch, that can tell you lots about the new features, sometimes really stuttered and misbehaved.

And yes, I applied all the updates. But my MacBook Pro has been pretty slow all round, lately. I have been looking at that ...

With Snow Leopard, though, the Mac can support up to 16 terabytes of memory, and Aperture 3 is fully 64-bit to take advantage of larger memory capacities. I imagine this would be most useful to working pros, considering the performance issues with my older machine, but there's still no default that I know of to tell your Mac OS 10.6x system to boot 64-bit every time. You still have to hold down the 6 and 4 keys on startup. Which seems silly, frankly.

Conclusion

Aperture 3 is a comprehensive update to a powerful package. It doesn't suit fine editing of images – you'll still need Photoshop for that – but rather a broad-stokes approach to enhancing and improving images. But if you have a powerful Mac, and you're serious about your photography, this is a must-have. Apple Aperture 3 costs NZ$349 (upgrade from A1 or A2 for $179).

A 30-day free trial is available at www.apple.com/aperture/trial.

- Mark Webster mac-nz.com