(no subject)
Hello! I have just returned from Mac Expo in London, and I thought I'd jot down a few of the killer features of Aperture.
These are just a few of the demoed features I can remember which impressed me. It is a pricey piece of software, though (less so if you are an educational type), and it has fairly hefty hardware requirements, too. But I'm still pretty convinced, and when I am rich and famous (as a wedding photographer, naturally), I will invest in a dual G5 with Aperture ;-)
- It deals with huuuge RAW files like they were tiny JPEGs
- All alterations to photos have no effect on the source file - cropping, colour alteration, etc etc
- It has a mode geared to reviewing the many many shots one might come back from a wedding shoot with, for example. It groups them smartly into what it thinks are "scenes" - using shot timings, I think. If you wish, you can then group a "scene" into a stack.
- These stacks may then be viewed, rated, and if desired, a 'stack pick' selected - i.e. the best picture of the bunch
- The loupe tool - this is a great one: when you are viewing multiple shots, you can run the loupe (a magnifying glass tool) over the images, and see quickly which shots are in focus. Another method of doing this is a hotkey to instantly zoom to 100% on all, say, 4 images you are comparing for quality
- Lift and stamp for alterations - if you have, for example, just corrected the white balance on a photo and all the rest of the set of 500 have a similar problem, you can "lift" the white balance alteration and "stamp" it on the other photos. This also applies to keywords, and any other alterations you can make to an image
- Smart web albums. This is probably not something I would use an awful lot, but it is clever nonetheless. You could make an album of all the 5-star photos from a wedding shoot, and have them laid out on a web page. You can then drag and rearrange the pictures as you please (guides automagically appear to help you line them up), and then either save a PDF for emailing (this is ludicrously fast) or upload as an HTML gallery to a server.
- Perhaps most importantly, It's not trying to be Photoshop. Instead, you can farm an image out to Photoshop in the course of your workflow, and include this in your Aperture collection - put it in a stack or whatever.
These are just a few of the demoed features I can remember which impressed me. It is a pricey piece of software, though (less so if you are an educational type), and it has fairly hefty hardware requirements, too. But I'm still pretty convinced, and when I am rich and famous (as a wedding photographer, naturally), I will invest in a dual G5 with Aperture ;-)