Jason Tag Photography

So after a week of working with the New version of Aperture, here’s my official report on it. Forgive for geeking out. There will be example photos that hopefuly, will make it worthwhile reading.

I had been hearing good, good things about Aperture from the beginning. Other photographers I know had talked to me about it and had strong feelings about it’s capabilities. Of course that’s to be expected from anyone using Apple products. However a few had said that they would stake their careers on the software. Now I understand why. At $199, it wasn’t too bad to get into it. Photoshop CS3 is currently going for $649. SO price wise it fit better for my budget.

From the moment I opened it up I could tell that I was in for a treat. I didn’t bother with watching the tutorials, I just jumped in. That’s pretty much how I do everything, It works for me and I figure why stop now. When I plugged in my card reader to start transfering images to the computer a box popped up asking me if I wanted to use iPhoto or Aperture to import photos. I selected Aperture and immediately Aperture opened with the import screen. I started importing before I realized that I needed to create a project to import into. But it was easy to move the files into a new project after the import So it wasn’t a big deal.

Once I got the photos imported, I selected one of them in the browser window and found the adjustments tab on the left pretty easy. There are a series of modules that can be opened and closed that provide you with all the features that you might want right away. And there are more that you can add if you need them. This was a stroke of genius I thought because you can keep the adjustments area clean and organized and only use what you need.

Aperture works on the raw camera files and supports tons of proprietary manufacturer raw formats. I was a bit concerned because the Olympus Raw format which my camera uses took a quite a while to get support in Photoshop. I was pleased to find that it is supported in Aperture. For me using Aperture removes two step s in the process of editing. In the past I would process the RAW files and transfer them to uncompressed TIFF’s before editing in the software that came with my camera and then I would open each image individually in Photoshop to begin editing. Now all I do is import into Aperture and then start editing.

Once you start editing the program is a breeze. The exposure adjustments are quite powerful allowing you to bring the exposure value up a little if it seems a bit dark. As far as I can tell this doesn’t bring in nearly as much noise as using curves in photoshop to do the same thing. Of course some noise will show up but Aperture does have a built in noise suppression to help with this. The photos below show a before and after with the exposure settings.

And there there is the Monochrome Mixer. As you may know I can never decide between color or black and white. I love the color images I’m taking but I also love the same images as black and whites. When I edit my photos I always create a color version and a black and white version of every image. The Monochrome Mixer in Aperture in quite good allowing you to use the RGB channels combined to convert the image or you can use the red, green, blue, yellow, and range channel individually. When using the red channel to convert the image to grayscale you get a similar effect to shooting on infrared film.

Overall I give Aperture a wicked thumbs up. It’s powerful, yet simple to use and understand. Of course I can’t get rid of photoshop completely because Aperture only does photos. Photoshop is great for digital painting but you can be sure that I won’t be using it to edit photos…thanks to Aperture.