Customer Reviews

Apple Aperture 1.1 (Mac) [Old Version]

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This program took me back to my dark room days of "Light Table" & "Loupes". Aperture definitely brought back memories of many hours pouring over negatives and slides and heading to the dark room to try out different techniques. Instead of hours looking through the loupe and messing with smelly chemicals to create different versions of your photos, you can now do it all on your computer right in front of your clients with a few clicks of the mouse. If you have two monitors setup you can do all of your work on one and show the clients the end result on the other monitor all very effortlessly.

A note about this program it is a beast when it comes to your system requirements you need at the minimum 1GB of RAM, at least a MAC with a 1.8Ghz processor for the G5's or a Powerbook G4 with 1.25Ghz or faster. Plus the latest Tiger and a good graphics card otherwise the program won't even load.

Essentially Aperture which can run natively on Intel and PowerPc- based Mac's is a great tool for professional photographers that allows for easy import, organization and "basic" adjustment and storage of photos.

There are many ways to import your images into Aperture. You can load directly from the camera or a storage device. You can also use existing photos that you may have on your hard drive(s). You can also import from your IPhoto library. Native RAW format as well as Jpeg, Gif, Tiff, PNG, PDF & PSD2 formats all work very easily in Aperture.

With the digital world we now have tons and tons of images on our hard drives and storage devices instead of hard copies when we all would have hundreds of prints, slides and negatives to store, and catalogue. Aperture makes the cataloguing part much easier. Aperture has a high performance database that allows you to add keywords to an image. Or you can use the star rating system to show the best of the best. You can setup Smart Albums based on your metadata queries. Or organize your photos into projects or albums. Within these systems you can create many different versions of your images. So if you want to tint and tone or apply a sepia toned effect no more smelly chemicals just make a copy of the photo you would like to see with some variation and presto like magic you can have those images in Black and White or with a tighter crop.

Don't worry Aperture does not touch your original image at all. Aperture creates a version of the digital master your original photo. Instead of making actual copies of the same image with variations which as we know can eat up lots of storage space Aperture uses a set of instructions for each image pretty much code that is read by the computer to store and show the different versions so those large RAW files aren't duplicated on your hard drive hogging that much needed space.

Aperture is at its best when working with RAW images. So instead of the multiple steps that some of us had gotten used to with converting our images and waiting forever for the process, Aperture now makes it a very streamlined process. Aperture supports many of the high end digital cameras from Canon, Nikon as wells as other brands and some compact cameras. You can visit the website to see if your camera is part of the lucky group.

When you import your photos you can create Stacks for rapid sorting. By Stacking your images you can have a more organized work space. Basically you can create Stacks in a number of ways you can have your images stacked if you shoot in burst mode or if you bracket your shots. The Auto Stacker lets you choose the time frame that you shot your images in to create a stack. You can also manually create Stacks. A number appears on the bottom left of the first photo in your stack to let you know how many photos are in that Stack. You can layout a Stack and then collapse it when done.

The library for Aperture allows you to get a handle on your photos. You can create nested folders to organize and view your images. You can also use albums within a project to organize and group photos in as many ways that you can think of all geared to how you work best.

We all should have heard of Metadata by now. Thats all the nifty stuff that tags along on your photo. In Aperture it displays the standard stuff like camera type and focal length and lots of other info. You can add keywords to the Metadata file, copyright info, caption plus loads more. You can make that image appear in different searches if you want to. Some of the data you add can be straight across the board if all of the images in that batch are from the same photo session or you can customize it for each image.

Then there are Queries and Smart Albums. With Queries you may want to see all the photos that you took during the winter, or all the images with water in them just set your criteria and those images will appear. With Smart Albums you can setup the album to include all images with snow in it, between a certain time frame and the query will find the images also any new images that you take with the keywords snow will also be added to the Smart Album. You can get really precise and detailed when setting up Smart Albums.

Aperture also has vaults for your photos which make backups a regular part of your workflow. When you create a backup Aperture automatically mirrors your entire Aperture Library on any Firewire drive that you designate as a "vault". You can have multiple vaults with some of your work being saved offsite. Once the vaults are setup Aperture lets you know if your vaults are in sync with your Library. Black means you're up to date, Yellow means that the master files in the library are backed up but that there have been changes since the last update and Red means that at least one of the master files has not been backed up.

Aperture also has One-Step Archiving. The archive contains all of your project data, to include the masters, all of your versions and metadata which you can burn to a DVD. Everything is self-contained. You can open and import the project into Aperture if you need to go back to it.

In the middle of learning about this program I started using two monitors and man-o-man that's the way to fly with this program. You can move your palettes around and setup the screens to get the most out of your particular work style. The HUDs or heads-up displays are great to put on the other monitor when you are working. The HUDs are floating adjustment controls that you can open and close as needed. So if you like to have certain info at a quick glance position the HUD to where you would like it to be.

As with many programs you can customize your workspace and toolbars. There is a great Full-Screen workspace that works awesome with two monitors. When working with two monitors you have so many options to choose from. You can span the entire screen over both monitors, use one monitor to compare images, stack images three, four and more deep lets just say you can set this up to the way you really work. In the tool bar just drag and drop the features that you use the most and take out the ones that you don't use that often.

The digital loupe is a free floating magnifier that lets you really see if that image is as crisp as it appears. You can view any portion of an image at 100% resolution this also includes RAW images which are decoded on the fly by Aperture. It was great to really quickly look through the images to find the ones that were nice and sharp.

Back in college I remember when room at the light tables were at a premium some days. It was great when it was your turn to look at all of your negs/slides and spread everything out. With Apertures' Light Table you can lay it all out. You can move your images around to create little clusters that work well together. You can do a story book layout before placing the images in a book or use the light table to compare which image looks best. When using two monitors the light table works like a champ. So while you have all of your images on one screen any image you select can be viewed at full size on the other. Plus the light table expands as you add more images so you don't have to resize the canvas manually every time you add something to it. You can save your layout in a Light Table album you can in fact create multiple Light Table layouts for a client and print it out in a high res PDF file for your client to review.

Some of the photo adjustments controls include RAW fine tuning, exposure & levels, color & white balance, composition, filters & effects and the very much appreciated red-eye correction, plus the spot & patch control. The great thing about the adjustments once you have applied an adjustment to one image you can apply the same adjustments to any other image(s) you would like using the Lift tool. Then apply the Lift and Stamp to apply the adjustments to multiple images. You can also sharpen an image however it sharpens the entire image you cannot select just the eyes for example. Sometimes having the entire image sharpened may not be what you want so just pop the image over to your other photo editor which in my case is Photoshop and make your necessary changes and then bring it back to Aperture. You can send an image to Photoshop as a 16-bit PSD or TIFF file with a click. Once you are done with Photoshop, Aperture then creates a new version of that image in the Aperture library leaving the master untouched.

Aperture also supports PSD files so you can go between the Aperture library and Photoshop where you can apply other effects like text, masking and compositing.

I really loved the versions approach. Your original version is never touched the program creates a small separate file that references the original image. This is great because it doesn't slow down your hard drive with multiple copies of the same image. You can make adjustments galore and show what the image can look like with different tints, tones, crops etc and all of the versions associated with a particular image are stacked together so you don't have to worry about where did that file go.

After all of the tweaking you can make great contact sheets, proofs and prints for your clients. You can make prints yourself or order them through Aperture. You also have the capability of making professional web pages. There are customizable templates for web pages to showcase your photos. Aperture does it all you don't have to know code to create you own web page. There are two different types of pages in Aperture web galleries and web journals. With web galleries Aperture creates the appropriate number of pages of your images once you specify the number of rows and columns that you would like. What's great is you can adjust image size and positioning of these images plus there is a setting in the Export dialog that lets you watermark your images. Whereas web journals offer more extensive with creative options. Use the Webpage editor to create pages that combine groups of photos with paragraphs of text just like a journal. You can publish these layouts if you have a .Mac account or you can put them on another server using FTP software.

The coolest part of all of this is the Custom Book Publishing. You can design a custom book of your images either for your clients or to showcase your best work. The templates are really customizable. There are some themes available and you can build up from these themes to give the book your special touch. The choices include a Proof Book, Stock Book, Picture Book, Special Occasion Book and Art Collection Book. So go ahead and arrange, group, resize, colorize apply filters to your hearts content. Add a story to your photos to really make that trip come alive or document a wedding for a special client telling about their courtship to the wedding. It is best to print the pages out yourself to make sure everything looks great before ordering the book. Once you have checked that everything looks great go for it and get that hard back book to share with your family and clients.

If you have the first version which is Aperture 1.0 you MUST get the updates for the program and load them in the correct order. The updates fixes many of the bugs that lock the system up, colorization issues and many other little tweaks that get the program running in the right direction for you.

I was not a great fan of iPhoto it just made too many copies of my photos and finding all the locations was just getting to be too much so I did all of my editing and reviewing in Photoshop. Now with Aperture I can really set things up the way I would like and then head to Photoshop for my fine tuning of specific photos. Between the two programs I think I have found the best of both worlds. With the new lower price I think if you have lots of photos be you a Professional or Amateur you will enjoy using Aperture. There is a bit of getting used to with all of the drop downs menus, layout options and the HUDs but once you have mastered that you will find that keeping track of your images is much easier and the ability to make changes on the fly worth it.

As an amateur photographer slowly turning semi-pro, this software makes my life easy. The updates from Apple were free, 2 now, and the changes are great.

I did lose some files during some whacky glitch that happened, causing me to learn some hard lessons about backing up before erasing the flash cards. Also, don't go messing with where the library lives unless you really know what you're doing.

The cataloging and rating systems alone are worth the price of admission. I still go to photoshop for really intricate touch-ups, but for most shots we're good to go right from Aperture. Easy user interface. Easy to learn. Good to go.

Aperture does not communicate well with other devices such as scanners and USB storages and other softwares such as ilife.
It makes some projects very difficult such as making DVDs and Movies with photos.
It offers less functions such as effects and provides unnecessary features which make things complicated.
I bought it so I will deal with it. But I wish I can reverse my decision.
However, it is easy to publish (of course it cost money). Apple company is trying to make money at every corners as you know.
I was going to buy a movie production software, but at this point I will hold the purchase.

Do not buy this version. The new version is the one you want. This is abhorently slow. The new ones faster though still not as fast as Adobe lightroom.
the new version is 4 1/2 stars I gave this version one to get your attention

Even with a system that meets Apples specifications I find Aperture is so slow, it's almost unusable. Unfortunately I bought the academic version of the program, so I won't qualify for upgrades. Wish I'd done more research before purchasing this program..

The program is perfect, I love it so much! The best one on the market. I tried Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture for me is better.