‘Design Thoughts’ : rjslade

Two pieces of software affect my daily life – Apple Aperture and Adobe PhotoShop.

Sure the underlying OS for the Mac is also important and the latest 10.5.2 and the Video updates of this past week have gone a long way to changing the overall experience but Aperture 2.0 is big news to me.

The main details are available on Apples site http://www.apple.com/aperture/ There are supporting pages of new features, resources, tutorial and tech specs all available for there along with the ability to download a trial version and buy it , either new or as an upgrade. They have lowered the price by $100 and if you have recently bought the program Apple acknowledge that by lowering the upgrade price from 99$ to 9.95$ – the shipping cost! Short of getting it for free you could not ask for more!

Why Aperture rather than Adobe Lightroom ? A good question.

In my case it was not a choice limited by hardware. For a lot of people on older systems this can be an issue because Apple rely heavily on their new technologies to make the screen magic work fast. My oldest machine is a now ageing Dual 2GHz G5 with an older 20 inch apple screen. Apple are less hung-up on work flow, Adobe lets you do certain things to the images in certain modes of the program. While the work-flow is sensible and well thought out, it can be limiting. The Adobe program at first blush is a lot prettier onscreen.

For the heavy work of adding titles, photo descriptions, keywords, both programs are very good, but on keywords they are slightly different.

The only way I finally decided was to take a set of about 150 images and do the same things with both over the month that each program gave me the ability to run a free trial. It came down to the web output of the program. I want to be able to create most of the pages for out PHOTOempt web site directly from the program, but I have an idea of what I want those pages to look like. There was no method within LightRoom that let me customise to my satisfaction to output! I found this strange given the ability to modify web output from Adobe Photoshop – that is based on web templates in a folder called ‘Web Photo Gallery’ in the ‘presets’ folder of PhotoShop. This facility is buried within the LightRoom program.

Apples Aperture program is a ‘package’, a special folder that can be opened and allow you the user to see assorted parts of it, modifying them at your own peril, but also allowing you or other developers to add features to the program that are not in the base program. In fact this is one of the banner features of the new Version 2 – Apple have provided ‘hooks’ that allow developers to add image manipulation features to the program. More about that later.

Buried inside the application package is a folder of web themes, and those themes are based on standard CSS and HTML so if you know how to play with Dreamweaver of GoLive , the latter is my choice, or a similar program – code away! On the PHOTOempt site the three different types of galleries are created entirely by the program. In version 1, as the program was creating these pages, an export feature, you were prevented from continuing other work – I understand that this sort of export feature is now a background operation, allowing one to continue working.

To me it will be interesting to see if Adobe correct this over sight when they upgrade their program – I have mentioned it to one of their development team… Anyhow after the trial period I bought the program though our friendly VAR (LeRoy) and have been using it ever since. Or rather we have been using it – my wife, who is the photographer has been doing the text aspects and I have gradually introducing her to the image manipulation aspects of the program. That meant the procurement of a 2nd machine – an intel Apple iMac – 24 inch model. I am using that and she is using the older machine – at the moment. As she becomes more proficient at the computer, like most users she becomes more aware of being held up by speed issues – Did I mention that the new Version 2, screams on the intel iMac.

There are a lot of resources on the web for Aperture. I list some here:

• Inside Aperture : After Apples own excellent resource material – the manual was great – you all know the RTFM rule I presume – this was my next source if information. Also here is information of LightRoom vs Aperture.
• Bagelturf : This fellow – his name is Steve Weller works hard. Why the name Bagelturf – I have no idea. His e-book ‘Get your head Around Aperture’ was invaluable to me and I am sure that given what he charged for it, he is doing us all a service for next to nothing. It is sadly no longer for sale but the information is all available on his site. He has also put together a very comprehensive guide to the new versions material and working his way through the upgrading process. He has – to me – a nice way with words – good at explaining things. And he is interested not only in what the program can do, but how it actually works.
• Aperture Professionals : In the same way that PhotoShop spawned a whole subculture – so has this program. I doubt it will ever be as large, in that a lot of people, while toying with photography do not require the tools for content management that a professional photographer requires. This site is a good oneThis posting only covers this one subject . I have other material to post later today – time willing. I am writing this post using another piece of software, not Safari , nor Firefox , nor MacJournal but ecto .

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