thomas fitzgerald.net

I’ve discovered a possible cause and solution to some of the speed issues people are having with Aperture. You can read about it on this post over at my new Aperture blog, called, funnily enough, “The Aperture Blog”.

I’ve started a new blog dedicated to Apple’s Aperture. I’ve been posting a lot about Aperture lately, and rather than have this taken over by the subject, I’ve set up a separate blog for it. Please check it out and leave feedback. I’ve also set up a separate twitter account for it too, so please follow that as well if you want!

Hot on the heels of Aperture 3 and 3.0.1 comes another Photo related update from Apple adding support for another bunch of Cameras. Of particular note (due to it’s absence from Aperture 3) is the popular Panasonic GF1.

Fresh off the digital presses, Aperture 3.01 has been released which hopefully will address a lot of the issues people were having. From the accompanying support document, the problems addressed are:

1. Upgrading libraries from earlier versions of Aperture
2. Importing libraries from iPhoto
3. Importing photos directly from a camera
4. Memory usage when processing heavily-retouched photos
5. Face recognition processing
6. Adding undetected faces using the Add Missing Face button
7. Printing pages containing multiple images
8. Printing photos and contact sheets with borders and metadata
9. Editing photos using an external editor
10. Display of images with Definition and Straighten adjustments applied

Many people seem to be having some serious stability issues with Aperture 3, and while I did initially, it seems to be fine now. I’ve been running it for the last few days and it hasn’t crashed on me once. I’m not sure what, if anything I did – but in the interests of those with issues here are a few things I did that you might want to try.

I’ve been playing around with the new adjustments options in Aperture 3 and I’m really impressed. Here’s an example. It’s a pretty bland image to start with.

Note the sky is completely burned out. The recovery slider would only bring it back in so far, but thanks to the new extended range curves adjustment I was able to recover much more of the sky. Here’s the final result after playing around for about half an hour:

I’ve only had a little time to play around with Aperture 3 (as I’m still recovering from a fairly serious illness) but I thought I’d post my first impressions. I had installed the trial version on my laptop and when the boxed version came in the post I put it on my main machine. I should point out that both are about two years old. My laptop is a core2duo 2.4ghz and my desktop is a 24″ iMac 2.4ghz. In no particular order then here are some thoughts on the software:

Aperture 3 is an amazing upgrade. People had begun to worry about the future of the software, as it was two years since the last version came out, but I can see now that they’ve been doing some major work under the hood. I feel silly for doubting Apple’s commitment to the product now. What I find interesting though is that some of the features Apple has chosen to highlight as part of the marketing bumph, namely places and faces, while understandable from a marketing point of view, are not the software’s greatest additions. They really have put a lot of thought into this release and it addresses pretty much all the concerns most people had about it. It more than bridges the gap with Lightroom. There are so many new features though that it can be difficult to get your head around all of them. So then, here are my top ten, in reverse order !