thomas fitzgerald.net

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 !

After a two year wait Apple has finally released a new version of Aperture. The release has over 200 new features and I’m still absorbing all the information, but it looks like a great upgrade. It addresses the two biggest concerns people had about the previous version, which were the lack of a curves editor and the lack of adjustment presets. Both of which it now has, but goes one step further by having an “extended range” curves tool which lets you work with the full range of raw data.

I’ve started a “photo a day” project for the new year. Well, I started it on New Year’s day, but I’m only getting around to posting about it here now. I wanted to have a few day’s worth of posts on it before really publicizing it. I tried to do this last year too but it didn’t work out to well. I think I got to day 17 before I gave up. Now that I’m working from home though it should be a bit easier! Anyway, I’ll try to make it interesting so please pay it a visit and subscribe or check back regularly. Thanks

From Nikon Rumors:

After going through the rest of the survey, it was clear that this whole campaign was created to gather information/data for the Nikon D700 replacement. Here are some of the questions (those are not direct quotations):

[Read NPS survey in Europe – all about the D700 replacement | Nikon Rumors]

Over on my Photography blog, I discuss an idea as to how camera manufacturers could create a DSLR which never has the problem of dust on the sensor.

A little Video I did on the spur of the moment using the 5D Mark II. I’m beginning to like that I can do moving versions of scenes I would have previously captured as stills. I guess that’s why they call it “moving pictures”. Anyway, enjoy….

Autumn In the Park from Thomas Fitzgerald on Vimeo.

In my previous articles on this subject, I did my best to give you a reasonably objective opinion on the relative merits of each programme, however, I will admit that as I am an Aperture user, and I have preferred Aperture for a long time, I think that I was a little biased in that direction. However, recently I have started to give Lightroom another look for my full workflow, and I have to say, I’m beginning to see that maybe it might be the better choice for me after all.