Intrusion
Intrusion - Flood waters at Cooleemee River Park, NC

Apple released Aperture 3 the other day with some impressive new features (Mac OS X only).

Apple Aperture is a photography workflow application similar to Adobe Lightroom. Aperture was actually initially released before Lightroom and the two have been competing since Lightroom was released soon after.

One which caught my attention was the multi-media video integration. With more cameras these days having the ability to make HD Videos it’s a nice feature keeping a standard/similar workflow for both photos and videos. I believe Aperture allows you to import the clips, move through the video, make multimedia slideshows and exports to video editing applications.

Aperture 3 also gained “face and place” features. Facial detection and recognition is a feature released in Apple’s consumer product iPhoto this past year and now has been included in Aperture. Aperture also now tightly supports geo-tags and geo-mapping of photos to locations.

A big improvement for Photographers on the go is the ability to sync/merge multiple libraries. Say your out shooting at a location and load the photos in a temporary Aperture library on your laptop. When returning home Aperture can easily merge this temporary library into the main one saving all data and edits. Aperture can syncs multiple libraries keep them updated and virtually the same.

Aperture 3 also has gained a new Brushes feature for retouching photos in a completely non-destructive manner.

At one time I used Aperture to manage my photographic process but ended up switching to Adobe Lightroom because I felt it offered a better workflow. With the release of Aperture 3 Apple has caught up with Lightroom 2 and pulled ahead with some new features. We’ll have to see how the final release of Lightroom 3 stacks up to this new challenge.

There is a free trial of Aperture 3 available for download.

Which ever product you may use, improvements of either Aperture or Lightroom is a benefit for all as it provides strong motivation for continual improvement of the whole product line.

7 Comments

  1. A fine picture of this flooded area. I like the viewpoint and placement of the swollen river in the frame.

    • Don, thanks, the water looks a little strange to me in this image but I think it’s because it was so red with mud before being converted to B&W.

  2. So Cool…wish i was a mac person!

  3. I too sometimes wish I was “a mac person”. Aperture has always intrigued me, probably because it’s supposedly faster than Lightroom. It certainly seems to be as intuitive as Lightroom and some of the stuff in version 3 appear to raise the bar a little. As you say, it will be interesting to see what the new version of LR looks like (I haven’t tried the beta version). But switching over to a Mac? Ah, there’s the rub. My PC is getting “old”, so a new one is somewhere on the horizon. Windows 7 will be a big enough transition, probably. A Mac would likely put me completely over the edge.

    • Paul, I spent years where part of my duties was user support for Windows computers and, to say the least, that was a frustrating job with the security and virus issues Microsoft was facing at the time. This experience caused me to look for alternatives at home and Linux wasn’t ready for prime time so I moved to Mac’s. I moved my wife to Mac’s a couple of years later and it has all but eliminated “computer support” from my home duties…what a relief. I’d certainly be considered a Mac fan.

      I liked Aperture when I was using it and it was a very difficult decision moving to Lightroom. I believe Aperture is faster and the new features certainly pull a little ahead of Lightroom 2. However, I’m not considering going back at this stage.

  4. I like that Apple still has this going – the ideas seem to bounce back and forth between Aperture and Lightroom to keep them both on their toes. I am sticking with Lightroom though, and looking forward to their v3 release soon!

    • I’ll stay with Lightroom as well, Mark. LR3 should offer some needed improvements to LR2, but I’m glad to see Apple keeping Adobe on their toes.