Photography: February 2008 Archives
A nice overview of the new features and changes in Aperture 2.0 by the Aperture Users Professional Network, which seems to bear out some of my own first impressions. Particularly interesting might be the plug-in API, especially if it will attract some of the PS Plug-In writers, thus obviating the need for a round-trip to PS in many circumstances.
Fraser Speirs seems to agree on the quality improvements in the RAW conversions, and has nice sample images here.
FWIW, here are some examples showing High-ISO shadow performance on a picture taken with a D70s at 1600 ISO, converted with standard settings through Aperture 2.0, Lightroom 1.3 and Capture NX 1.3, in this order:
The 100% crops show a nicely even and fine-grained noise background in the sky in the Aperture 2.0 conversions not matched by the LR or NX conversions (at least with standard settings). While not really visible in the crop above, low-contrast detail seems not to suffer as a side-effect of whatever Aperture is doing here, so this definitely seems a win for High-ISO work, like this hand-held shot at nightfall.
The crops above were all taken from the drainage pipe in the upper right of this overall picture of the Ammersee (to the west of Munich) at Nightfall:
Taken with a Nikon D70s, Sigma 10-20mm f4-5.6 zoom at 10mm, f4 and 1/25s, ISO 1600, hand-held.
So Apple has shipped the long-awaited 2.0 of Aperture, its professional photo-everything app, coinciding with the Mac OS X 10.5.2 update that ushers in (again long-awaited) support for Nikon D3, D300 and Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III.
Having settled on Adobe Lightroom for my photography needs, but cursing its lack of multi-monitor support, and always interested in alternatives, I took a quick peek using the trial version, to see what has changed since Aperture 1.5.
My first impression is that speed has definitely improved since 1.5, especially for GPU-starved computers like my old-but-trusty PowerBook G4 17” 1.5GHz with 2GB RAM. That said, on this computer Lightroom is still a bit snappier for most operations, especially those that trigger a full RAW reconversion, but Aperture is definitely usable, and I’d imagine things to be much better on a more high-end GPU than the old Mobility Radeon 9700 in the PowerBook.
I also definitely like some of the UI-improvements, since to me the old Aperture UI felt a bit over-tweakable and somehow cluttered, whereas out-of-the-box Aperture 2 feels fairly approachable.
The new RAW rendering engine seems faster, and I quite like the output I have seen so far (based on random D70s samples): Especially high-ISO images seem to have less chroma-noise and a more fine-grained appearance to their luminance noise, without loss of detail, compared to Lightroom and Capture NX, yielding a high-ISO film look that looks fairly pleasing. Take this first impression with a ton of salt, though, since I have only looked at a couple of pictures in detail, all of them from my D70s.
There is of course lots more in the new version, compared to Aperture 1.5, and I’ll definitely take a closer look, especially since the price for Aperture 2.0 seems to have dropped again, now to only $199.
I’ll probably post more of my impressions as I get to play more with Aperture 2.0.