Mac Mondays: Aperture and Prosumer Photographers

Apple has announced its new tool for photographers to preview, import, organize, edit and output to your clients. Aperture is a postproduction application that “treats RAW images as JPEG� in terms of how easy it is to edit and control the process. The application also takes advantage of EXIF and META data to help you organize these proofs. This is not a Photoshop competitor but a tool to compliment Photoshop. With PSD support and more, you can use Aperture to help you do small edits to your photos and move those into albums, edit them in Photoshop then move them back into Aperture to exports to online printing engines such as Ofoto and .Mac or print them as contact sheets or other customized prints.

Now that we know what Aperture does, how does it his affect today’s digital photographer and how they get work done? Apple boasted that this helps photographers get back to what they are good at doing, “taking photographs� and removes the geekiness of moving these onto your computer, doing minor modifications then outputting for your clients to see. While I was working with a company we won’t name that makes computers and a popular music player, I met someone that is a wedding photographer and was convinced a 17� PowerBook was what she needed to help her get work done faster and deliver finished proofs of the wedding to her clients. She purchased a PowerBook with Photoshop CS and of course this came with iLife ’05 so she decided to use iPhoto. As many know, iPhoto caps out at 25,000 photos and then creates a new library but when it creates a new library, there is no option to choose library 1,2 or 3. She went through other software’s like iView Media Pro but none had the same ease of use which iPhoto had nor did it have support for RAW. Even Adobe’s Bridge application could not help her import, manage, edit and output her proofs and final images to clients.

Aperture is iPhoto for the rest of us and has everything a serious photographer to a professional need. This application does for pros what iPhoto did for the rest of us. The fact that this application is competing with Adobe’s Photoshop is a joke. Ask yourself this, “Does iPhoto competes with Photoshop?� The answer is no for many obvious reasons. This application will change the way we treat digital images and I believe is the final step to convince photographers that it really is easier to do things digitally. How amazing is it to fill your 1 gigabyte compact flash card with over 200 RAW images of San Francisco’s Fleet Week and when you come home, plug them into your Mac and launch Aperture and preview all of those RAW images side by side magnifying and choosing the images you want to import and those you want to trash. You import 50 great images and since they were all taken between 2 and 4PM, you choose the images at 2-2:30PM that are all taken from this angle and apply the necessary level and colorization modifications to that one image. Then you select all of those images and apply that profile to the ones in that same environment and that was all it took to do a apply a color profile to a batch of images. You can place these images in separate “smart folders� based on time, exposure, zoom and more since Aperture reads EXIF META data your camera give to each photo it takes. Your final step is sending a PDF contact sheet or to your .Mac account for your friend to chose which one he wants you to print for him. He chooses the image of the F-14 flying over Golden Gate and using Ofoto built into Aperture, he gets a poster-sized print in the mail within 5 business days.

Aperture is that easy and since editing these raw images is as easy as editing a JPEG, there is less waiting and more time for work. Aperture has built in support for Core Image and uses Quartz Extreme to do many of the renderings so if you are using a G5 Desktop or the latest iMac, there is zero waiting. This application is going to change the way we handle our digital images but who is it for? With a price tag of $499, Aperture is not for those photographing baby’s first steps. I have a thumb rule to this application; if your camera costs less than the application, you are not ready for Aperture. Another qualification that is not really necessary is for those that do not make money off their photography then they don’t need Aperture. For you, time is not money and you can keep using iPhoto since you are just a hobbyist or perhaps using Adobe Bridge since it comes with Photoshop CS2. I don’t need Aperture.

Adam Jackson is a freelance writer with over five years experience that focuses Macintosh technology. You can always contact him at support@mypersonalgetaway.com