Aperture 3 brushes are basically unusable

[RS1999ent]

Hi,

I recently upgraded to Aperture 3. In my opinion, it reeks of a product that is still in beta --- one that has been released several months too early. This is especially true of all the new brushes, which cause either excessive slowdowns, or aperture to crash. For example, I just spent 30 minutes waiting for Aperture to stop beach-balling after applying the selective black & white brush to a photo. Yesterday, Aperture crashed seven or eight times while trying to use the clone feature. In my opinion, these sort of crashes are unacceptable for a product that has been released and I'm very surprised to see this sort of issue from an Apple product.

There are other weird quirks too; every in one 100 times I use the retouch brush, aperture "zooms in" on a portion of the photo automatically. The preview in the bottom pane, however, remains unchanged.

I'm running Aperture 3.0.1 and have the prokit update.

I've seen rumblings about these issues on other forums, but wanted to bring it up explicitly here. Has anyone else run into these issues? Are these legitimate bugs, or is my laptop just not capable of using the brushes features---is it too old? I'm running a early 2008 macbook pro (2.4 GhZ/4GB of RAM).

 

[mike.coulter]

Your specs should be fine... Have you tried re-installing it or running a clean up app on your Mac?

 

[wheelhot]

Hmm, I would agree with you last week until I found out that the minimum RAM Aperture should have is 2GB and not 1GB.

Usually, when I run Aperture, I would have my browsers [Safari + Chrome] (loaded with the flash stuffs, multiple tabs and all), Adium, iTunes, iCal and this definitely slows down Aperture like mad, especially in full screen mode (no problems at all in Preview mode and doing the management side). One day my Mac crashed and I decided to give A3 a try without having anything open and guess what, running in battery mode in full screen, I am able to do the adjustments with almost no lag and brushes work much better then before. I assume if I had more RAM it will solve my A3 lag issue (if I decide to upgrade my RAM that is )

Alright, my mac is the first generation multitouch 15" MBP with 2GB of RAM. So as it seems, there is something weird going on with ur Mac. Have you tried just running only A3 after a fresh system boot up?

 

[RS1999ent]

Usually, when I run Aperture, I would have my browsers [Safari + Chrome] (loaded with the flash stuffs, multiple tabs and all), Adium, iTunes, iCal and this definitely slows down Aperture like mad, especially in full screen mode (no problems at all in Preview mode and doing the management side). One day my Mac crashed and I decided to give A3 a try without having anything open and guess what, running in battery mode in full screen, I am able to do the adjustments with almost no lag and brushes work much better then before. I assume if I had more RAM it will solve my A3 lag issue (if I decide to upgrade my RAM that is )

Yeah, I'm already running w/4GB of RAM---I can't put anymore in it Also, its *not* just a RAM or paging issue; CPU usage jumps up to 100% and stays at that amount when applying brushes. When normally using aperture, it uses about 800MB of RAM. With brushes, I've seen it jump as high as 1.6GB. I'm usually not running much else; though, I haven't made it a point to explicitly shut down every other application before running aperture.

The way aperture slows to a crawl and crashes though, really makes me thing that all this has to do w/some inefficiency or problem within the program.

Alright, my mac is the first generation multitouch 15" MBP with 2GB of RAM. So as it seems, there is something weird going on with ur Mac. Have you tried just running only A3 after a fresh system boot up?

I'm pretty careful w/my laptop and I've seen some other complaints about these issues w/Aperture 3 as well. My intuition is that the new brushes in aperture just aren't ready for prime time.

 

[wheelhot]

My intuition is that the new brushes in aperture just aren't ready for prime time.

Definitely agree with you on this one.

On the other hand, I heard that Aperture uses RAM as its temporary storage which explains why it has such a huge RAM usage, whereas Lightroom utilizes both the HDD space and the RAM as a temporary memory. So if this is true, I guess Apple should look into using the HDD as a temporary space? and with all the GCD and OpenCL in SL, I feel that Apple didn't use em in A3?

 

[VirtualRain]

I haven't experienced any issues with brushes or otherwise. However, I'm using a 2.93GHz quad core Mac Pro with 6GB of RAM and SSD's in RAID0... an admittedly extreme system for this kind of work. Never the less, I have used multiple brushes rather extensively in a couple of editing sessions without seeing a beach ball. However, if it takes a system like mine to run Aperture smoothly, that's simply unacceptable.

What else is running on your system when you are using Aperture? Perhaps try restarting your Mac and then use Aperture without any other apps running to see if that improves things?

 

[RS1999ent]

What else is running on your system when you are using Aperture? Perhaps try restarting your Mac and then use Aperture without any other apps running to see if that improves things?

Nothing really intensive --- I usually have my mail application open, an application called "Things," and maybe safari active w/o any windows. I did reboot and run the standard maintenance scripts this morning, so we'll see if that helps...though I doubt it.

I'm kinda curious --- have you been using brushes w/new photos, or on photos imported from a previous aperture library and reprocessed? I wonder if that has something to do with the problem.

Btw, clearly I'm not the only user experiencing this problem:

http://www.paulinskipphotography.co.uk/aperture-3-day-two
http://www.flickr.com/groups/aperture_users/discuss/72157623461661438/
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=11216751

My guess is that the problem is caused by either an inefficient implementation by apple, thus allowing only more powerful machines to execute brushes w/o problems, or due to some issue with photos that were originally part of an aperture 2 library. Not sure which, but I hope apple fixes it soon

Btw, everything else about aperture 3 is much better and faster than aperture 2. It's really just the implementation of brushes that seems buggy.

 

[thomasrboyd]

Be sure and try using Aperture in the 32-bit mode and turn off faces.

There's comprehensive information on Aperture 3 here: http://aperture.maccreate.com

 

[VirtualRain]

Nothing really intensive --- I usually have my mail application open, an application called "Things," and maybe safari active w/o any windows. I did reboot and run the standard maintenance scripts this morning, so we'll see if that helps...though I doubt it.

I'm kinda curious --- have you been using brushes w/new photos, or on photos imported from a previous aperture library and reprocessed? I wonder if that has something to do with the problem.

Btw, clearly I'm not the only user experiencing this problem:

http://www.paulinskipphotography.co.uk/aperture-3-day-two
http://www.flickr.com/groups/aperture_users/discuss/72157623461661438/
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=11216751

My guess is that the problem is caused by either an inefficient implementation by apple, thus allowing only more powerful machines to execute brushes w/o problems, or due to some issue with photos that were originally part of an aperture 2 library. Not sure which, but I hope apple fixes it soon

Btw, everything else about aperture 3 is much better and faster than aperture 2. It's really just the implementation of brushes that seems buggy.

I have used brushes on both new and imported images from my previous library (brushes turned out to make a nice improvement to one of my previously hellish photos).

Perhaps it is very inefficient, but with my hardware, it's not rearing it's ugly head. I wouldn't take my experience as any kind of evidence the problem is not legitimately performance related.

 

[iTiki]

I run Aperture 3 in 32 bit mode due to some plug-ins I use only run in 32 bit. Aperture is running perfectly and have no issues using brushes. Might want to give 32 bit mode a try.

 

[wheelhot]

Hmm, so far I only used brushes on new images. Shall try on old images when I get home.

I used A3 in both 32 and 64 before and don't notice a huge difference in speed. The only thing I realize was slower is the adjustments preset preview mode, it takes longer to load in 32 bit, I'm guessing it has something to do with the 32bit vs 64 bit thing? Oh and I didn't know that to use certain plug ins, you are required to run A3 in 32 bit mode

Well I do like the new brushes though, really easy and fast to use. It's a pity that brushes doesn't work smoothly and from what I see, only those who uses the high end iMacs or MacPros that doesn't suffer the usual BBOD when using brushes.

Hmm, now a MacPro with the Dell U2711 monitor is starting to tempt me. For those owners of a MacPro. I know it is expensive but how long do you guys plan to keep em? Before upgrading/buying a new MacPro perhaps? And for photographers, does a Quad vs Octa core really make a difference or it is mainly RAM and GPU memory (also are they any significance difference between 4x Nvidia GPU vs 1 Nvidia GPU vs 1 ATI GPU?)

 

[chrono1081]

I didn't get to read the whole thread so sorry if this was mentioned but do you have the 3.0.1 update?

I too thought the brushes were unusable until the update. Now I love A3 and switched from Lightroom (which I've been using since beta until now).

 

[VirtualRain]

Hmm, now a MacPro with the Dell U2711 monitor is starting to tempt me. For those owners of a MacPro. I know it is expensive but how long do you guys plan to keep em? Before upgrading/buying a new MacPro perhaps? And for photographers, does a Quad vs Octa core really make a difference or it is mainly RAM and GPU memory (also are they any significance difference between 4x Nvidia GPU vs 1 Nvidia GPU vs 1 ATI GPU?)

Honestly, a Mac Pro Quad is a very nice machine but probably overkill for photographic work unless you use Photoshop and a ton of layers. I certainly would not suggest an Octo core. There are very few workloads that can take advantage of that kind of parallelism.

Most people can get 4-5 years out of a Mac Pro. Personally, I upgrade my computers every 2-3 years.

I'm not sure what, if any, post processing software is making use of GPU's. Perhaps someone else knows the answer to that.

EDIT: This is off topic... PM me if you want more info or head over to the Mac Pro forums here!

 

[mrkgoo]

Yeah, I'm already running w/4GB of RAM---I can't put anymore in it

Not entirely true - I have the same MacBook Pro, and I'm running 6GB of RAM. Aperture works ok, but not as well as it did before I imported my 30,000 iPhoto library. I have a feeling it's to do with my new HD as well.

MY Mac will occasionally beachball when using Aperture 3, but nothing major.

 

[wheelhot]

Not entirely true - I have the same MacBook Pro, and I'm running 6GB of RAM. Aperture works ok, but not as well as it did before I imported my 30,000 iPhoto library. I have a feeling it's to do with my new HD as well.

MY Mac will occasionally beachball when using Aperture 3, but nothing major.

Hmm, is the early 08 MBP is the one with the first multitouch trackpad?

And in the manual says the max RAM capacity is 4GB if I'm not mistaken, so you are saying that 6GB works too? what about the extra 2GB then? Cuz I am also thinking of upgrading my MBP RAM, hopefully it improves A3 speed.

VirtualRain, thanks! shall check on the MacPro forums and perhaps PM you

 

[Patriks7]

The first time I launched the new Aperture, it was VERY slow. But after a couple times, it has been getting better and better. I'm guessing that there is too much info for it to process at once, especially if you have a lot of pictures.

 

[mrkgoo]

Hmm, is the early 08 MBP is the one with the first multitouch trackpad?

And in the manual says the max RAM capacity is 4GB if I'm not mistaken, so you are saying that 6GB works too? what about the extra 2GB then? Cuz I am also thinking of upgrading my MBP RAM, hopefully it improves A3 speed.

VirtualRain, thanks! shall check on the MacPro forums and perhaps PM you

Yup.

It's officially stated that 4GB is supported, but many users have installed 6GB. Not sure if it's your issue or not. There's a huge thread about it here:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/573906/

 

[RS1999ent]

The first time I launched the new Aperture, it was VERY slow. But after a couple times, it has been getting better and better. I'm guessing that there is too much info for it to process at once, especially if you have a lot of pictures.

My library isn't really that big by most standards, I think---only 50GB or so. There's an option to get aperture to tell you what background tasks are currently running, and which ones are queued up. For several hours after installing aperture 3, this window listed 'Detecting Faces' as the only task executing. That has now completed and there is no more pending background activity.

Yup.
It's officially stated that 4GB is supported, but many users have installed 6GB. Not sure if it's your issue or not. There's a huge thread about it here:

Yeah, I've seen people claim that 6GB works (not sure why 8GB supposedly slows the system down to a crawl though). I think it's kinda sad if one needs 6GB of memory to perform a simple clone or retouch operation in aperture though. Photoshop Elements definitely doesn't require this much memory.

I didn't get to read the whole thread so sorry if this was mentioned but do you have the 3.0.1 update?

Yep, i have the 3.0.1 update. From reading threads, 3.0.1 seems to have solved issued w/slowness due to face detection and a memory leak in some base library. I made it a point to install 3.0.1 before importing my aperture 2 library.

 

[RS1999ent]

^ okay, I take part of that back. It's not clear that aperture has problems when using the clone or retouch brushes; I think it might just be the 'selective' ones.

 

[romanaz]

I've tested what you have been saying here, on my 2007 2.4ghz macbook pro w/ 6gigs of ram and I have no problems using any of the brushes on new or old photos. Of course I had to wait days after upgrading my library for faces to stop processing (but it was SOO worth it).

Are you keeping your Aperture library on your internal drive? And if your using an external (either to keep the library on, or your photos), how is it connected?

 

[wheelhot]

Yup.

It's officially stated that 4GB is supported, but many users have installed 6GB. Not sure if it's your issue or not. There's a huge thread about it here:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/573906/

Thanks for the link, mine is supported

But with the 6GB config, it means I'll be running 4x2GB of RAM, I heard people say that configuration is not good and a 2x2GB (Total 4GB Ram) is better?

 

[romanaz]

Thanks for the link, mine is supported

But with the 6GB config, it means I'll be running 4x2GB of RAM, I heard people say that configuration is not good and a 2x2GB (Total 4GB Ram) is better?

I'm having no issues running that configuration, Aperture 2 and Final Cut, Color and Motion sped up quite a bit when I went from 2-4-6.

 

[mrkgoo]

Thanks for the link, mine is supported

But with the 6GB config, it means I'll be running 4x2GB of RAM, I heard people say that configuration is not good and a 2x2GB (Total 4GB Ram) is better?

6GB will generally give you more reward than the small loss of performance due to being unmatched.

 

[nepfotos]

No problems with the use of the brushes here, Aperture 3.01 (64 and 32 bit mode) and 2008 Octo-MacPro.

 

[sery76]

My problem is somehow i lost retouch brush hud. It just appears on adjustment menu but i can't see the hud for the brush settings...