Some noob questions about Aperture

[MCAsan]

Correct. There will be a different flow compared to DAM->plugin->DAM.

What I am referring to is that fact that only Aperture and LR even acknowledge that they DAM/editors can not do everything a photographer may need in post processing. I don't know if the other DAM/editor companies are that dumb, stupid, lazy, or arrogant to ignore the world outside their products.

I can't wait to see who signs up on the new Photos workflow. Hopefully this list will include as a minimum all the companies that today do plugins for Aperture and LR.

 

[deeddawg]

What limp along for a few months. Its not like Apple is going to kill the app. It will be good for as long as Yosemite or earlier is being used. For many of us, that's years. On the other hand, if you chase the latest and cannot work with something that works, perhaps your point is well taken.

My point, which I probably did not make clearly enough, is that I'm curious why one would invest time and effort moving to a known dead-end product. Yes, Aperture will work great for at least a year, and longer if one stays with Yosemite or Mavericks. But then the unknowns kick in.

Eventually, Photos will quite possibly provide most if not all of Aperture's capabilities. Just a guess, but one would hope so. What is unknown is whether that will be in v1.0 or 2.0 or later. Also unknown is what attributes / data will carry over and how that will be treated. What will you lose moving from Aperture to Photos? We don't know.

Granted, if someone is well ensconced with an existing Aperture workflow then it's probably best to stick with it. Still wise to consider what tweaks might be made towards easing an eventual migrations elsewhere if it turned out to be necessary. Yet to move onto Aperture at this point? I don't understand why one would do so. Thus I was curious what the reasons were to make the move now from iPhoto to Aperture instead of waiting for Photos to come out, or at least more info to be know.

(and my use of "limp" was founded on the assumption that iPhoto must in some way not be satisfying the OPs needs; thus my question of why move now instead of staying with iPhoto until the path forward is more clear)

 

[Ray2]

My point, which I probably did not make clearly enough, is that I'm curious why one would invest time and effort moving to a known dead-end product. Yes, Aperture will work great for at least a year, and longer if one stays with Yosemite or Mavericks. But then the unknowns kick in.

Eventually, Photos will quite possibly provide most if not all of Aperture's capabilities. Just a guess, but one would hope so. What is unknown is whether that will be in v1.0 or 2.0 or later. Also unknown is what attributes / data will carry over and how that will be treated. What will you lose moving from Aperture to Photos? We don't know.

Granted, if someone is well ensconced with an existing Aperture workflow then it's probably best to stick with it. Still wise to consider what tweaks might be made towards easing an eventual migrations elsewhere if it turned out to be necessary. Yet to move onto Aperture at this point? I don't understand why one would do so. Thus I was curious what the reasons were to make the move now from iPhoto to Aperture instead of waiting for Photos to come out, or at least more info to be know.

(and my use of "limp" was founded on the assumption that iPhoto must in some way not be satisfying the OPs needs; thus my question of why move now instead of staying with iPhoto until the path forward is more clear)

Your points are very well taken. However, Aperture is quite a step up from iPhoto yet still a manageable learning experience. If you learn Aperture you can easily pick up Lightroom or Capture One. Starting out with either of the other 2 I feel would be a much steeper and more difficult learning curve. Lightroom's logic has always escaped me. C1 can be intimidating as one's initiation into post processing and its DAM is woefully weak.

Photos is a complete unknown at the moment. Apple appears to be handing over development to 3rd parties which suggests to me its going to be a pretty basic core with advanced tools dependent on who knows. Could be a long wait and Aperture may end up having a much longer life than many expect. Last, there's some measurable probability Photos will not be at all suitable for photography enthusiasts. Knowing Aperture provides an easy move into other post processing apps or simply using Aperture till it will no longer run. While some of the tools are weak, its less dependent on computer resources, stable and the initial renders offer a far better staring point than Lightroom and more consistent shot to shot renders than C1.

Not directed at you but a lot of people seem to moan and groan about it being ignored yet fail to realize its still one of the best post processors out there. In spite of Apple's current march to mass market.

 

[simonsi]

There is clearly no need to migrate away from Aperture immediately, any necessary migration is likely 2-3yrs away at least, by which time Photos will have shown what it actually is vs the current guesswork and a sensible decision can be made.

Personally I don't like the interface of LR, in the same way I prefer the controls of a Nikon vs a comparable Canon camera in the first place.

It wouldn't trouble me to continue to put learning effort into Aperture and I think the point is very valid that having learned Aperture, any user is better placed to decide what features they want in any future DAM/editor decision.

 

[iRock1]

I'm going to add a few more questions that I didn't posted earlier, and some that I've just came with during the last weeks.

1) What's going on with the way Aperture handle those “JPEG previews”? When I transfer the photos from my camera using iPhoto, I don't see that weird effect mentioned earlier. However, when I use Aperture, as soon as I open a photo for the first time, I'll notice for a few seconds the old preview that supposedly was generated by the camera (and then transferred to the program) and then it will change colors and stuff. I don't understand.

2) What's the real utility of changing the AWB when shooting RAW? If, as some user said before, nothing that I tell the camera will be transferred to the resulting file (except for the obvious settings like f or shutter speed), wouldn't that be pointless? I mean, I could even change the WB later with LR or Aperture.

Would the RAW+JPEG option make sense to capture a more “real” lighting situation, so I can use the JPEG as a model to edit the WB in the RAW file later?

3) I have doubts on the way Aperture and iPhoto work when I edit a photo (I guess it's identical in both cases). If I edit a JPEG file, will the application automatically create a copy first? Is that copy the one I'll be working with, so the original doesn't lose quality? If so, why the need of converting those JPEGs to TIFF?

 

[robgendreau]

Every image editor or organizer or viewer has to render RAW files into image files so you can see them.

With some applications, like iPhoto and I believe Aperture, they use Apple's RAW conversion algorithms. Adobe has their own, and so do many camera manufacturers and software developers. You'll find endless debate over which does the best job of it out of the box (or camera). You can even do it using the camera's own software, and cameras also do it automatically when they generate a jpeg. And most all cameras also generate a jpeg preview even if you shoot only RAW, so that you have something to look at on your camera's LCD when you view shot photos.

Odds are your software is showing those embedded previews when you first import, they change into more complete jpegs or previews as the desktop software itself creates it's own from the RAW. The result is gonna look different in Aperture than in DxO. You can subsequently manipulate much of that, but not all of it. And some RAWs store different info than others; my Oly RAWs store lens corrections; not sure other brands do. And some things obviously ARE transferred to the photo; you can adjust exposure some post but you are still limited by the aperture you shot at, ditto with focus, etc. WB and some other stuff are part of rendering; remember a RAW is really just a bunch of signals from sensors that has to be demosaiced, changed into a color scheme, etc. Different software will do that differently even before you start playing with it.

Unfortunately, there is no "real." Never has been. Photography is a replication of what is out there, and to a certain extend what people see (for example we don't see infrared...but it's there and your digital camera sees it). Both hardware and software and you editing it are methods to make it more "real," but ulimately that's where the art comes in. And we haven't even gotten to how what you output on (monitor, printer, etc) does to it....

And use RAW. JPEG is a compromise. If you like the way the camera makes them, by all means use them. But you'd need to experiment with your software to see if it works on the original jpeg or not; it might. Don't assume it won't.