After sitting quiet with Aperture for months, Apple have been pushing updates out in quick succession these past few weeks.
Having made the switch from Aperture over to Lightroom just a few weeks ago myself, I can’t help but look at these updates without a slight hint of concern that I may have perhaps jumped too soon.
The latest 2.1 update has certainly pushed Aperture firmly back into the game with the addition of their new plug-in architecture which I tried out for the first time last night.
My initial thoughts when I read Apple’s press release were FAIL. This just creates a new TIFF file and loads up another image editor on top. It’s no different than the existing round-trip “Edit in Photoshop” capability. Any subsequent edits simply create more versions of the file in TIFF format causing the library to bloat big-style.
Well my assumptions (which I think many share) were wrong.
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A few weeks back I posted that I had been gradually becoming dissolusioned with Apple’s Aperture, primarly due to speed, and that I had started to play around with Adobe’s Lightroom whilst hoping and waiting for the “big Aperture update” to solve the speed problems and perhaps add some nice new features.
Well despite the very late arrival of Aperture 2 (i.e. post PMA) I have now moved my whole library over to Lightroom. And it wasn’t a nice thing to have to do, so you can be really sure I had made my mind up before doing it.
My trial with Lightroom was going so well that I only actually downloaded the Aperture 2 trial a few days ago as Adobe’s product had so captivated me. However, I had a 64GB committment to Aperture in my current library, so I wanted to make sure I was doing the right thing. Of course the version 2 trial doesn’t really make it easy to convert your live library in case you decide not to upgrade, which I can understand. So it took me a little tweaking around to force the trial to go ahead and upgrade my library - I wanted to test it in a “live” situation. Read more
Moving towards Lightroom (from Aperture)
a.k.a. Desperately seeking 2.0
Recently I have been somewhat dissatisfied with Aperture. Whilst I still think it a great product, I am finding that, despite a few incremental updates, and the release of Leopard, the product is still pretty slow to use. I love the full-screen mode and ease of switching between the standard display - but it is a bit slow and it will occasionally get a bit hung up on itself and display a picture with the “Loading…” text for over a minute.
I’ve been very patient. Hoping for the “next big update”. I was convinced we would see a something following the release of Leopard to take advantage of the new Core Animation technologies to help speed up the interface. How wrong was I - it appeared the Aperture team wasn’t even quite ready for Leopard - sure we got a dot increment release the same day Leopard shipped, but we also found that we shouldn’t use Time Machine, lest we potentially corrupt our data. Read more