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You can't hurry love ....
We want to get things done fast. We can't afford to waste time. Anything we do, we want to do it right away, and we want results now. We live in a time when we actually almost always bend time to our will.
Today's photographers are able to bend time with Aperture. Aperture actually helps us do things with our photographs at a fast and quick pace. Faster and quicker still do we move along things when we add to our workflow the magic of presets, lift-and-stamp, fill-in, plug-ins, and automator, among others. The process of moving pictures around, and the many things we can do with our pictures, is typically fast and easy.
With a plan in mind, or a system in place, we push photos into proper slots, and we manage to get organized and stay organized, and we get our jobs done.
But there is one part of our work in Aperture that actually takes the most time. It is the time when things can seemingly come to a grinding halt. That time, and part of our work, is: Editing. Or, let's say, perfecting the image.
This is always the point, it seems, that we cannot just hurry up.
Despite presets, despite auto-controls, and despite standards, we take the most time, and apply the most control, when it comes to how we want our final images to come out. While naturally we will take advantage of Aperture's ability to create editing presets, part and parcel of being a real photographer is manually perfecting the image, and in making the best the image has to offer come out. And that can really take a lot of time. With love and devotion, we embark on a "creative" process that just cannot be hurried. And so, we take our time.
We start with manual RAW fine tuning that touches on color boost, chroma blur, sharpening and noise compensation. Then we tweak the exposure sliders that combines saturation, brightness, contrast, and tint. And then there's levels, highlights and shadows, white balance, and more other color. For us photographers, time stand still, and we are happy in that moment, but in reality, time went past us. That's the paradox in digital photography we have to live with. We speed up on a lot of things so that we can actually spend a lot of time on what essentially matters to being a photographer.
Because in Aperture it is actually not painful, photographers seem to take perverse pleasure by spending a lot of time in digital photo image editing. Yes, you just can't hurry love.
You can't hurry love, but you can hurry raw file format support. And to switch from the Supremes to Diana on her own "I'm still waiting"....
I think what he's trying to say is that you should move away from Aperture to a program that allows you to do RAW edits, albeit in not such an efficient manner.
/end partial sarcasm
(Still waiting for D300 support).
With respect, your devotion is so blind that reality escapes you. Aperture is nice, but it is one of the slowest RAW convertors on the market.
Until v2 arrives, it is not a realistic platform for production work, even on an intel quad.
You also forget that the batch apply is limited, the sharpening is extremely basic and as many have said, RAW support is very slow in coming.
Dominique you are a godsend, i completely agree with you re: Aperture being a really gorgeous environment to create beautiful photos in. stay positive.
I do love Aperture capabilities and mindset...
It has a beautiful interface and super organizational skills.
It needs global presets...
It needs better RAW support...
It need to be lot faster...
It need to release Ver. 2.0 now if Apple expect to retain its faithfull...
"Today's photographers are able to bend time with Aperture."
hilarious.
more like apple is bending RAW support time.
given the reality of aperture as it stands now, what was the point of this post?
brutal comments. but all very true and warranted.
I feel pretty well bent. I got this stuff for photography and no RAW support months later. It s*cks to be us.
While aperture is a great organization tool, it's not more tailored for professional portrait, wedding, and commercial photographers. Obviously, you can use a bunch of makeshift organizational tricks to try and make it into a workable solution. However, this is often more effort than it's worth.
From a wedding photographer's standpoint, the printed album module is both the best and worst feature of aperture. If you could create flush-mount album designs, at all different sizes, directly from Apterture, professionals would go nuts. No reputably wedding photographer would ever think of giving an Apple book to a client for anything more than a party favor.
Also, I'm not sure who thinks it's the pinnacle of efficiency to have your image library separate from your album. Right now I have to export all images needed from Aperture and import into my album software. Then if I need another photo, or need to tweak the color more, it's back to Aperture, export, then import, then place in my album.
This lack of customization is especially frustrating, since Apertures album creation tools are far superior to almost any standalone package, some upwards of $500 - $1000.
Not sure if it's economically viable, but Apple should partner with a vendor to create additional functionality for paid photographers (the ones making a living off photography). I would even go as far as saying you could charge upwards of $300-$500 for this add on functionality.
Anyway, to beat a dead horse, they first need to concentrate on their pro photographers by actually supporting the latest list of cameras. Also, Aperture should be a tool to help generate revenue, both by including relevant features for the working photographer and also by lowering our Costs of Goods Sold by reducing the time it takes to service a client.
Aperture is quickly becoming that high school quarterback that simply can't quit talking about how good he was 20 years ago, as he armchair quarterbacks from his Barcalounger.
Aperture was a good enough start to make me switch to the Apple platform, which I still think was a good move. However, that commitment to Aperture was based on the belief that a company of Apple's stature would continue to improve their professional apps in a timely manor. I'm getting tired of drinking Steve's Kool-Aid, and I'm starting to feel a little faint.