Apple Releases Aperture 2 with improved interface
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Although RED is making the big noise among cinematographers now.

Again, it isn't that simple. There are choices to make when processing images. Which ones should we make? Which image should we use?

There are quite a few photo site that do a very good job of this. If you need to see examples, you can look up some.

In a discussion such as this, which is not a tutorial, taking the time to find proper images for demo use, and working them, is a time consumer.

There are comparative reviews of both programs out there.

But, a specific question about how some features stack up can be answered.

RED is a very nice camera, and for what it is, cheap. But it's not for all environments.

I'd love to see one in action. It's compact and light... have you heard about the SCARLET camera?

Sure, but until NAB, we won't see it.

Small, cheap (uh, relatively), and the rest is basically guesswork right now.

OK, I did search on Aperture and image processing.

Here's what i got.

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0802/08021304aperture2.asp


Granted that he doesn't mention what other software he's tried the quote is next to useless, but hey. Funny, I went to reviews.photography review and found exactly the same article. Did they maybe copy the Aplle press release verbatim? ANd wow, photoshop news has exactly the same review. I'm not gonna say I notice an extreme lack of journalistic integrety. At least the one from Photoshop news says.. "Posted by PSN Editorial Staff." They don't actually claim to have written it.


http://www.news.com/8301-13580_3-9872913-39.html


More notes by people talking to Apple

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/con...id=7-9258-9278

I've gotta say, contrary to what was posted above, I can't find a single reference to a side by side test of Apertures and Lightroom's processing engines.

In fact if you go through the following thread, http://discussions.apple.com/thread....70460&tstart=0

You'll notice the biggest problem professional seem to be having with Aperture is the slower than Adobe release of RAW processing ability for new cameras. In fact there doesn't seem to be any complaints about image quality or the quality of the existing Processing Engine, and that was before the release of Aperture 2.

For people such as myself who like picking up camera bodies when they are being dumped just before the release of the latest greatest, as opposed to thinking I have to have the newest body to take a good picture, or that having the latest body will give me some kind of an advantage, (can we say consumer dupes) I haven't found a criticism of Aperture that even makes sense to me. Anyway enough reading for one day. Too bad I couldn't find one of those "many" sites on the internet that will explain to me in detail why Lightroom or other progams are better than Aperture. I'll just have to take your word for it that they exist.

OK, after yesterday, I went out , shot an image with my Pentax *ist, came back i and loaded the image 4 times, in Aperture, in iPhoto, in Raw Developer, in Canmera Raw, R3.7, (Photoshop CS2).
I did no editing work on the raw file and used default settings for the import. The files were then converted and exported to as tiff files, imported into photoshop, a second time for the CR import and then exported as a png. I selected a small section of the picture that has both a sunset, a cell tower a chimney and parts of three different trees and shadow. The results are below.
iPhoto import

Aperture import

Photoshop CS2 CR3.7 import

Raw Developer import




The Aperture/iPhoto images are pretty much identical, (not surprising since Apple built the processor into the OS. It makes sense that they'd decode with the same software in both programs. If you look at the tree in the foreground, bottom left, in the aperture/iphoto image the trunk appears to have light coming through it, in five places right beside the house chimney.

The RD and CR3.7 images show the tree the way it looked through the viewfinder. The CR and RD images have a bit more punch and therefor show a bit more blush under the clouds, but I assume that could be corrected in post processing. IN terms of accuracy, the actual portrayal of what i saw in the viefinder, I have to judge both the RAW developer and Photoshop Raw Processors superior to the Apple processing engine. At double magnification in Photoshop the CR3.7 image appeared to be a little bit cleaner than the Raw Developer image although since the difference doens't show at 100% mag, I'm not sure if that means anything other than that photoshop enlarges it's own files better than it does someone else's.

This is probably as much time as I want to put into it. But from my results. If there is any good news at all it's that iPhoto doesn't alter the Raw files it imports. If you export the raw file to a folder and then process in Photoshop, you get the cataloguing benefits of iPhoto and the better CR processing engine. However it's disappointing that the image quality is so easily demonstrated to be inferior in the Aperture/iPhoto imports. For those who don't want to pay photoshop money for quality Raw file importing RAW developer (availble as free trial download from the Apple website) is avery close second to Camera Raw. If you check out the cell tower and the crown of the tree slighty visible above the roofline of the house, just to the right of the cell tower, you'll see the Photoshop image is a little cleaner than the RD image.

It looks to me that Aperture is basicly an improved replacement for iPhoto, not competition for photoshop if you insist on maximum image quality. And when you consider the HDR images I do three or four times a year and the other stuff Photoshop does that Aperture doesn't do, I'm guessing Photoshop is going to be on my computer for a while yet.

I would agree. You must try CR 4.+. It has controls such as highlight recovery, which Aperture 2.0 is now also using, plus a number of others.