Never did get around to trying Aperture. Thought i was so smart with all my photoshop knowledge. Now it just seems like too much work & I use Lightroom for almost everything. I invested 35 dollars in a public lecture by Katrin Eismann, and after taking notes all morning long, it's all a breeze.
I love Aperture to the bottom of my heart and is still the best tool available to manage your photographs. I still use it and will be using it until it becomes impossible. This is the first app I download whenever I reinstall my OS. The process flow is amazing.
In the end, Apple is a hardware & services company. Everything else is subservient. Even if they owned a professional market for a (insert here: audio, photography, video editing) app, the amount of revenue that that would bring in would be a drop in the bucket and the ROI in terms of continual support and development required would not be worth it. Unless it helps to significantly sell more devices or subscribe to more services - bye, bye.
Since Aperture was killed I’ve tried Capture One, DxO, Luminar, Affinity, Pixelmator and none of them have the ease of use for spot retouching (burn/dodge etc.) Aperture had, combined with DAM. They each have their strengths (Capture One’s RAW conversion is second to none) but none of them quite fit the whole package.
Adobe’s products do everything needed but I found them incredibly awkward.
Bring back Aperture support!
Capture One has exceptional RAW conversion, yes. Of all the post-production tools I've used, I also find its Digital Asset Management capabilities the least-bad. I sure miss Aperture's asset management, though.
Not to mention Capture One is the only tool that supports sessions. I'm sorry, but when editing photos I *DO NOT* want to be distracted by a million photos in a library, no matter how good the DAM is. Capture One has the most customisable workflow and is by far the best tool out there right now. Though I wish it wasn't so expensive, its still a good investment if you're a serious photographer. The only limit for me is lack of HDR support which needs to be done in an external program like Aurora.
Thanks for the article but I think the whole Aperture vs Lightroom comparison misses the mark. The real question is, why does Apple develop what is seemingly a good solution, then decide to kill it off or seriously cripple it aka Final Cut, Photos etc.? Why does Apple only seemingly cater to the lowest common denominator these days? Will Apple's new corporate "only if it makes significant money" management style hurt or hinder the company long term? Where are the hardware and software solutions we users actually want? Aperture died a long time before it was officially retired, at least a couple of years without any meaningful updates from my recollection... Aperture could have been so much more. I always envisioned them expanding the "lessons" concept of GarageBand to interactive editing demos by professional photographers with Aperture. Photos is a joke by comparison. Apple has seemingly no interest or talent in App development these days. It's a concern isn't it? Don't get me started on what happened to Nik after the google buy out. Damn shame, their U-Point technology was really ground-breaking compared to anything in Aperture.
This article misses the point. Aperture was alright for sorting photos and introduced some powerful features... all of which can be found in Photos. Apple killed off Aperture because more and more Apple's so called pro-apps are being woven into the consumer apps. This is not because Apple hates so-called professional users but because Apple sees no reason to hold features off from everyone else.
I truly see a time when there is no Final Cut Pro or iMovie but one powerful but simple to use movie editor that can be used by everyone. I see the same thing between GarageBand and Logic Pro. Sure this is going to be annoying to pro users because there will now no longer be a demarkation between the apps they use and the apps everyone else uses and so they will see it as a devaluation of their skillset but this is a stupid attitude to have and one that WILL see them lose business.
Everyone can go out and buy a Milwaukee drill but that doesn't mean they have the skills to use it properly and effectively. It will be the same in this scenario.
Customer: I have a Mac with Video Editor X why do I need you? Professional: Because I know the tools in-depth and can do things you could only dream of with that same application and can make your product look amazing Customer: Fair enough, I don't have the time to fully learn this stuff here's my money
Or you get the ones bemoaning Apple's plans
Customer: I have a Mac with Video Editor X why do I need you? Professional: Because Final Cut Pro is a superior tool and Apple getting rid of it to make a consumer friendly editor was the dumbest move ever and frankly I'm thinking of leaving the Apple platform forever as a result. Customer: I shall do this myself, I can't be bothered dealing with you.
Sure that's a simplistic view of it all but there's absolutely nothing stopping Apple making nothing but professional apps available to everyone. Take Aperture to Photos. While Photos might seem like a simple cross between iPhoto and Aperture the truth is that it's a better product than either. For example iPhotos started adding features that Aperture never got until much later in life such as Facial Recognition and Maps. These seemed like gimmicks until Apple added them to Aperture but iPhoto's implementation was always better. Aperture's backing up was always better than iPhotos'. But with Photos you've got great iCloud backups that are useable across devices, you've got much more powerful facial and mapping technologies and you've got better sorting capabilities as well as better editing features and anything that Photos can't do is trivially offloaded to apps like Pixelmator or PhotoShop.
The point is people miss what Apple is actually doing. They are making highend features accessible to all people. That doesn't mean that the pros are going to have their business destroyed as a result it just means that Apple doesn't have to waste money R&Ding two different apps they can concentrate on making one amazing app that does everything two apps used to do.
Of course now pros will be in the same boat as consumers... they'll have to learn how to use the new apps but they have more of a vested interest so it's going to be a dumb idea for them not to learn it when it comes.
But this is just how I see where it seems Apple is going. It might be a future that never happens but it does seem like all the underpinnings of Mojave and iOS 12 are leading us to a direction that will make this inevitable. We'll see but I'm excited if this is the way Apple is going because it's going to make the Mac and iOS platforms seriously powerful platforms... more so than it already is.
Since Aperture was killed I’ve tried Capture One, DxO, Luminar, Affinity, Pixelmator and none of them have the ease of use for spot retouching (burn/dodge etc.) Aperture had, combined with DAM. They each have their strengths (Capture One’s RAW conversion is second to none) but none of them quite fit the whole package.
Adobe’s products do everything needed but I found them incredibly awkward.
Bring back Aperture support!
Capture One has exceptional RAW conversion, yes. Of all the post-production tools I've used, I also find its Digital Asset Management capabilities the least-bad. I sure miss Aperture's asset management, though.
Not to mention Capture One is the only tool that supports sessions. I'm sorry, but when editing photos I *DO NOT* want to be distracted by a million photos in a library, no matter how good the DAM is. Capture One has the most customisable workflow and is by far the best tool out there right now. Though I wish it wasn't so expensive, its still a good investment if you're a serious photographer. The only limit for me is lack of HDR support which needs to be done in an external program like Aurora.
As a fairly new Capture One convert, how does making an ACR (or Lightroom) HDR conversion, saved as DNG, then brought into Capture One work?
Aperture fans should look into the Raw Power app/extension by Gentlemen Coders. The app offers some of the tools and the look of Aperture. It works on your Mac as an extension in Photos or as a standalone app. I use the extension and it is quite good. The company was founded by Nik Bhatt who was once the leader of the Photos and Aperture teams at Apple. There is also an iOS version which let's you edit RAW on your phone.
I kicked the tires on Aperture and LR (beta) when it was first released and settled on Aperture for it's superior interface and Apple ecosystem integration which were both important to me and never looked back. Aperture works like I do and made a loathsome task (organizing) fun and providing all the editing I needed for 99% of my photos. When Apple pulled the plug, I grudgingly turned to LR which is horribly slow, bloated and non-intuitive although it gets the job done (but the raw conversions still seem to be lacking compared to Aperture). I transitioned because photos was nothing like Aperture and was lacking in it's feature set. In addition, I was scared that Aperture would not keep working with OS updates. Several years later, I dread the task of importing and post-processing and I miss Aperture every day. Apple really dropped the ball on this one. They are flush with cash and never should abandon something like this in my opinion.
You could have delayed the pain of moving to Lightroom for many years. Aperture still works (except for a few minor problems) in Mojave. The user interface still is far better than any other non-destructive photo editor.
Painfully, I realize that now but at the time it was all doom and gloom. I waited a year before I did it and may go back someday. So, I guess it is still getting camera updates since they need to do so for Photos...? Seems crazy to return to it but it might make post-processing and organizing less painful for me...might even be worth running them in parallel.
As others have mentioned, Aperture didn’t lose its battle with Lightroom, it simply abandoned the field and surrendered. This was a very callous move by Apple because for professionals who have committed to a program like this it is no trivial task to move your libraries to another system, plus you lose the ability to re-edit. I tried Lightroom, but absolutely despised it on almost every level. Once you have had a taste of freedom, you will never be content living in a cage.
I’ll give you just one example of something that made Aperture better for pro users: Cropping on output. I used to make hundreds of prints for my customers on my Epson 3800. In Aperture I would select the photos and size for the prints, say 4x6, then Aperture would show me a preview of everything of all the prints and in that preview I could resize and crop each photo individually. This allowed me to get just the right crop of each photo for my clients. So after Apple forced me to try Lightroom, and much to my frustration I could not find any way to do that same simple crop on output. I was incredulous that such a useful and seemingly simple feature could be missing from Lightroom, and asked Matt Koslowski at Adobe Max during one of his Lightroom sessions if I had just missed how this worked. It couldn’t do it, he said. You have to crop the photo before printing. I was a little incredulous, because I didn’t want to crop my master file to 4x6. In that case, he said, I had two options: create a duplicate and crop that, or go back after you print and un-crop the master. When you are dealing with hundreds of prints, either of these options was mind-blowingly burdensome. Take that one use-case and multiply it by 100 and that was my experience trying to switch to Lightroom. So I gave up on it. (Here is a link on how one can “easily” crop on output in Lightroom: https://digital-photography-school.com/batch-crop-and-resize-in-lightroom/ It is nuts compared to how simple this was in Aperture.)
I now use a hodgepodge of methods to organize and edit my photos. I know I could stay with Aperture, but I didn’t want to keep adding thousands of photos to a program that had been EOL’d. Plus, my needs have evolved over the years. I want the ability to cloud-sync and edit my photos on my iPad Pro. Adobe’s latest evolution of Lightroom actually looks much better than the old one, particularly in it’s mobile version, and I may revisit it. Right now I like using a combination of Photos and Luminar for my everyday personal photos, and Adobe Bridge and Photoshop for my professional editing. Luminar is very reminiscent of Aperture in a lot of respects and since Photos now allows round-tripping to outside editors like Photoshop that solution works pretty well. However, Luminar doesn’t have a mobile app so Lightroom CC still has a leg-up on it. But frustratingly there is no one, simple solution that comes close to the power and ease-of-use that Aperture had.
The article doesn't mention Aperture's relation to iPhoto. Prior to release, Aperture was rumoured as 'iPhoto Pro', which was a pretty good description. For years the two products had overlapping functionality (but incompatible library formats, doh!). As I recall, many consumer oriented features (like Faces, highlighted in the article) appeared in iPhoto first then were adopted by Aperture.
Aperture 1.0 running on the Macs we were had then (late model G4 towers or G5s), it was sluggish to use with RAW files. As I recall, Apple talked a lot about how it was GPU accelerated, which maybe was a problem as GPUs weren't that fast back then!
One of the immediate wins for Lightroom was better performance at 1.0. Adobe effectively got this 'for free' as they built LR around the Adobe Raw Converter engine which had been part of Photoshop for years, and was already well optimised.
Apple decided that they were goi g to fix the images for us.
I don't recall Aperture applying some kind of 'auto enhance', but it was using a new and different RAW processor. At the time most people were using Adobe Camera Raw (as part of Photoshop) and, when compared, Apple's RAW processor certainly has a different look to ACR. You can see this today if you compare the look of an unedited RAW file in Photos.app with the same file in Lightroom or Photoshop's Camera Raw (and you camera manufacturer's own RAW processing software, they all look different).
One other tidbit, I remember there was a heavily rumoured Aperture integrated GPS recorder app which Apple was expected to release alongside the iPhone 3GS. The idea was you'd start the app at the beginning of a shoot, record your location throughout the shoot, then Aperture would match up timestamps from GPS track and image files to figure out where each image was shot. Few cameras had onboard GPS at the time, and the ability to retroactively geotag all the images from a shoot would have been a nice feature for Apple to add. Sadly it never happened (I'm guessing it ate too much battery on the iPhone), and 3rd parties were left to fill that gap.
It was a large amount of enhancement. Coupled with second rate tools, it never had a change.
I kicked the tires on Aperture and LR (beta) when it was first released and settled on Aperture for it's superior interface and Apple ecosystem integration which were both important to me and never looked back. Aperture works like I do and made a loathsome task (organizing) fun and providing all the editing I needed for 99% of my photos. When Apple pulled the plug, I grudgingly turned to LR which is horribly slow, bloated and non-intuitive although it gets the job done (but the raw conversions still seem to be lacking compared to Aperture). I transitioned because photos was nothing like Aperture and was lacking in it's feature set. In addition, I was scared that Aperture would not keep working with OS updates. Several years later, I dread the task of importing and post-processing and I miss Aperture every day. Apple really dropped the ball on this one. They are flush with cash and never should abandon something like this in my opinion.
You could have delayed the pain of moving to Lightroom for many years. Aperture still works (except for a few minor problems) in Mojave. The user interface still is far better than any other non-destructive photo editor.
Painfully, I realize that now but at the time it was all doom and gloom. I waited a year before I did it and may go back someday. So, I guess it is still getting camera updates since they need to do so for Photos...? Seems crazy to return to it but it might make post-processing and organizing less painful for me...might even be worth running them in parallel.
The real problem with continuing to add photos to abandoned software like Aperture is that you are just making your inevitable conversion to some other product exponentially more painful down the road. I figured that Aperture would keep running for a long, long time, just like another one of Apple's abandoned products, iWeb. But to continue to add thousands of photos, and more importantly to continue to edit them in a proprietary and now abandoned and unsupported format, made no sense to me. And not knowing which macOS update will suddenly make Aperture unusable or maybe even worse, workable but somehow broken, made me bite the bullet early and convert my libraries as soon as I could. Knowing that Aperture is still working today doesn't make me regret that decision.
I still use Aperture. For managing image collections, it remains unsurpassed. It should be emphasized that it was _brilliantly_ conceived and executed. It was (v. 3) as true to itself as any complex software I've ever used. As Richard Hallas states above (https://forums.appleinsider.com/discussion/comment/3101909/#Comment_3101909): ***Aperture did NOT fail. Lightroom did NOT win. Aperture was, and still is, the superior product of the two, by a wide margin. The fate that befell Aperture was unjust, unfair and avoidable. It simply – unfortunately – fell foul of Apple's iCloud strategy.*** I put it simply: the iPhone ate Apple, and Aperture was incompatible with the iPhone. I estimate that I've "lost" over 2,000 hours of work moving image collections to other programs (Lightroom mainly) and doing things less efficiently. The demise of Aperture is a blot on Apple and on the software market.
I still use Aperture, mainly because I have 5-6 different photo libraries from various Macs. I have an app that helps find duplicates that works with Aperture and use it to streamline my photo library.
I use Photos mainly to export unmodified originals to my iCloud Drive to backup the photos permanently.
I don't use iCloud Photo Library since I do not want my photos deleted by mistake on any device.
Apple creates software to increase the sale of hardware.
They also strive to create software capabilities that only exist on their platforms.
Apple spends far more to develop and market these products than they ever generated in direct revenue. It was (and is) all about selling more hardware. Once an application no longer differentiates Apple from the others, they have to evaluate whether the expense/effort is worth it. When a product no longer contributes significantly to that goal, it is likely to be consumerized or discontinued.
Adobe on the other hand, creates software to sell/rent software. This motivation results in a much different approach to developing and evolving their products.
I was on the product team(s) responsible for iMovie, Final Cut Pro, iDVD, DVD Studio Pro, iPhoto and others, so I have some experience with this.
I still use Aperture. For managing image collections, it remains unsurpassed. It should be emphasized that it was _brilliantly_ conceived and executed. It was (v. 3) as true to itself as any complex software I've ever used. As Richard Hallas states above (https://forums.appleinsider.com/discussion/comment/3101909/#Comment_3101909): ***Aperture did NOT fail. Lightroom did NOT win. Aperture was, and still is, the superior product of the two, by a wide margin. The fate that befell Aperture was unjust, unfair and avoidable. It simply – unfortunately – fell foul of Apple's iCloud strategy.*** I put it simply: the iPhone ate Apple, and Aperture was incompatible with the iPhone. I estimate that I've "lost" over 2,000 hours of work moving image collections to other programs (Lightroom mainly) and doing things less efficiently. The demise of Aperture is a blot on Apple and on the software market.
That’s absurd, totally untrue and can’t even be explained in any logical fashion.
a product fails if it’s taken out of production. Lightroom has become a major success. Apple really wanted to get into the photo editing business, the way it wanted to get into the video editing business. One, it would be such a great tool, that people would buy into the platform for it. Two, Adobe had stepped back from the Mac in the wake of the disaster of the holiday season of 1995, and Apple wanted to have software that would insulate them from third parties leaving the platform.
whi,e FCP was a big success, aperture was a big failure. Look, pretending that is wasn’t doesn’t help Apple, or it’s customers. Apple bonked it, pure and simple. They could have made the major changes we all to,d the they needed to make, but they just took baby steps. When Lightroom cane out a few months later, we looked at it and moved to that. Adobe understood the professional photographer, whi,e Apple didn’t. So instead of making the big effort, they instead positioned the product as a prosumer product. When that didn’t work, they kept lowering the price and finally discontinued it, and subsumed some of the features into the new Photo software.
Comments
Not to mention Capture One is the only tool that supports sessions. I'm sorry, but when editing photos I *DO NOT* want to be distracted by a million photos in a library, no matter how good the DAM is. Capture One has the most customisable workflow and is by far the best tool out there right now. Though I wish it wasn't so expensive, its still a good investment if you're a serious photographer. The only limit for me is lack of HDR support which needs to be done in an external program like Aurora.
The real question is, why does Apple develop what is seemingly a good solution, then decide to kill it off or seriously cripple it aka Final Cut, Photos etc.?
Why does Apple only seemingly cater to the lowest common denominator these days?
Will Apple's new corporate "only if it makes significant money" management style hurt or hinder the company long term?
Where are the hardware and software solutions we users actually want?
Aperture died a long time before it was officially retired, at least a couple of years without any meaningful updates from my recollection...
Aperture could have been so much more. I always envisioned them expanding the "lessons" concept of GarageBand to interactive editing demos by professional photographers with Aperture. Photos is a joke by comparison. Apple has seemingly no interest or talent in App development these days. It's a concern isn't it?
Don't get me started on what happened to Nik after the google buy out. Damn shame, their U-Point technology was really ground-breaking compared to anything in Aperture.
I truly see a time when there is no Final Cut Pro or iMovie but one powerful but simple to use movie editor that can be used by everyone. I see the same thing between GarageBand and Logic Pro. Sure this is going to be annoying to pro users because there will now no longer be a demarkation between the apps they use and the apps everyone else uses and so they will see it as a devaluation of their skillset but this is a stupid attitude to have and one that WILL see them lose business.
Everyone can go out and buy a Milwaukee drill but that doesn't mean they have the skills to use it properly and effectively. It will be the same in this scenario.
Customer: I have a Mac with Video Editor X why do I need you?
Professional: Because I know the tools in-depth and can do things you could only dream of with that same application and can make your product look amazing
Customer: Fair enough, I don't have the time to fully learn this stuff here's my money
Or you get the ones bemoaning Apple's plans
Customer: I have a Mac with Video Editor X why do I need you?
Professional: Because Final Cut Pro is a superior tool and Apple getting rid of it to make a consumer friendly editor was the dumbest move ever and frankly I'm thinking of leaving the Apple platform forever as a result.
Customer: I shall do this myself, I can't be bothered dealing with you.
Sure that's a simplistic view of it all but there's absolutely nothing stopping Apple making nothing but professional apps available to everyone. Take Aperture to Photos. While Photos might seem like a simple cross between iPhoto and Aperture the truth is that it's a better product than either. For example iPhotos started adding features that Aperture never got until much later in life such as Facial Recognition and Maps. These seemed like gimmicks until Apple added them to Aperture but iPhoto's implementation was always better. Aperture's backing up was always better than iPhotos'. But with Photos you've got great iCloud backups that are useable across devices, you've got much more powerful facial and mapping technologies and you've got better sorting capabilities as well as better editing features and anything that Photos can't do is trivially offloaded to apps like Pixelmator or PhotoShop.
The point is people miss what Apple is actually doing. They are making highend features accessible to all people. That doesn't mean that the pros are going to have their business destroyed as a result it just means that Apple doesn't have to waste money R&Ding two different apps they can concentrate on making one amazing app that does everything two apps used to do.
Of course now pros will be in the same boat as consumers... they'll have to learn how to use the new apps but they have more of a vested interest so it's going to be a dumb idea for them not to learn it when it comes.
But this is just how I see where it seems Apple is going. It might be a future that never happens but it does seem like all the underpinnings of Mojave and iOS 12 are leading us to a direction that will make this inevitable. We'll see but I'm excited if this is the way Apple is going because it's going to make the Mac and iOS platforms seriously powerful platforms... more so than it already is.
The Workflow in Lightroom, and the subscription pricing both majorly suck.
Aperture will be used until either Apple makes a Photos Pro, or maybe something like Luminar or Affinity brings out something useful.
I’ll give you just one example of something that made Aperture better for pro users: Cropping on output. I used to make hundreds of prints for my customers on my Epson 3800. In Aperture I would select the photos and size for the prints, say 4x6, then Aperture would show me a preview of everything of all the prints and in that preview I could resize and crop each photo individually. This allowed me to get just the right crop of each photo for my clients. So after Apple forced me to try Lightroom, and much to my frustration I could not find any way to do that same simple crop on output. I was incredulous that such a useful and seemingly simple feature could be missing from Lightroom, and asked Matt Koslowski at Adobe Max during one of his Lightroom sessions if I had just missed how this worked. It couldn’t do it, he said. You have to crop the photo before printing. I was a little incredulous, because I didn’t want to crop my master file to 4x6. In that case, he said, I had two options: create a duplicate and crop that, or go back after you print and un-crop the master. When you are dealing with hundreds of prints, either of these options was mind-blowingly burdensome. Take that one use-case and multiply it by 100 and that was my experience trying to switch to Lightroom. So I gave up on it. (Here is a link on how one can “easily” crop on output in Lightroom: https://digital-photography-school.com/batch-crop-and-resize-in-lightroom/ It is nuts compared to how simple this was in Aperture.)
I now use a hodgepodge of methods to organize and edit my photos. I know I could stay with Aperture, but I didn’t want to keep adding thousands of photos to a program that had been EOL’d. Plus, my needs have evolved over the years. I want the ability to cloud-sync and edit my photos on my iPad Pro. Adobe’s latest evolution of Lightroom actually looks much better than the old one, particularly in it’s mobile version, and I may revisit it. Right now I like using a combination of Photos and Luminar for my everyday personal photos, and Adobe Bridge and Photoshop for my professional editing. Luminar is very reminiscent of Aperture in a lot of respects and since Photos now allows round-tripping to outside editors like Photoshop that solution works pretty well. However, Luminar doesn’t have a mobile app so Lightroom CC still has a leg-up on it. But frustratingly there is no one, simple solution that comes close to the power and ease-of-use that Aperture had.
I still use Aperture, mainly because I have 5-6 different photo libraries from various Macs. I have an app that helps find duplicates that works with Aperture and use it to streamline my photo library.
I use Photos mainly to export unmodified originals to my iCloud Drive to backup the photos permanently.
I don't use iCloud Photo Library since I do not want my photos deleted by mistake on any device.
They also strive to create software capabilities that only exist on their platforms.
Apple spends far more to develop and market these products than they ever generated in direct revenue. It was (and is) all about selling more hardware. Once an application no longer differentiates Apple from the others, they have to evaluate whether the expense/effort is worth it. When a product no longer contributes significantly to that goal, it is likely to be consumerized or discontinued.
Adobe on the other hand, creates software to sell/rent software. This motivation results in a much different approach to developing and evolving their products.
I was on the product team(s) responsible for iMovie, Final Cut Pro, iDVD, DVD Studio Pro, iPhoto and others, so I have some experience with this.
a product fails if it’s taken out of production. Lightroom has become a major success. Apple really wanted to get into the photo editing business, the way it wanted to get into the video editing business. One, it would be such a great tool, that people would buy into the platform for it. Two, Adobe had stepped back from the Mac in the wake of the disaster of the holiday season of 1995, and Apple wanted to have software that would insulate them from third parties leaving the platform.
whi,e FCP was a big success, aperture was a big failure. Look, pretending that is wasn’t doesn’t help Apple, or it’s customers. Apple bonked it, pure and simple. They could have made the major changes we all to,d the they needed to make, but they just took baby steps. When Lightroom cane out a few months later, we looked at it and moved to that. Adobe understood the professional photographer, whi,e Apple didn’t. So instead of making the big effort, they instead positioned the product as a prosumer product. When that didn’t work, they kept lowering the price and finally discontinued it, and subsumed some of the features into the new Photo software.