alxknt

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alxknt
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  • How Apple's Aperture created a new class of app on October 19, 2005 and lost it to Adobe L...

    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.

    melgross said:
    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.
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