Further thoughts on Aperture’s demise

The dust is beginning to settle on the Aperture debacle, and I’ve had some time to think about it. It’s interesting to see some considered views from long term, expert Aperture bloggers. There’s a glass half full view here, and a glass half empty one here. I’d tend to say the latter was more realistic, but my glass remains ditheringly uncommitted. I’ve dusted off CaptureOne Pro 7 and Lightroom 5, and I find both competent in various ways, but both feel like downgrades from Aperture. Both are good enough, and feature some editing tools which are superior to Aperture’s (sharpening, in Lightroom, and keystone correction in both), but in general I still always come back to re-realising how good, if unassuming, Aperture actually is. The Aperture marketing team deserves to be hung, drawn and quartered. In terms of UI and DAM features, Aperture makes both look prehistoric. CaptureOne’s DAM toolset is a partial cut & paste from MediaPro, with plenty of critical bits missing. It’s a start, but general about as much use as chocolate teapot, not to mention very clunky to use. In theory CaptureOne interfaces with MediaPro. In any approaching realistic practice, it doesn’t. For example MediaPro knows nothing about CaptureOne’s variants, and CaptureOne is totally unaware of MediaPro’s hierarchic keywording. Both have a “catalog” concept, which are superficially similar but completely seperate. Basically it’s a total dog’s breakfast. The rendering of CaptureOne is quite interesting, in that it is quite unlike Aperture and Lightroom for my Olympus ORF files. CaptureOne has more saturated red tones, which are quite difficult to replicate. When evaluating CaptureOne, you do need to be aware of it’s unusual input tone curve feature, which defaults to “film standard”. In my opinion it’s better to start off with the “linear” option, at least until you get a feel for what it is doing. However, taking Olympus Viewer as a reference, Lightroom and Aperture are much closer than the CaptureOne default rendition.

And so to Lightroom. I used Lightroom v1 for about a year before moving to Aperture, so I know roughly what makes it tick. Lightroom 5 seems to have had all manner of bits glued onto it, and quite a lot of random changes. Some of this good, some less so, but the overall impression remains of someone trying to build a replica of Aperture in Lego. There is far too much clutter in the UI, and far too many options, many of which are squirrelled away in unlikely locations. It’s all pretty chaotic, and doesn’t seem to have had much overall design guidance. I think that in time it could be tamed and streamlined through use of keyboard shortcuts, but even so, I’m not why “Map”, for example, gets the same prominence as “Develop”. By using this ultra-modal approach, seems to me that Adobe’s designers painted themselves into a corner very early on. However, Lightroom has two key aspects: a massive installed user base, and endless web and print resources, paid for and free, some of which are very good. It also has an iPad client - not Adobe’s Lightroom Mobile, which even the cheerleaders seem unimpressed with, but the excellent 3rd party app, Photosmith, which has similar functionality to the late lamented Pixelsync (and thanks again for murdering that, Apple. Bastards).

So on the whole, Lightroom seems to come out on top. The problem there is that I’m really not enamoured about Adobe’s subscription model. Now, maybe, for 20 years, maybe, but if my circumstances change, or when I’m retired on a pension, Adobe’s monthly tax might become a big issue.

Anyway, when it comes down to RAW editing, even if for some reason Aperture doesn’t cut it for me, there’s really no reason why I can’t continue to catalogue in Aperture and edit elsewhere. I’m aLightroomeady doing this - I sometimes use Iridient, or Photo Ninja, or Photoshop, or Sigma DPP to process photos, and manage the output in Aperture. So the big issue really is the longevity of Aperture’s DAM features.

I’ve obviously had my eye off the ball as far as the DAM market is concerned. I used to follow it closely, hoping for a modern replacement for iView, but I gave up. In the meantime a very promising looking application called Photo Supreme has emerged. Apart from it’s inherent values, it looks to me that it could act as a metadata hub, or bridge, between various applications. It can read Aperture (and Lightroom, and CaptureOne) libraries, and it seems it can spit out data which others can then import. I haven’t had time to try it yet, but I will.

In the meantime, I’m not evaluating the fullness of my glass just yet. I’ll stick with Aperture for a while at least, but with a very clear eye on keeping everything ready to export.