Hmm…

For reasons that will become clear in a forthcoming post, I’ve been using Iridient RAW Developer quite a lot recently, which is always a pleasure.

Just now out of curiosity I decided to compare IRD’s interpretation of a RAW file with Aperture’s. I was actually more interested in sharpening (and IRD won, easily), but I ended up getting sidetracked by what looked like a pretty large colour shift introduced by levels in Aperture.

This is a crop of the photo I was playing around with (Olympus E-3 RAW, unadjusted):

It looks pretty much identical in both programs at default settings. Well actually if you look closely, IRD has slightly more detail, but that’s not the issue here.

Here’s the image with Level adjustments in the Luminance channel in Aperture:

And here’s the same thing in Raw Developer, or at least an approximation using a Lightness curve:

It looks to me that Raw Developer has nicely retained the color balance, but Aperture has introduced a pretty drastic magenta cast.  It may be that my assumption that Lightness=Luminance is wrong, but I tried the same thing in RGB and got pretty much the same result. And of course my curve is not a perfectly accurate match of Aperture’s levels settings, but still, we’re not talking minor details here. The colour shift is huge.

I guess it’s all down to taste, but even so, it is easier to adjust to taste when you’re starting from an unadulterated baseline…

Addendum: after a bit more investigation, I noticed two things: 1, Aperture doesn’t actually appear to offer level adjustment in the Luminance channel. The Luminance / RGB options just change the underlying histogram display. The fact that the edit points stay the same seems to confirm this, although I could well be talking rubbish. 2, I can replicate the RAW Developer result by sticking to the Exposure and Contrast slider in Aperture. The lesson seems to be to treat Levels with caution.

Has anybody noticed yet ? What’s that ? Oh. Right. I’m last.

Actually I got the tip off for Aperture 3’s release from the excellent and still improving RB Design blog run by Robert Boyer.  I highly recommend his site as well as his eBook series, without a doubt the best value for money technical writing you’re going to find on Aperture. It’s great to see an Aperture-related web site at least on a par with the best of the Lightroom community. Some of Robert’s tips will leave wondering why you never knew that ... and make Aperture really hum. AND he’s got a sense of humour and doesn’t shy clear of the odd rant, bit of invective or rude word. Highly entertaining.

I’m stuck with Aperture 2 since my photo workstation is a Mac G5, and the budget for a Mac Pro is in the realms of fantasy. But I’m not complaining - Aperture 2 does everything I need.

Aperture 3 looks like it has some outstanding new features, and although it isn’t really an issue, at least not for me, it seems to becoming a far more powerful tool than Lightroom. One thing that does disappoint me though is RAW support: although it doesn’t affect me, the lack of support for the Olympus m4/3 series is a let-down, and the no-show for the Leica M9 is really surprising (yes, I know it records DNG, but the Ricoh GRDII also records DNGs, and at default settings they look crap in Aperture). At least the Lumix LX-3 finally made it. But I predict that RAW support is going to provide some fuel for Ye Olde Forum Flame Wars.

Whatever. Welcome Aperture 3. We’ve been expecting you.

A while ago I had a pretty unpleasant experience with Aperture. It was quite weird: I had a project open, showing the thumbnails. As I watched, these were systematically overwritten, one by one, by thumbnails of photos from a completely different set of projects. The originals were all from a set of projects for June 2008, and the “invaders” from projects for May and June 2004. As always, all files were managed as referenced files, not stored in the Aperture library. And the originals were safe. The version names stayed as initially set, taken from the 2008 filenames. There was no obvious correlation at all between the two sets of files.

Metadata was also preserved: edits applied to the 2008 images was applied to the 2004 “invaders”, obviously with strange results at times.  Digging into Aperture’s depths, I discovered that the XML files used to organise the projects referenced two files, the original and the replacement.

Trying to fix things by using Aperture’s “manage referenced files” tools was to no avail. Mirroring the company’s CEO’s dysfunctional personality, these tools are nothing if not opaque. Restoring backups from Time Machine also didn’t help - in fact, it just resulted in a repeat performance.

Posting the issue of the Apple discussion boards, and the near useless AUPN forums, was of no use. I get the impression that due to its very small user base, there are very, very few people who have any knowledge of Aperture much beyond superficial. Or if they are any, they’re not sharing.

So all that was left to was drastic surgery, which I put off for ages, but finally did tonight.  First, in order to break the references, I moved the folders containing the 2004 files to another volume.  I then deleted all the overwritten versions in the 2008 projects, and reimported the original 2008 files. Obviously I lost all metadata, including editing and cataloguing, for nearly 1 months’ photos - about 400 shots.  I then went to the 2004 projects, restored the 2004 folders, and rebuilt the references. In this case it was tedious and time consuming, and Aperture naturally went belly up a few times, but at least the metadata was preserved.

This has really shaken my confidence in Aperture. It needs to be rock-solid in this of all areas. I’m afraid that my impression of Aperture is that it was designed by the A-Team but implemented by the C-Team. Or possibly rushed to market by industry standard idiot marketing managers, and never recovered. But there’s little alternative. Lightroom is an awful mess and looks like getting worse. I’ve never seen such a case of collective denial as exists in the Lightroom user community. Aperture has a far better RAW conversion engine. The only, slightly, better alternative I know of is Iridient RAW Developer, but that doesn’t provide an end to end solution: a trip to Photoshop is almost always necessary, which introduces digital asset management issues, to which there is is no longer any real solution.

So, I’m left with two choices: 1, pray that Aperture doesn’t screw up again, that it is still under active development by Apple, and that a significantly enhanced version 3 will appear one day, or 2, revert to Lightroom, and waste endless hours on profiles, presets, and whatever else it takes to get away from the nasty RAW conversions it delivers by default.

I guess for now, it’s better the devil I know.

In recent months I’ve found myself doing a lot more film photography, and this reopens the old issues of how best to manage film scans alongside digital camera files. Ultimately they’re all just photos, and I’d like to be able to manage them together. In the “old days”, I used iView Media Pro to manage all my scans, and built up a considerable number of catalogs, including a “reference” catalog for finished, best work.  These days I’ve got Aperture to do this for me for my digital camera files, and the iView stuff lives on if ever I want to go back to earlier work.  However, I’ve still been trying to use iView to manage my film scans. It really is a very powerful tool, but ever since it was taken over by Microsoft, and recast as “Expression Media”, it has stagnated. Two versions of Expression Media have been released, and apart from packaging and some very marginal new features, they offer nothing to justify the absurd upgrade price. And in fact, I can’t even buy an upgrade in Switzerland. Microsoft’s online store points me at the full version, with a ridiculous price, wherever I click from.  Why do I care if it offers nothing ? Well, there’s things in iView 3 which don’t work properly any more on Mac OS X 10.5 - I think OS X 10.3 was current when iView 3 was released. And if I’m committing work to it, it seemed a safer bet to be up to date.

But I couldn’t do it, so I was prompted to see what Aperture could do for me. One winning point Aperture scored over the competition from Day 1 was the ability to manage large files - and 16 bit 4800dpi scans from XPan film are large, over 170Mb. It doesn’t make much sense to process these files in Aperture - Photoshop is the right tool for that - but managing them, maybe.

Recently, and belatedly, I’ve started scanning linear 16bit “RAW” scans, and post-processing them away from the scanning software. This implies that I’m going to have various “versions” of the same “master”, and one flaw in iView was that it can’t easily handle this scenario. But Aperture can: it has stacks. Nice stacks too.

Here, you can see the Aperture browser showing a few XPAn scans, all arranged into stacks, with the “RAW” file and the processed versions.

It works pretty well, although it doesn’t quite have the cataloging flexibility of iView. However, keeping to a consistent file naming scheme, and using Aperture’s list view, ordered by file name, it is simple enough to associate versions created outside of Aperture. Having decided to use this method, I can now in fact make it even simpler - drop the “_RAW” suffix I’ve been adding to the 16bit lineear scans, and let Aperture generate version filenames in the usual when, by launching Adobe Photoshop as an external editor.

I think this is a nice example of the flexibility of Aperture, and a justification of its philosophy to NOT impose a workflow, but rather to provide the environment in which you can roll your own.

I suppose I’m not alone in always wondering if there might be a better way of processing my digital images. There are several aspects to what we’ve been conditioned to call a “workflow”, but to me the most important of these are organisation (selecting, rating, keywording, arranging) and developing the RAW to a usable image. For a while now, I’ve been using Apple Aperture 2, and I’ve devoted more time than I care to think of moving older work into it. Originally I used iView Media Pro to catalog, and a variety of RAW convertors, including Capture One, Adobe Camera RAW, and Iridient RAW Developer. Of all of these, I liked Iridient best. It produces beautifully detailed, balanced output, and has more controls than most people will ever need - especially as often the default settings are just fine. But what Iridient (and Capture One) does not have, is any integrated way to organise an ever growing photo collection, and although there are workarounds, the benefits over switching to a “non destructive RAW workflow tool” like Aperture or Adobe Lightroom have to be pretty convincing. I find Aperture’s RAW conversion to be almost as good as Iridient’s in most cases, at lest for my Olympus E-1, E-3 and E-400 files. So I decided it was worth the switch.

However, the other day, prompted by something I read somewhere, I decided to take a closer look at Aperture’s conversions. I noticed that there was some faint but quite definite banding in a cloudy grey sky I was looking at. Firing up the same image in Iridient, I saw no such banding - and better handling of a patch of lurid dayglo orange which Aperture had toned down a bit.

Aperture’s rendition of the scene in question

Panic ensued. Did I now have to go back to Iridient, find a new cataloging tool (Atomic View, maybe, but, well ...) or pay the crazy fee Microsoft expects to “upgrade” from iView to Expression Media 2 ?

Well, I decided not to panic. I exported a version from Aperture and opened it in Photoshop - and guess what ? No banding. I imported the Iridient version into Aperture ... hello banding! So that part is clearly an Aperture display issue. But the colour issue remains, even if it is really quite trivial.

I was still a bit shaken, and combined with a period of screaming at Aperture to GET ON WITH IT several times today (it didn’t help much) I thought I might as well look at other options. So I tried Lightroom 2, especially as the gradient tool has always sounded intriguing, and I always like the targeted adjustments.

Well, in the GET ON WITH IT stakes, Lightroom 2 has little to envy Aperture. The gradient tool is horribly fiddly to use, and as slow as the slowest parts of Aperture. And after a few minutes I realised I could never go back to the dreadful Tonka Toy user interface that Lightroom forces on its users.

As for Capture One, well maybe, but since it is Intel only, and I’m using a PowerPC G5, I guess I’ll have to remain in the dark. In any case, if I want a conversion-only tool, I can’t imagine why Iridient would not satisfy me.

So, at the end of all this, I’m happily back in Aperture, secure in the knowledge that whatever the market share stats may indicate, it blows the doors off of Lightroom, and whenever I’ve got a tricky or deserving image I want to give special attention too, a quick roundtrip to Iridient and / or Photoshop is not, really, all that much of a hassle.