Man Oh Man, I Love Apple
What a day.
First off, Apple released Mac OS X 10.5.2 yesterday, and they really did a bang-up job of addressing issues that many of us emailed them about. A lot of us hated the transparent menu bar and the forced use of the new Stacks feature — and Apple made both items an option, and even added some additional features to Stacks. The Time Machine menu item is nice, too, for those of us that like to keep track of that sort of thing. There were lots of other great fixes, too, but those are the ones that affected me the most.
Outside of that, Apple also announced the long-awaited Aperture 2. HOLY CRAP, we Aperture-heads have been waiting forever for this release, and it looks as promising as we had hoped. I won't go into all the details, but some of the features we asked for and received are:
And loads more. Needless to say, this update is already ordered with 2-day shipping.
Now all they need to do is open the iPhone to Verizon...
First off, Apple released Mac OS X 10.5.2 yesterday, and they really did a bang-up job of addressing issues that many of us emailed them about. A lot of us hated the transparent menu bar and the forced use of the new Stacks feature — and Apple made both items an option, and even added some additional features to Stacks. The Time Machine menu item is nice, too, for those of us that like to keep track of that sort of thing. There were lots of other great fixes, too, but those are the ones that affected me the most.
Outside of that, Apple also announced the long-awaited Aperture 2. HOLY CRAP, we Aperture-heads have been waiting forever for this release, and it looks as promising as we had hoped. I won't go into all the details, but some of the features we asked for and received are:
- The new Recovery Tool to hep with blown high, etc.
- The VIbrancy Tool to selectively boost saturation.
- The "fixed" Retouch Brush to make subtle changes more natural.
- BACKGROUND EXPORT, finally!
- A new, streamlined Adjustments HUD.
- Project skimming like we have in iPhoto 08. SWEET.
- Hue boost.
- Cold pixel reveal, finally.
And loads more. Needless to say, this update is already ordered with 2-day shipping.
Now all they need to do is open the iPhone to Verizon...
posted by Maury @ 10:22 AM Permalink | 3 comments so far 
3 Comments:
You could just void your warranty on your iPhone...
I've never messed with Aperture. Is that something I could benefit from even though we have Photoshop CS3? Sell me on it, Maury.
They are 2 different animals, really, and both are worthwhile investments. One could say...
Aperture is a photo editing and management application, and Photoshop is a photo manipulation application.
I was an Adobe Bridge user for years, but when Aperture (and even iPhoto) came out, I MUCH preferred the library management offered when compared to Bridge's clunky method. Being able to organize shots and shoots any way I like, with as much detail and intricacy, with my hierarchy, etc., etc. was a boon to me. The way Aperture allows you to store, manage, and reference pictures just works for my brain.
For example, I have a folder named Vacations. Inside this folder is a folder for each year. Inside the yearly folders are Projects for the different places we've visited. And even then, I may have a parent folder for the vacation spot if we did a tour or something else. For portrait shot stuff, you could setup something like...
Portraits Folder > 2008 Folder > Hintze Family Folder > Jackson's B-Day Project, Mikey's B-Day Project, Christmas, etc., etc.
Basically, the possibilities are endless.
I'm also a fan of tagging my shots with names, locations, or whatever you want so that I can quickly do a search for all New York Karen shots or whatever.
Outside of organizing, the tools for image editing are better than Bridge and Photoshop. The sheer volume of fine tuning capabilities in Aperture leave Photoshop in the dust, plus, they're all in one place. Aperture is much more intelligent with auto-corrections, white balance, levels, saturation, etc. Exposure control, Luminance level, exposure tint, blah blah blah. There's just no comparison.
My workflow consists of importing my images and organizing them how I want them, then I begin the post processing them in Aperture. If I want to do manipulation (cross processing, faux Lomo, etc.) I export my RAW image as max quality JPG and tweak away in Photoshop until I'm happy. Since my images will either be printed or scaled for web, I don't worry about the RAW > JPG conversion at export. Of course, with Aperture, I can go directly into Photoshop as 16-bit, make my changes, then save the modified version back into my Aperture library as a Version.
The export functions in Aperture are also totally sweet. You can setup and export any way you want, from specifying 1024x? 80% JPG, to adding watermarks, for emailing, quality, file type, and more.
I can't recommend it highly enough, so I'd suggest downloading the trial and giving it a go for a few weeks. It'll be quite a shock from Bridge at first, but it'll be well worth the discomfort once you get used to it.
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