I’m going to start my blog with a bit of a rant about Apple’s new version of Aperture (version 3). This is the application Apple markets to pro photographers for managing, editing and outputting their photos. The theme of my post today is the final quality of the output.
When you export photos to size less than 100%, Aperture 3 sharpens the image, which would be great if it weren’t for the fact that it automatically over-sharpens the image, which produces an overly contrasty border around the edges of objects in the photos.
Aperture 1.x and 2.x both under-sharpened the exported photos, or even used none at all. This was also a bugbear of mine (why buy pro-grade lenses when Aperture makes it look like you used cheap lenses?). Now Apple seem to have overcompensated.
There’s no manual control for the amount of sharpening applied to exported images, which limits the effectiveness of the whole application! The aim of any photographer, pro or amateur, is to show people their work, isn’t it? And this is usually done these days via website galleries like mine or via email attachments, where resizing is always needed. So after buying sharp, expensive lenses and cameras, and spending hours optimising the look of the photos on the computer, the result is compromised by the amateurish automatic over-sharpening of the photos! It looks like the photographer has been careless.
At least with the earlier versions of Aperture you could have sharpened the un-sharp outputted photos, but you can never unsharpen sharpened photos! I’m considering switching to Adobe Lightroom 3, which is a shame as I’m otherwise pretty happy using Aperture as it’s feature rich and easy to use.
