Today I decided I’d had enough of Aperture 3.0′s half-dead snail’s pace, instability and poor export quality. At least until Apple release fixes for these problems. I can’t even downgrade to Aperture 2, which ran at a fairly acceptable speed. I paid for an upgrade to ruin my photography workflow!
I’ve been giving Lightroom 3 a go for a while now, and I’m really impressed with it’s speed and features. Some aspects aren’t as good as Aperture’s, like the library management, and some are missing, like photo book creation (which I haven’t used actually), but I’m impressed by the huge user base and support for the application. Editing photos in Lightroom is a bit quirky, but I’m sure I’ll get used to the interface in time.
Until Apple releases fixes for Aperture 3.0, and/or I buy a fast Mac with a lot of memory, it’s Lightroom from now on!
I wanted to share with you this excellent blog by Peter Belanger, a product photographer. His clients include Apple and MacWorld, and he’s got behind-the-scenes photos of some of his shoots. Interesting stuff.
I had some fun with some delicious berry photos for iStockphoto, and what’s better than getting to eat your subject matter? I think I’ll be doing more food photography in the near future!
My best selling photo has now been downloaded over 1000 times on iStockphoto:) If only all my other photos were as popular! A nice milestone to reach, and quite an appropriate photo for such a milestone. Thank you purchasers!
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.
