We keep hearing about Aperture being good for professionals and how it’s got all these tools that allow professionals to work better. But what exactly does Aperture have that gives it the edge? We know there’s ‘more of everything’ with Aperture, but what are those things that make it irreplaceable? Here’s ten reasons I think Aperture just rocks when it comes to professional image editing.
Photo Management
While iPhoto’s event based photo management system works for home use, when it comes to professional work, there’s nothing like organising your stuff into projects. Each project can hold folders, smart folders, books, web galleries, all tied to each project. You can directly import new photos to projects, or folders within that project. This emphasis on projects visually translates to the ability to have a thousands of separate iPhoto libraries within a single window.
Non-Destructive Editing
To be able to come back to an image, and change a certain edit merely by dragging sliders puts Aperture’s editing features far ahead of iPhoto’s. And instead of creating a duplicate copy to protect the original, Aperture merely adds these edits as meta data, saving a huge amount of space in the bargain. This provides for much quicker edits, while not having to worry about saving changes. You know your original image is untouched.
Minute adjustments for controlling every detail
Versions
You can have two or more different looking images, but both referring to the same master (file) on the hard drive. You can have a sepia tone on one ‘version’, and crop the other image differently, and apply hundreds of other settings, but it won’t take up more than a few kilobytes of additional storage. This allows you to see how an image will look with different settings applied, compare them at the same time, without eating into precious hard drive space.
Stacks
Want to organise stuff within your project? Merely select a bunch of images and ‘stack’ them up into a single image. To see all the images within the stack just click the expand button and they slide out into full view. This allows you to have a clean library with thousands of images in each project, yet be able to navigate them with ease. Versions of course are automatically ‘stacked’.
A shot of three versions of the same master, in a single stack.
The Vault
A built in backup system allows you to quickly save your images and edits onto an external drive. When it comes to data loss, nothing hurts more than losing your photos. The vault feature is much better, faster, and more robust than Time Machine at making sure everything is backed up.
The Loupe
iPhoto is almost weird when it comes to grabbing the minute details of your image. You have to go into editing mode and then zoom in 100% to see finer details. Aperture’s Loupe tool allows you to quickly zoom into certain areas while looking at the full image at all times. Oh, and the loupe can be used even while in thumbnail mode which makes it a whole lot more useful.
Editing Friendly UI
The user interface is geared for managing and editing images. You can for instance edit an image while in thumbnail mode or go full screen and still have the same amount of tools at your disposal. Yet, viewing images in Aperture is just as good as with iPhoto, since properly presenting your images to clients is more than 50% of the task.
Retouch, Clone, Dodge & Burn
These four tools are required to add touch ups to images, and would otherwise require you to go to something like Photoshop. You can Clone and retouch right from within Aperture, and the edits stay non destructive, just like the rest of the settings. Dodge & Burn however is a destructive change, which is automatically saved on a new version instead of a master. Again, just a few more kilobytes tacking on to the master.
Import Options
I’ve never had a better importing experience. You can control every aspect of importing, right from keywords, filenames, to whether you want to move the images to your library or just reference them. Aperture can also automatically stack similar images based on colour and shapes.
Dual Monitor support
Using Aperture along with a dual monitor is just pure bliss. You can have the power of the aperture interface on your screen while displaying full screen images to clients on the secondary display. There’s more ways you can exploit the second monitor.
I’m still studying Aperture, but it definitely looks like a great tool to master. Phil on the other hand uses Lightroom and claims it’s a more polished tool. Perhaps he could enlighten us some day. Any Aperture users amidst care to share a cool tip?
