Poor Aperture, it has been in limbo for a couple of years with RAW updates nearly every months and some sparse updates here and there. When Aperture 2 came out at the 1st quarter of 2008, it felt like the next major release will be due a year later. As the months went by, Adobe Lightroom was getting all the attention and rightly so it deserves.

Suddenly, Aperture 3 came flying in unexpectly, what did we get?

It seems that the developers at Apple decided to borrow features from iPhoto and iMovie into Aperture. The layout remains the same along with new features such as Faces, Places, brushes, adjustment presets, full screen browser, oh, audio and video support, and advanced slideshows. Now those seems great on paper and the application is now 64-bit app which means things should chug along faster.

Looking at the world of Apple and their secretive motives, the company has selected a batch of pro photographers to show off Aperture on their website about how wonderful it is. It is the status quo of Apple marketing once again until we stumble back in the real world.

It is a different mixture here as I found out that the responsive of modifying levels, curves, brushes, cleaning up the photos has mid range performance hits. It is acceptable at most times if you can bear it, else you are going to have quite a frustrating time. Word of advice, make sure you have well over 2GB of RAM to deal with this beast. It is, after all, a Pro app.

The most dreadful part of this software is ‘Faces’ because it is enabled by default. A quick uncheck in preferences quickly brings back the performance that Aperture deserves. I never got the idea of ‘Faces’ as it seems so time consuming and can cause disarray. I have far too many photos of people and having to deal with this function takes up my time. The clear aim of a software is to use it straightaway without delay.

Aperture is buggy. Extremely buggy that it is quite shocking that it has become a major release. This brings back the days of when OS X was first released in 2001 with serious performances issues and bugs forcing Apple to fix the issues asap.

My issues? I have converted my current library to Aperture 3 and found many of my photos refusing to be displayed. All I was left was a nice cutout of a grey background. Wonderful. To resolve this issue, I have to refresh reprocess the photos, this could take a long time and ran into more frustration that ‘it just doesn’t work’.

Another one was where I edited a photo using a plugin, it doesn’t show up in the preview where it appears in full screen, I keep running into this bug far too many times with Aperture 3 that I wish I never put the software on in the first place.

Remember the word of advice earlier about the RAM? Just watch Aperture eat it all up after editing a couple of photos. This thing leaks memory like no tomorrow!

Aperture 3 has got so much going for it with the new features, brushes and great number of plugins on standby. It has a huge potential to chase after Adobe Lightroom and perhaps Photoshop as that still remain supreme, it is let down hugely on their quality build and for that explanation, I recommend reading Daniel’s post Keeping up with the Joneses.

Note: It is a good idea to back up your current library before upgrading. You’ll fall back to Aperture 2 in a hurry.

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