Aperture 3.2

Since our review of Aperture 3.0 at its launch, Apple has been busy not only tightening the app by making it more stable and correcting minor glitches in specific cases, but also adding new capabilities like support for iCloud, iOS 5, and Lion multi-touch. Among an extremely capable field of pro photo-workflow software?especially Adobe Lightroom ($299, 4.5 stars), ACDSee Pro ($99.99, 4 stars), and the impressive newer arrival, CyberLink PhotoDirector ($99.99, 3.5 stars)?Aperture's smooth user interface, Faces and Places features, plentiful output options, and good camera raw support stand out. For Mac users who want a big step up in power from iPhoto, Aperture is a natural. But Lightroom goes further for the pro or very serious amateur, with not only the enforced workflow, but with specific lens-based corrections for geometry, vignetting, and chromatic aberration.

Aperture is available either from the Mac App Store for $79.99, or as a free trial downloadable from www.apple.com/aperture. It's a Mac-only application, so Windows and Linux users are out of luck, but are well served by Adobe's competing Lightroom, PCMag.com Editors' Choice photo workflow app, which is also available for the Mac. Another new Mac and Windows offering, Corel AfterShot ($99.99, 2.5 stars) has a ways to go before catching up with the two major players from Adobe and Apple.

Interface
Programs in Aperture's class are all about workflow. The progression is generally from importing and organizing to adjusting and editing to outputting your photos to print and web. Lightroom, ACDSee, AfterShot, and PhotoDirector take the approach of segmenting each of these phases of the workflow with different "modes" in tabs or buttons, usually along the lines of Organize, Edit, and Output. The progression often makes sense, but there are times when you may just want to jump around and perform an organizing action in the midst of photo editing.

Aperture is non-modal, meaning you can do just this, performing any action at any point in your process from its single Inspector panel. The tabs on this panel for Library, Metadata, and Adjustments, along with the interface's buttons and the app menu, give you access to everything in the program at any stage of the process. Your process will determine which is best for you: the more methodical types will prefer Lightroom's approach, while Aperture will better suit the more ADD types, who want to jump around between functions.

The modal approach will be comfortable for many photo pros, and it epitomizes an actual "workflow." But navigating Aperture's easy full-screen view, with optional "heads-up" display for the Inspector, becomes second nature pretty quickly. This new full-screen capability makes it easier to show nothing but your big glorious photo. Lightroom still has three levels of "full screen" and requires extra steps to hide all the panels and toolbars. However, neither Aperture nor Lightroom let me undock the panels the way ACDSee did.

Aperture lets you view your library as large thumbnails in full screen mode, and its thumbnail-size slider makes adjusting them easier than in Lightroom. Aperture also has a nice zoom with the mouse-wheel option. New support for OS X Lion gestures means you can pinch and unpinch on a trackpad to zoom in and out as well. Rotating and cropping also benefits from multitouch gestures. Another feature lacking in Lightroom but available in Aperture is the virtual Light Table; this lets you arrange photos in different sizes in a single view and save them as one PDF or JPG. I'm not sure how useful this is for most photographers, but it's been brought up on Adobe Lightroom forums by those who miss it.

Import and Organize
When you import photos from a memory card, Aperture saves files in its own area as "managed" photos, only accessible by Aperture, but you can save the images to a regular disk folder and have Aperture treat them as "referenced" files for editing. Any edits will be saved in Aperture's database, but the master images remain where you placed them on the drive. You can also export a managed file to a disk file visible in Finder. The raw import settings for my Canon EOS Rebel T1i turned out beautiful images. And the software can perform some image processing as it imports, such as applying adjustment presets, and even Apple ActionScripts that you can download from enthusiast sites.

Like most current photo-editing software, Aperture is "non-destructive," meaning it keeps a master of the original image you imported and saves your edits in a database. Any of your edited images is called a "version" (as opposed to the master?the original). I think Lightroom makes it a little easier to take snapshots and view before/after comparisons, though you can do this in Aperture through menus. Lightroom also makes it easier to see a split view of one side showing your original and the other your edited version. And while tethering my T1i worked flawlessly in Lightroom 3 beta, Aperture wouldn't play. I contacted Apple about this and assume it will support this most popular of DSLRs soon.

Aperture lets you organize your images in several hierarchies?at the top level, your Library contains Projects, which can be subdivided into folders, albums, and Smart albums. Stacks is a feature in both Aperture and Lightroom that lets you group related photos, and both can auto-group photos into stacks based on the shots' timestamps. Aperture makes a bigger deal out of stacks, giving the feature its own menu (Lightroom offers a choice under its Photo menu). And Aperture has a nice expanding animation when you reveal a stack's photos.

Aperture offers all the extensive metadata support you could want?camera and EXIF, ratings, captions, keywords, and much more?including support for the standard IPTC Core spec. One thing I'm used to is right-clicking to get properties, but that's not an option in Aperture. For my Canon T1i, Aperture could show me the focus points, but Lightroom couldn't. A very complete filter dialog lets you view just photos that meet the criteria you want, though in a minor quibble, Lightroom makes it easier to filter by EXIF info such as which lens you used.

Aperture also now displays video and lets you do basic trimming, something Ligthroom users will have to wait for in version 4. I do wish it were easier to filter the library view by just video, though. The video editing like what you get on the iPhone?very basic. But it can be useful for slideshow presentations, and it's more than you get it Lightroom 3, which only displays videos in the betas I've seen so far.

iCloud Photo Stream
New for version 3.2 in Aperture, a Photo Stream entry appears by default in your Library tab in the side panel. The first time you click on this, you'll see a message asking whether you want to turn the feature on or not. After responded in the affirmative, a confirmation dialog appeared, telling me I had to enable iCloud in System Preferences. The relevant control panel opened, where I could sign into my Apple ID. After returning to Aperture and hitting the Turn on Photo Stream button, two project thumbnail trays appeared at the bottom of the window. My guess is that this was because I had iCloud Photo Stream syncing set up on a Windows PC, too, but shooting a couple more photos with my iPhone quickly populated both sets with the new photos.

By default, any photos I added to my Aperture Library were automatically added to Photo Stream, which wasn't a good thing for my storage limit. A complicated series of rules apply if you upload from multiple computers. One smart feature of Photo Stream is that it can make raw camera files viewable on your iPhone or iPad.

A striking point about Photo Stream (and in some ways iCloud as a whole) is that it's almost more generous with Windows PC users than with Mac users. The service works with all recent versions, including XP, Vista, and Windows 7, whereas only the latest version of Mac OS X is compatible: Leopard and even Snow Leopard users are less favored than Windows users.

Also, on Windows, you get a standard folder under My Photos for your Photo Stream, where on the Mac the folder is hidden, with the photos only accessible through iPhoto or Aperture. This means Lightroom users on Windows can point to this as an auto-import folder, so Lightroom has no Photo Stream disadvantage compared with Aperture.

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