Aperture Priority

Last August, I began looking for alternatives to Photoshop for digital photo processing. Having worked with Photoshop since version 2.0, I thought it might be a good time to explore other options.

Working with Photoshop’s Camera Raw plugin Since version 10 has been wonderful. Finally, Photoshop has dedicated tools designed to address the specific needs of the Photographer. Only, you can’t print from Camera Raw, you can only export to Photoshop, which means you now have two files to manage; the original, and the working copy.

Working with Adobe’s Bridge has also been wonderful. It’s a great way to organize your library in an open architecture that works in conjunction with the OS. But, it is a separate application from Photoshop.

So, I decided it to look at Capture One, Adobe Lightroom 2, and Aperture 2. I downloaded the 30-day trial versions, and explored each one. They were all very good. They all had their unique advantages. But Aperture won.

Lightroom was a close second, but if you already have Photoshop CS3 or CS4, it didn’t offer any real advantage, except perhaps a more integrated approach.

Capture One was very powerful, but focused more on Raw conversion, and not at color correction or retouching. Plus, the interface was a little difficult to navigate.

Aperture combines an image browser, Raw converter and non-destructive adjustment tools in a single, intuitive interface. There is no differentiation between JPEG or RAW images other than a few special tools dedicated to the RAW format. It’s all pretty seamless. And, I can still work with any of the files in Photoshop just as I could before.

In fact, I opened an .NEF image through Photoshop’s Camera Raw plugin, saved it as an RGB .TIFF with the base layer as a Camera Raw Smart Object, added it to my Aperture Library (which you can do with the option of storing the image files in their original locations) and applied all sorts of Aperture adjustments to it. Then, I went back to the original .TIFF image, double-clicked the base layer to open it in the Camera Raw plugin, and made some adjustments there and saved the file. Back in Aperture, those changes were added to the ones originally made in Aperture.

So now, I have two weapons in my arsenal against mediocre photos. And, Aperture is about a quarter of the price of Photoshop.

Aperture doesn’t replace Photoshop. You can’t combine images in Aperture. You can’t do pixel-level editing (although you can come pretty close with Aperture’s non-destructive cloning and healing tools) But, for 90% of what I need to do, I find myself going there first. Even though I’ve been working with Photoshop for over 20 years, I’m more comfortable working in the Aperture interface.

Who would have thought Apple would develop an application like this? But then again, who would have thought that they would have created a device to outsell the Sony Walkman?