Just as I finished bitching about Aperture 3, Apple released an update yesterday.  First, I’ll post the published fixes and then my impressions:

This update improves overall stability and addresses a number of issues in Aperture 3, including:

• Upgrading libraries from earlier versions of Aperture
• Importing libraries from iPhoto
• Importing photos directly from a camera
• Memory usage when processing heavily-retouched photos
• Face recognition processing
• Adding undetected faces using the Add Missing Face button
• Printing pages containing multiple images
• Printing photos and contact sheets with borders and metadata
• Editing photos using an external editor
• Display of images with Definition and Straighten adjustments applied
• Zooming photos in the Viewer and in the Loupe using keyboard shortcuts
• Accessing Aperture libraries on a network volume
• Selecting and moving pins on the Places map
• Adding and editing custom locations using the Manage My Places window
• Switching between masters when working with RAW+JPEG pairs.

The update is recommended for all users of Aperture 3.

For detailed information on this update, please visit this website:http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2518

First off, let me say that this update certainly improved the general stability of the program, but navigating around the library is still slower then it should be.  There may have been a minor improvement to the reliability of Faces, but it is still not terribly skilled in locating faces that have already been identified.  I have now tagged 2,128 photos of my wife and it still cannot find her in pictures taken under similar conditions to photos already tagged.

This leads me to believe one of two possibilities – that there is still something seriously broken in the faces feature, or that their underlying methodology for locating similar faces is hopelessly obtuse.

There is one final quirk that’s been bugging me this morning.  I’m not sure exactly what’s going on with color profile tagging.  I spent about 20 minutes working on a photo this morning with onscreen proofing turned on.  I exported a JPG and uploaded to a website and found the gamma to be completely off.  Now, I understand color profiling is difficult, but as far as I’m aware…Safari is color-profile aware.

Which brings me to my question, coming from photoshop I learned a lot about assigning color spaces, but I can’t find anywhere in Aperture that explicitly details what color space your image is in or what it is exporting to.  All I can find is onscreen proofing.  Thus, I have no idea why my image looks one way inside aperture and another outside of it…other then to assume that the color profile it is exporting is not the same that it is proofing.

Ugh…

Update 1: Spoke too soon.  I just spent 30 minutes tagging faces, turned to work on something else and came back to find aperture asking me to tag all the faces I’d just tagged.

At this point, I’m considering switching to Picasa for organization.

Update 2:  I’d forgotten where colorspace was set on export, but found it under “edit” when exporting.  Turns out I was already exporting to sRGB while doing my onscreen proofing in the same.  Still no idea why I’m seeing such a gamma shift when uploading the photo to a website.  I still have questions about how Ap3 is handling colorspace.