By any account, Aperture 2 was long overdue for an upgrade. The only other “pro” application in Apple’s stable receiving less active development was Shake, a compositing program Apple has openly stopped supporting. Most people expected Aperture to simply die on the vine like other market experiments (AppleTV), and the continued adoption of Adobe Lightroom did nothing to breath life into Aperture. What seems at first to be a capable and professional photo librarian was quickly starting to look like one of those pet projects that no one had the heart to kill, so they simply decided to ignore it instead.
A few years back I was searching for an easy utility to complete a photobook project I was working on. My search lead me to a free trial of Aperture, a package I found to be surprisingly well designed and easy to use.
My initial enthusiasm was slowly tempered, as in the two years since I installed there was only been one update released. No new features, no new improvements and worst of all…not even a hint that anyone in Apple even cared about the package.
When iPhoto’s semi-annual release added gimmicks like face recognition and integrated GPS photo mapping, I assumed that these features would quickly roll into it’s “professional” big brother, but there was still no update (free or paid). My disappointment in Aperture’s development changed to downright frustration when I began to start playing with Google’s excellent and free Picasa on my wife’s laptop. Seriously? Google’s free photo software from has working face recognition?
Just when I was about to download and install the Lightroom 3 trial, Apple finally released Aperture 3! Face recognition, yay! GPS photomapping, yay! Brushable adjusments, yay! Entire codebase rewritten for native 64-bit processing, yay!
Judging by the press release, Apple released a feature-filled, high horsepower software package that can legitimately handle most photographic tasks previously owned by Photoshop’s full version. Is Aperture 3 finally a worthwhile contender?
…that depends on if you can even get it to run.
