Stop the lights

I do 99.9% of my image processing in Aperture, which is Apple’s RAW processing software.  As a result it is vitally important to my photography and to my workflow, and any improvements that are made to it have the potential to make my post-processing life much easier.  So I was excited when Aperture 3 hit the market a couple of weeks ago.  I tried the demo for a while, liked what I saw, and upgraded to the full version.  I’ve been living with it now for a few weeks.  Here are my thoughts so far.  If you’re thinking of moving to Aperture 3 you want to read this.  Trust me.

The first version of Aperture was awful, clunky, slow and featureless. I tried it, left it, and used Photoshop Elements instead. Then Lightroom came along, as RAW became more popular and the photography community began to preach its benefits, and probably not coincidentally Apple upped its game with Aperture 2.  I jumped back on board, and fell in love with it.  It could do 90% of what I wanted and in many ways shaped how I did (and still do) my post-processing.

Lightroom 2 saw Adobe up its game in this market too, and now Aperture 3 brings to the table a lot of what Lightroom 2 brought – selective editing is built in to almost every tool, it has curves, it has presets, it supports multiple libraries, it runs in 64-bit mode.  Had I written to Santa about Aperture 2, Aperture 3 is what I would have hoped for as a response.

There’s only one niggling issue.  But it’s a big one.  So before you go and upgrade, read on!

For reasons that I don’t understand, if you shoot in RAW using a range of cameras – Nikon D300 and Nikon D700 being two of them (my two cameras) when you upgrade your library from Aperture 2 to Aperture 3 it will ask if you want to reprocess the master files. You can choose not to, but it means for those images you can’t access the full range of Aperture’s new capabilities – in particular the brushes to make local adjustements.

It’s not a big deal that Apple have changed how they process RAW files from certain cameras, but it is a very big deal that doing so changes the final image (quite significantly).  So before you click yes to the reprocessing prompt in order to get the full brushes capability for your entire library, you need to think very carefully.  In fact, just click no, and decide later.  I’ll show you why.

What follows is an image from my D700, processed as I liked, using Aperture 2:

Ignore the image itself – it’s just used here as an example (though if you want to know it was shot at the docklands in Dublin and was my attempt to capture the sense of glass and steel that the new buildings down there give).

Now here’s the image in Aperture 3 after I click yes to the “Reprocess Master” prompt.  Same RAW file, exact same adjustments in Aperture 3 as were applied in Aperture 2:

The differences may not be clear, so here’s a comparison with a crude checkerboard of the two images.  Every second tile is Aperture 2 or Aperture 3 as indicated.  If they were identical you shouldn’t be able to see the checkerboard:

Depending on how good your monitor is, you should see differences in exposure, colour and highlight detail.    This isn’t a huge problem for a personal “snap” like this, but for wedding shots that a client has seen in a web slideshow but you haven’t yet exported for an album you do NOT want this level of change.

To get something close to the original Aperture 2 version in Aperture 3, for this image I had to apply the following changes:

• Add 3% more cyan in white balance tint slider (-10 to -7 here)
• Add 1/2 a stop exposure
• Add 20% sepia

I have yet to investigate if those changes are the same for all images (I suspect not, but if they were at least I could create a preset and apply them to everything that is reprocessed).

Applying them here gives me the image at the very top of this post, which is close to the Aperture 2 version that follows it – again here’s the checkerboard comparison:

You can hopefully see that this is close to the image I started with.  I’m not able to say which image has the better processing of the RAW file.  In fact, you’d presume that the later version of the software is an improvement, and more true to what the camera saw.  But I don’t like that upgrading my software can so dramatically alter a previously post-processed image by as much as half a stop and a 20% sepia tone.  That is quite serious.

The biggest pain is that if you try out the demo of Aperture 3, it won’t allow you import an existing library so it’s very cumbersome to do a comparison like this. You have to import a master into Aperture 3′s Trial version, apply the same adjustments manually that you applied in Aperture 2 (which requires switching between the two versions and seeing what settings you have for each adjustment) and then export from both versions of the software.  OK for one or two images if you’re very dedicated, but a pain in the butt for any more than that.  And chances are you probably won’t realise you should be doing this when trialling the software.  Though having read this, you know now!

To be fair to Apple, I guess they recognized this is not an ideal situiation because if you do decided to reprocess your master image using the new RAW engine, either at installation (I strongly recommend you don’t do this) or later on an image-by-image or album-by-album basis, they offer the choice of creating new versions and keeping the original or just overwriting the original.

At least this allows you keep the non-destructively edited original unchanged, but if you have thousands of images creating duplicate versions (that aren’t actually duplicates) is presumably going to blow up your library size.

Another saving grace is that you can choose to reprocess only unadjusted images, or only adjusted ones, or both.  At least that allows you easily leave the ones you’ve post-processed alone and migrate the rest.  That is the approach I will likely take.

Of course there are still flaws with that – if I’ve processed one shot out of 10 formal group shots in the same lighting at a wedding and opt to reprocess the RAW file for the 9 unprocessed shots, I can no longer just lift and stamp my adjustments from the one shot.

I’m hoping that I can find a set of tweaks that makes the reprocessed images look like the the Aperture 2 post-processed ones, save it as a preset, and apply on an album-by-album basis.  But I’m not sure yet if this will work.

For now I will be reprocessing adjusted images as new versions and living with the library hit.  I’ve also exported as full-res JPEGs all important processed shots just for saftey. If I really want to revisit these shots using the new brushes for local adjustments at least I can weigh up the effort in post-processing again versus the benefit the brush will give me for that image.  But it’s not ideal.

You need to decide for yourself how big a deal all of this is if you are thinking of upgrading to Aperture 3.  If you don’t  already use Aperture 2 you need not be worried about any of this really (though it would be interesting to compare an unadjusted image from Aperture 3 to one from Lightroom 2 for the same RAW file – is Aperture 3 more correct than Aperture 2 or just different?).

And for the record, I do recommend Aperture 3 to newbies to the software who use a Mac – it’s very powerful.  For those on Aperture 2 I’d also say upgrade, but think carefully about the impact of this issue (and how you will deal with it) before you do.

More on this to come if I make more progress with finding a pre-set that makes Aperture 3 look like Aperture 2.