Photos

Have just downloaded the beta release of OS X 10.10.3 with the new Photos app and benchmarking this on my MacBookPro. I pulled in a very small Aperture library which was residing on my MacBookPro which seemed to go ok although the app was working overtime doing something as it processed the images (not sure what as there is not an activity window like you get in Aperture).

Photos appears to be fairly rudimentary although eventually after a bit of tweaking and browsing I found the histogram window, levels control, white balance adjustment and definition, noise reduction and vignette controls. 

Other editing tools comprise the usual basic exposure, highlights, shadows, brightness, contrast and black point sliders and colour sliders with saturation, contrast and cast controls.
There is a black and white option and definition and sharpening sliders.


However sad to see no star rating system carried over from the imported Aperture library - rather just converted to a key word with the star rating. Given that this is a very early release I hope Apple can focus on getting some power functionality into Photos to appease the many disillusioned Aperture users.

It appears to be very much an iPhoto type app rather than the serious pro Aperture app in its present guise.... .we shall see as this develops - let's hope Apple get a little bit more serious with this app as otherwise it is going to leave a lot of serious Aperture users eventually (if not already) to jump ship to Lightroom or Capture One.

I will continue to evaluate this new Photos app in the coming weeks and alongside this I am also evaluating Capture One from Phase One. More reports to come in the coming weeks.

End of an Era - Aperture to be Discontinued

The news today from Apple that their pro photo application Aperture is to be discontinued will be a huge disappointment for many pro photographers who rely on this robust library management and post-processing application for their workflows. ...... me included.

Apple have decided to discontinue both Aperture and iPhoto and replace this with the new application Photos which will be realised as part of the iOS 8 release in the fall 2014 and OSX Yosemite release early next year. The new Photos application will be geared to link with iCloud and be integrate with iOS applications. Aperture has not had a major update since 2010 when Ver 3.0 was realised and iPhoto has also not been upgraded since 2011.

The new Photos application was first previewed at the recent WWDC 2014 and will be realise as part of the iOS8 realise this fall and the OSX Yosemite release in early 2015. It is very much geared up for cloud-based storage of photographs thereby giving access to images by all OSX and iOS devices for managing and editing. However the focus seems very much on camera photos ...... not much mention of serious pro photograph needs.

An Apple spokesperson stated:

"With the introduction of the new Photos app and iCloud Photo Library, enabling you to safely store all of your photos in iCloud and access them from anywhere, there will be no new development of Aperture. When Photos for OS X ships next year, users will be able to migrate their existing Aperture libraries to Photos for OS X."

Current Aperture users don't need to worry, the program will get updates to work under OS X Yosemite. Still, active development of the app will end.

Apple has also stated that while they have decided to discontinue Aperture they have no intention of abandoning pros and will continue to develop both Final Cut Pro and Logic. I find this statement rather contradictory ...... "no intention of abandoning pros" and yet they are abandoning pro photographers!!
Included with the reports was a new picture of the OS X Photos application, as seen above. From the picture, it would appear that the application has a "prosumer" layout. The app is also shown with a darker user interface, which is different from the predominantly white app shown off at the Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this month, as shown below.

However what does this mean going forward to the many pro photographers who have committed workflows and numerous Aperture plug-ins?

Questions To Ponder

1. For pro photographers using Aperture to manage, catalogue and post-process multi-terabyte photo libraries how can an iCloud based system be practical? 
2. Can the replacement Photos application come anywhere close to the power of the current Aperture application for image management and post-processing?
3. Will the Photos application have the capability to use the current plug-ins which were an integral and 
4. important part of the Aperture workflow?
5. The Aperture application had a powerful book publication facility  - will Photos have this facility?
6. Will Photos have the ability to retain the non-destructive virtual adjustments of the Aperture files?

Alternatives

The obvious replacement application for many photographers would be Adobe Lightroom .... but there are others which may be worth a serious consideration once you have chosen to totally abandon Aperture and don't want to be drawn into the Adobe Creative Cloud environment:

Phase One Capture One Pro 7
ACDC Systems
DxO Optics Pro 8
Corel AfterShot pro

For me I am not going to rush into any transition from Aperture. It is being supported through to OSX Yosemite and my workflow on the current Ver 3.5.1 is stable and meets all my requirements right now, so unless I get a new camera that is not supported by Aperture then it should be ok to continue to use on the Apple platform for some time.

However I will be starting to review alternatives and the Phase One Capture One Pro 7 is looking like a favourite at the moment ...... more on this later as I sort through these apps, test them them and weigh up advantages/disadvantages.

Aperture - Potential Dangers of Using Stacked Images

All of my RAW master images are stored in my Aperture database as referenced files. This means that the original master RAW files reside on a separate disk system rather than in the Aperture Library itself, with my Aperture application itself and the Aperture Library residing on my main MacPro system disk. This has many advantages of maintaining your Aperture Library to a reasonable size, particularly when your image database system becomes very large. I have about 15 years of digital photos plus earlier digital scans of my 35mm and film camera photos stored in my Aperture system so the file system is quite large by now.

Recently I went through an annual offsite backup and tidy up of my Aperture system and decided to relocate all of my master files except the current year onto an external RAID disk to free up space on my internal Mac Pro RAID disk where all the referenced files used to be located. Aperture allows you to easily relocate master files so after choosing all files in the projects I went through the relocation process to the new external RAID disk. 

Relocate Originals

It was only after this process I noticed an apparent discrepancy in the expected file sizes on the new disk volume. On further investigation I noticed that there were many master images which could not be located - as indicated by the dreaded yellow arrow icon on the image - meaning that the referenced master image could not be found.

Referenced image cannot be found

I suddenly realised that because I use stacks within Aperture to group together image files (in my case I usually group together my multiple bracketed shots as well as multiple images used to create panoramas) all of the missing masters were within stacks. It became apparent to me that unless you open all stacks prior to the relocation of masters then only the stack "image pick" within the stack is relocated.

Stacked images

Thankfully I had a full backup on another external disk system so I then had to go through the process of relocating the missing master images on this backup disk and then regenerating my original referenced library file system.

So a warning to anyone using stacks that before any file manipulation such as copying, relocating masters, etc ensure that ALL stacks in your Aperture project or library are open to ensure that all images are copied or relocated. Otherwise you may not notice that these referenced files are missing and you may then potentially lose these master images for ever.