Featured Review

There are 3 things Apple want you to know about Aperture 2. It’s fast, it’s high quality and it’s integrated. I’m going to look at each of these in turn and then finish up by telling you some things I don’t like about it. I figure you can read glowing tributes about it everywhere so I’m going to declare it my job to tell you where they could improve it.

This review is going to assume you know what Aperture is and why you might want it. If you don’t then either wait for our Aperture vs Lightroom shootout or see Apple’s website.

[Editor’s note: we had planned to do a huge head to head of Aperture 2.0 vs Lightroom 1.3. Then Adobe released 1.4 so we scurried to include that. Then Adobe pulled 1.4. It seemed fairer just to review the hot new software, let Adobe sort their act out, get a stable release and do the head to head then. However, watch out for the “could do better” section of this review – some of that is influenced by things I think Lightroom does better than Aperture.]

Speed

We tested Aperture 2 on a 2.66 GHz quad core MacPro running Leopard with 3GB of memory this is close to the recommended configuration. Just to make sure we also kicked the tyres on it on a MacBook 2GHz Dual Core with 2GB of ram.

Aperture 2 is fast. I loaded up a project containing a bunch of 70+ MB layered PSD files and took a browse through them. Scrolling from one to the next brought up a full size image on my second monitor almost immediately after hitting the arrow key. It then took a little under 6 seconds to load a full resolution version. Even on the MacBook it was almost instant to view one picture after another. Browsing pictures in Aperture 2 is an absolute joy.

The application also caches the full resolution views. Go back to one you have already loaded and the chances are you will get a full resolution preview immediately.

Interestingly, large jpegs are about the slowest file you can preview. This is because raws and most PSDs have embedded thumbnails but jpegs need full decoding before you can view them properly. Full quality jpegs from a D3 took maybe a second to appear on the screen and even ones from a Fuji S5 with extended dynamic range appeared almost instantly.

If you find that slow then just turn on Quick Preview. I guarantee you cannot page faster through images than Aperture can display them. Even a hardened games player mainlining triple espressos can’t hit the button faster than Aperture can respond.

It’s a similar story when you are making adjustments to images. It’s slightly annoying to wait for the image to fully load before you can make adjustments but once it does load all the controls are instant. With the application in viewer mode and a full screen copy of the image on a second monitor there’s a tiny tiny lag. But only if you look for it. Apart from the delay to load the images fully the adjustments tab is a whole lot of fun to use.

Exports are pretty speedy but to be honest I didn’t time them. Aperture now does background exports. Yeah, get on with your work, watch the progress indicator if you like. Do what you want. Aperture finally got with the program and stopped making you stop while it exports. For some v1.x users this alone will make them upgrade.

And while we’re on speed, it’s quick to make the application do what you want. You can customise pretty much any command with a keyboard shortcut. Don’t like the shortcut for a command? Change it. Want a shortcut for a command that doesn’t have one? Create it. Wants different sets of shortcuts when you do different kinds of work to completely mess with your head? Create a new group. But don’t blame me if you hit the wrong key now and again.

One downside to all this speed is that Aperture will take all your resources. There may be a limit to what it will grab but we never found it on a quad core 3GB machine. Don’t try to do too much else while using Aperture. This makes sense but was frustrating when writing this review – switching to Word or email could take a long time if we’d been hammering Aperture.