Aperture 3
Apple has finally released its new powerful photo editing and management software, the Aperture 3. Unlike iPhoto, which is also another amazing photo management software by Apple, the Aperture 3 is more powerful and has more features to makes photo editing more simple and also helps photographers to manage their massive photo libraries. I am able to download a 30-days trial version to test out this software.
I have been a user of both the Apple Aperture 2 and Adobe Lightroom 2. Being a photographer, you would really expect the software to be fast and simple to use since you would have quite a number of photos to edit and organise. I personally find that Adobe Lightroom is faster and also offers more features than the Aperture 2. So, let’s see how the new Aperture 3 performs, will it be a new breakthrough or it’s just another piece of ordinary software?
200+ new features have been added onto the Aperture 3, including Places, Faces and Brushes. Aperture 3 is a fantastic software to organise large libraries of photos by putting them into different Projects or even better, by organising them using the Faces and Places features. The face detection and recognition feature automatically detects and organise your photos by the people in them. You could view all the people you named in the library and also view detected but not yet named faces in a project. This is a very cool feature to help you find photos of a person in particular throughout your entire library. You could also explore your photos based on where they were taken using the Places feature. If you’re shooting with a GPS-enabled camera, Aperture 3 uses reverse geocoding to convert location coordinates into familiar location names, then displays those locations on the Places map. If you’re using a separate GPS tracking device, the path of your photo journey appears on the map when you import a track log. You can even extract locations from iPhone tracker apps or your iPhone photos.
Aperture 3 also makes editing photos even easier by introducing Brushes and also Adjustment Presets. Brushes is one of the new tools to help refining your photos by painting image adjustments onto parts of your photo. Brushes lets you paint in a wide range of effects to selectively fine-tune your photos. With precise control of the size, softness and strength of each brush, you can adjust only the parts of the image you want, leaving the rest untouched. Aperture 3 includes 15 Quick Brushes that perform the most popular tasks like Dodge, Burn, Polarize and Blur, without the complexity of layers or masks.This is one of the most useful additions in my opinion, but nothing too fancy since Adobe LR2 already has it so it’s not a surprise that Apple would add it onto the Aperture3.
Aperture 3 also includes a couple of adjustment presets for applying professional photo effects with just one click, very useful when you have too many photos to edit or when you’re just too lazy. You could also create your own custom presets or download new presets from other professionals. I just love how easy it is to make photos look much interesting by just simply making a few adjustments such as vignetting, sharpen tools. I manage to edit from this:
to this:
in just merely 5 minutes by just adjusting the exposure, details, colors and a few more tweaks.
Aperture 3 not only makes orgasing and editing photos better, it also makes sharing photos more fun. You could create an amazing slideshows by combining photos, HD videos and also soundtracks together. That’s not all! you could also add professionally designed themes to it to make your own masterpiece. Aperture 3 includes all the themes from iPhoto 09’ and adding a few new themes to it. If you don’t fancy making slideshows, at least you could upload and share your photos on Facebook or Flickr in just one click. Like all the other softwares, you could also send photos through e-mails.
Would i highly recommend this product? The answer is simple, YES! This software makes importing photos much faster than the previous versions. Not only that, it has so many new features that would make organising and editing photos a whole new experience. It makes a photographers life much easier. Compared to Adobe Lightroom 2, the Aperture 3 has more to offer such as the Face and Places feature, and the advanced slideshow feature, other than that I feel it’s pretty much the same. However, for non-mac user, you would still have to stick with Adobe Lightroom or other windows-supported softwares as Aperture 3 only supports MacOSX systems.
For more info, kindly visit the Apple website.
Rating: 4/5
