Aperture for the masses?
Posted: March 7th, 2010 | Author: wade | Filed under: Aperture, Software, Technology | Tags: Aperture, Apple, Digital Raw file | 2 Comments »
It took a long time to get here, but the new Aperture release looks like it’s been worth waiting for. A bunch of new features like selective (non-destructive) dodging and burning, 64-bit architecture with the additional memory capacity that it brings with it, together with the introduction of adjustment presets and something resembling Photoshop’s curves functionality are all things I’ll use daily.
But it’s not all rosy. You see, Aperture 3.0 seems to have brought with it a few teething problems that are a good reminder to us all that the early adoption of new technology and business critical systems don’t mix.
But I am not going to give you a full product review here. Plenty of informative ones have been done already. Suffice to say it’s very good – and a bargain for the money.
But while Aperture 3.0 does enough to persuaded me not to change teams, I suspect it’s too late for a significant section of the Aperture 2.0 user-base which was eroded by the temptation to go where the grass might be greener. The long wait for this release and the utter-silence from Apple throughout, had many users convincing themselves that the company had all but dumped the product (Aperture – dead or alive?, Will Aperture Suffer the Same Fate as Shake?, A Plea for a Significant Aperture Update ). Many were persuaded that it was simply a prudent business decision to move to the competition, who are quite happy to keep users in the loop on their plans, and who made it clear their product had a future.
There is of course merit in both approaches to customer relations, but I get the distinct impression that Aperture is now down a lot of users who lost faith and gave up waiting.
Nonetheless, in Aperture 3.0 it seems Apple has come up with a cunning plan that might recruit more new users to the fold than its delay ever cost – and not because of any particular new functions or features.
Rather, several references to iPhoto in their marketing language, the low price point, and porting the Faces and Places tools straight out of iPhoto (seriously, Faces for pro-users?) all tell me that Apple has cottoned on to the realisation that they already have a lot of amaetuer photographers on their books and bringing just a fraction of them to the Aperture camp would be very profitable for them.
It could also be profitable for us. Such an injection of sales revenue might elevate Aperture from a niche product with (it seems) limited development resources, to something much more mainstream and in line with the priority Adobe has been giving to Lightroom. That means more regular and feature-packed releases, a bigger online support community, and more third party plug-ins and products.
I guess we’ll see.
At it’s release, Aperture started as a deeply flawed product, with simply abominable RAW processing. Once it was improved, after teams were fired, etc, it was far from a broad professional product, with limited camera support and spotty performance and updates. With the release of v2, we hoped we were seeing a serious commitment to Aperture by Apple, but it was simply more of the same… a big fix, lots of press, no communication from Apple about the future of the product, and all the while, Adobe’s Lightroom has maintained consistent, steady progress, communication and support by Adobe. As a result, today Lightroom has huge market share and is probably the fastest growing workflow solution.
Here’s the big issue. Any professional photographer cannot afford to guess at the workflow they should be using. To commit to a system and covert to it is a sizable investment of time and money, and you need to know that it’s going to support you for a long time to come- especially a workflow like Aperture that is built around proprietary catalog system, as it was originally. More than a few that I know personally have, on the faith of what Apple’s marketing has promised, made that investment only to be forced to re-invest in switching back to an Adobe workflow, notably Lightroom.
Maybe Apple is appealing to the “pro-sumer” market, those photographers who don’t need to pay the mortgage with their work, but are committed to their avocation and enjoy identifying with the pro. A working professional, however, can’t afford to waste time guessing at what Apple will do next, especially when those guesses include, as they have in the past few years, the possibility that Apple may drop the product entirely.
Aperture has been a case study in how not to develop a product. Besides my personal opinion that Apple is telling photographers how they should be working, rather than providing a product that is for how they ARE working, you just have to wonder how many false starts the product will go through before the industry calls it for what it is- which you’ve pointed out above.
The fact that Aperture is, after all that, still even considered a viable professional solution is a testament to the blind devotion of Apple fan-base, certainly not Apple’s commitment to developing and supporting a viable product.
I’m speaking as an Aperture user who likes LightRoom but can’t get round its filesystem management so I don’t use it. I speak not as a blind devotee either.