A thorough review of Aperture 3.0.1

by Chris Foley on March 4, 2010

Photo management software gets curves, and a whole lot more

I’m very excited about Apple’s rabidly anticipated upgrade to its professionally image storage and editing application, Aperture. Many of us who have chosen Aperture over Adobe’s excellent (though in my opinion, unduly confusing) Lightroom, have been frustrated with the amount of time spent waiting for Apple to finally release a feature update or at least a bug fix update for Aperture 2.

I know a few photographers who have thrown up their hands in defeat and have gone over to Adobe. Well, I’m pleased to say that this new release puts Aperture back on the map as a feature-rich and competitive application. Those of us who shoot a lot of photos, but aren’t necessarily good with Photoshop will rejoice at Aperture 3′s incredible new features, interface updates, and stability.

Russ Jaskalian has written an excellent overview article at Macworld.com.

Here’s an excerpt:

Apple has finally updated its pro photo management app, Aperture, to version 3, and there’s something in this new release for every level of photographer—Apple says Aperture has over 200 new features. There are features that have been long awaited and mysteriously absent from previous versions, like a curves adjustment tool. There are iPhoto () carryovers, like Faces, and there are scores of new additions aimed at making the sometimes tortuous workflow of photo management and RAW processing as painless as possible.

This review covers some of my favorite features, as well as issues that some Aperture users have experienced.

Faces and Places

One thing is clear in this new release: Apple wants to entice amateur photographers to step up from iPhoto, but they don’t want to alienate the pros. To do this, Aperture 3 now has new ways to organize images using Faces (based on image analysis and user input) and Places (based on geographic location information), both of which will be familiar to iPhoto users.

Places can be used to link images to a map of the world; the map has various levels of magnification, and an ever-growing, impressive database of worldwide locations. It’s incredibly easy to drop images right onto the map to assign a location, or import and link GPS data to images in a project.

If you already use Aperture 2 () with a large library, when you upgrade it can take Faces a long time to churn through the image analysis for the first time. With my library of 20,000-plus Canon 5D RAW images, it took about 24 consecutive hours on a 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo iMac with 4GB of RAM. A hint: Turning off Faces can make Aperture’s performance snappier.

These features are fine and make it easier to locate specific images hidden in large photo libraries. But for most pros (myself included), neither is going to dramatically improve workflow.