Re: aperture

["Daniel M. German" <dmgerman uvic ca>]

 >> What I'd *really* like would be a tool that only keeps
 >> the original, and as many versions as I like of
 >> "manipulation history scripts" to generate modified
 >> versions with my favorite image editing tool. If one
 >> day I want to generate a new copy, or come back on
 >> an old picture when I find out a new trick that seems
 >> to do a better job at something I was trying to achieve,
 >> then I can do it easily, and without adding yet another
 >> tens-of-megabytes file to my hard drive (yes, potentially
 >> at the cost of looking at a hourglass icon for a few
 >> minutes...).

 Daniel> While I have not used it, my understanding of Aperture is that it  
 Daniel> does something along these lines.  The original image is never, under  
 Daniel> any circumstances, altered.  All adjustments are CoreImage  

This is true of photoshop too. The original RAW photo cannot be
modified. Instead, one has to save the file (usually huge, because it
has been decompressed) as a PSD file.

I agree that photographers work in layers, and never modify the
original image data (they might copy the layer, though).

Since its announcement (when I browsed apple's web site) I am starting
to appreciate it model. Photoshop does not let you easily zoom into
the photo, and once you have retrieved it you cannot re-process the
raw data with different parameters (you have to start all over again).

I have to say that I see a lot of future in an application like
Aperture. If it can integrate the 10-20 tasks most commonly used by
photographers they might be willing to leave photoshop for it. As it
is, I suspect 50% of my photo work can be done with it, but for
sophisticated processing photoshop is currently the best tool in the
market.

Photoshop CS2 requires a _lot_ of memory to run (I have a dual G5, so
I can't comment on its speed requirements). I had to upgrade from 1
gig because bridge (its file browser) was taking almost all the
physical memory, forcing apps to swap like crazy. Photoshop + bridge
will easily take 2 gigs when running while processing a couple of
images (specially if they are high resolution medium format scans--I
can't imagine working with large format photos :)

I am also interested in this type of application, and willing to
invest time on it.


--
Daniel M. German
http://turingmachine.org/
http://silvernegative.com/
dmg (at) uvic (dot) ca
replace (at) with @ and (dot) with .