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Aperture, I Come Not To Praise Thee…

Robert Boyer's picture
July 1, 2014 - 9:00pm

Aperture, I Come Not To Praise Thee

I come to bury thee. Something along those lines, who’s line was that anyway? Marc somebody or other. Like most of you, my first reaction was one of those stages of grief — anger, shock maybe. I certainly expected an Aperture X. After a day or two my first thoughts disappeared replaced with a new emotion, a new thought process, expectations. I rewound the clock to late 2005. I was late to digital. Not being some sort of curmudgeon, or out of fear, or even laziness to learn something new. Truth is my color output was digital for years before most people. I just hated the cameras, I hated the process after the in-camera work. It was slow, tedious, cumbersome, boring, clumsy, disconnected, slow, just plain unenjoyable.

Does anyone remember vintage 2003 or 2004 RAW workflow? Give me film any day of the week. Shoot — Done. I still like film for that reason among a few other more technical and aesthetic characteristics that never really got sorted with digital. Long story short, along came Aperture v 1.0. I think I have the original email from Apple. It was expensive, five hundred bucks if I memory serves. As soon as I read the marketing copy I got it. I bought it same day. This was it, finally, a revolution. Apple in one swift, elegant maneuver (visualize as Brad Pitt’s Achilles when he takes out the big guy in the first minutes of the movie) completely obliterated what a pro RAW workflow looked like. Without Aperture do you think any of the other products out there would look anything like they do? Nope. Let’s hope that the new guard really really has been Jobs-ized and is thinking like Apple was back then.

How Apple Works

Ever since Steve Jobs’ encore performance at Apple, they’ve done something as a technology company that no other has done. They chuck stuff over the side when it’s run it’s course. Gone, out with the old in with the new. Instead of dragging along every old, bad, kludgy, ill-conceived hunk of crap ever cobbled together they dump it overboard completely replacing it. They provide a migration path — sometimes not perfect — sometimes painful and then they dump that after a short time as well. Instead of dragging along a bunch of old crap they emulate functionality and force everyone to move along with them. Trust me this is a far better way of managing technology than holding onto legacy crap forever. Hell, even if it still works it’s buggy, nobody remembers how it works, it's costly, and constraining. I like this about Apple, so why would I deny them a chance when over and over again they’ve displayed the same pattern.

Remember OS 9? That was obliterated very quickly and we’re all better off for it. Firewire? CD/DVD drives? ADB? Resource Forks? PowerPC? All completely gone along with a myriad of other stuff under the hood. Apple pushes the tech, shoves it down your throat. You may not like that. More accurately they make it workable for normal people that really don’t want to be fiddling with tech-stuff as some sort of side job or hobby, then they shove it down everyone’s throat.

Apple pushed the entire industry to HD, LCD, long battery life, good looking computing devices, small, thin, light, wireless. Who had workable WiFi in all their stuff years before anyone else? How about GigE? How about Thunderbolt? Who else uses the tech that’s both stable and the best way do it and then moves on while it’s user base is blissfully unaware — at least for the most part. PowerPC to intel… I could go on and on. Yes PowerPC was better in many, many ways—while it was better. Then it wasn’t. What happened? We took a minor performance hit for about a year. Who cares? What we didn’t get were 2-inch thick 15 pound laptops that melted you, and had 14 minute battery life. Give me a 15 inch Al-book G4 any day of the week.

I promise this is going somewhere. Hold on. I need the context both for those of you that have been around the block with computing since the 80’s like me and for you newbies.

The Power of The Mass Consumer

Now a little bit of photography history to put you to sleep if the above didn’t do it. Since the dawn of time, photographically speaking, “how pros do things” has been a constantly moving target. Every single time the “pros” that stuck it out believing the newer, more friendly way of doing things would never cut it… they’ve been wrong. Daguerreotypes, tin-types, wet plate, dry plate, sheet film, automation, digital, every single time “the pros” that haven’t embraced change been wrong. 

The mass consumer drives photographic technology innovation and quality. It always has and it always will. Does this mean those that have the technical skill and knowledge aren’t better prepared and better informed how and when to embrace and use those innovations? Of course it doesn’t but you need to realize “how pros do it” is temporal in nature. Even with tech stuff it’s completely contextual and temporal. Let’s take just one example of silliness that’s a bit more up to date; ”Pros strip all EXIF, IPTC, and color profile information” from their images when they put them on the web. Well, maybe that was a good idea in 1991 when color management was a twinkle in the eye of the lunatic they never let out of the basement and we were surfing with 1200 baud but now? Oh yea — great idea getting rid of those couple of text bytes in the world of the searchable, categorizable, metadata driven automation world. Yes this “pro methodology” still happens to this day… why? I guess due to blind repetition of the rules. There’s a million notions like that out there. It’s probably a good idea to keep an open mind and embrace things that provide new opportunities by thinking through what you gain vs. what you lose. Using that blatant example, evaluation of the minutiae of something new may tell you that you have no choice in removing the color profile on export or striping IPTC info you’ve put in. Maybe you should ask yourself why you are doing this as a matter of course in the first place. Just a metaphor but fitting.

There that wasn’t too, too bad was it? Context for the real part of the story of Aperture’s demise.

Apple Cares About Photography

Let me revise that… Apple cares about media, all of it. Does this mean they will serve the needs of every single solitary requirement for every single person… nope. They do care a hell of a lot about photography though, just like they care a whole lot about video, audio, music, et al. So why not Aperture X? Great question and I wish Apple would actually just satisfy my personal curiosity but I’ll take a stab in the dark here. I could be completely off. I am prognosticating after all.

Let’s talk about video for a moment. We all realize video is a different beast than still photos right? There really does need to be a pro version and a normal version of Apple’s non-linear video editing software. A hell of a lot of it relies on the same core services it’s just that the UI features and capabilities etc, are way different. For the most part the thought process between the two apps is the same. Take a look if you haven’t. It’s one of the reasons there was such a strong reaction to Final Cut Pro X. It’s de-complicated but super powerful. This is the future regardless of whether the current sticks-in-the mud want it to be or not. When? I don’t know but it is. Just like the end-to-end workflow for RAW was in 2005.

This same thing goes for Audio. Garage Band is excellent for what it is but the complexities of pro-studio recording are far, far too complicated to shove on most people. Even so, Garage Band on iOS exceeds the capabilities of the most expensive digital audio and even analog pro studios two decades ago. I won’t go into details but both apps are fantastic.

Let’s take a closer look at still photography for a moment. Are pro needs really different from consumer needs in still photography? I’ll venture that they are not. Before you go berserk think this through. Both on the hardware end and requirements perspective they have converged. First off lets look at the hardware. A new iOS device is an order of magnitude more capable than most high-end hardware was in 2005. Don’t think so… you can edit HD video on iMovie for iOS. Remember when Apple shoved HD down to the consumer way back then. It worked but was painful even on a MacPro. Stills are a piece of cake, even RAW files.

As for requirements… any sliders at all were just not for ”pros”. That’s changed a bit. Even ACR - it’s all in the sliders. Aperture or any of the other mainstay work-flow tools aren’t for compositing, liquify-ing, applying makeup that wasn’t there, puppet-warping, content-semi-aware-aspect-ratio changing, etc, etc. What they all do is basic tonal and color correction, contrast, spotting, camera fault/lens fault amelioration, etc. All of that used to be complicated stuff now it’s all automatic or sliders.

Organization has a lot of the same similarities. Metadata based smart collections, static groupings, fast searches on the fly, etc. Still photographs are vastly different from audio and video. I propose we are at a point where consumer and pro still photography needs are about the same for the stuff that can be considered capture, process, and organize. It certainly fragments from there but for all of the RAW workflow tools it’s the same consumer or pro. Well, at least it is for the major functions. We’ll save the tethering stuff and all that for another day but even tethering is sort of obsolete. If not yet, it will be soon as a specialized differentiation from the norm of shoot it and it’s everywhere immediately point of view.

To close this part down I’ll offer this; iPhoto and Aperture have been converging in function for years. They share the same core imaging engine and even database now. I don’t think they fired the Aperture guys. It makes sense that both apps become one app. The hardware and functional requirements for both are at a nexus point.

What This Really Means

GPU, unified API, third party stuff, RAW engine enhancements, iCloud, all of it. It all means something that will be quite wonderful. iCloud is going to be dropbox on steroids, 3rd party stuff will hook right into the iOS photo app stuff in new and better ways. This is all about parity and ubiquity and having everything play nicely and transparently together on both platforms.

In reality I think this also means RAW on iOS, if not now then soon. It might even mean all the stuff I wanted in Aperture for iOS just happens in a much bigger way then I might have imagined. Will we see a bit of backwards before we start seeing forwards? Will we have less before we get more? Most likely yes but that might be okay. If I remain openminded as I have in the past and let go of notions about the way we used to do it back in the day then I just might be better off.

More prognostication and speculation based on a few data-points. How many 3rd party thing-a-ma-gigs are out there for photo related endeavors on iOS? Too many to count. What do you think makes more money for lets say umm… VSCO; Film for LR/ACR or VSCOcam with in-app purchases? Based on how much of the VSCO blog and twitter fodder is VSCOcam related I’ll bet you it’s the iOS stuff. They will be all over this like flies on s$#@t. Very cool. Good chance Nik, and the rest of them will be too… maybe. If not the old players, then someone else. What about RAW? Well, that’s just a matter of time in my opinion.

The future of compute intensive tasks is boatloads of GPU cores. Apple was the first to bring this to the consumer slowly starting with Aperture, Final Cut Pro, and some other apps, then rolling it into both iOS and OS X API’s directly. Do you think Apple’s higher level services don’t piggy back on that stuff? Of course it does. Why are boatloads of GPU cores the answer? Power management, battery life, heat, and scalability are the answer. Fine grained power management is much easier when you have a ton of little processors that aren’t in use. Combine that with better performance when you need it and you’ve got a win. Checkout the specs on the A7, 64-bit, the 4-core GPU, the optimization of all those GPU compute related API’s and how that dovetails with LLVM (a painful changeover from gnu-c a while back that I thought was all about license B.S. Maybe not so much… If you’re not so techie I’ll bottom line it for you—RAW from a computational standpoint is nothing on the A7 if done right. Games are way worse.

I think I’m spot-on here. The only real question is if this all comes together in the Yosemite era or the next one. Lots of it is directly marketed for this year just in more consumer-y words. The iOS developers absolutely know what a lot of this stuff means to them. The unification of the photo ecosystem within iOS is a really really big deal. The message was that it’s also being unified across OS X too. Yes, it was explained as an iCloud-y consumer-y thing but it’s way way bigger than that. The only real question is, when as end-users will we see feature capability parity and more in an ever-increasingly transparent package.

All About Me

When it comes to photographic correction and manipulation, I’m agnostic. I can make anything work. I’m an expert user of all of ‘em. I really don’t care that much. The more they get out of my way the better. I can’t wait until they all go away. I use Aperture 3 as my library of reference. I use it to import, sift, rate, juxtaposition, and cull my work. I use it because it’s elegant and invisible not because I can’t and don’t use any other RAW processors, I do. Aperture 3 isn’t going anywhere this week. I’m not that wed to anything so I’m not worried. All my photos are there, are my metadata is there, I can move it anywhere I want and process them any way I want. I do it all the time now. I may be the odd man out but I’ve been set up to do this since the beginning.

What am I going to do? I am going to get familiar with what Photo.app actually does, I’m going to take a step back and see if it feels like it’s the future even if it lacks something here or there. Everything lacks something here or there. I don’t exclusively use Aperture 3 for RAW decode now, never did. If there’s a glimmer of Photo.app looking like it’s the future for most people even if it can’t be out of the gate I’ll be on-board. Just like I was with Final Cut Pro X.

I’ll certainly be there with my thoughts on the matter and the realities of living with that new ecosystem. If you need some help I’m sure I’ll not be the only person with this take that’s serious about photography. We’ll see. I see this as unexpected but with a tiny bit of reflection, it’s natural and has left me wide-eyed with the possibilities and probabilities of where Apple’s vision of a photo-ecosystem is going.

Hell maybe I won’t need the long overdue re-write to my existing Aperture 3 eBooks or make new ones for Photo.app. Maybe Photo.app will be so transparent there’s no explanation required. I can’t wait until we get past this crazy techno barrier where all the complexity has to be re-hashed over and over making Kelby millions of dollars for what should be invisible and intuitive. I cannot wait for the day we can all get back to photography, except for those few people that geek out on the stuff that’s really not part of the main endeavor. Instead maybe I’ll jump into the ecosystem 3rd party game. Maybe I’ll use it that to learn Swift. Maybe my latest freebie boondoggle will turn into something that’s available to use right within iOS and Yosemite Photo.app. Who knows?

Of course I could be way way off and we’ll all still need Capture One, or Lightroom, or whatever but sooner or later I’ll be right.

App:
Apple Aperture
Platform:
macOS
Author:
Robert Boyer

That sounds more like a developer site than a photographer's site but I guess it might work. Swift is very like-able from my POV… sort of like ruby w/ a slightly C-esque skew but fully compiled – this LLVM switch Apple did a couple years ago is extremely cool. And as usual it takes Apple to actually do something useful with the underlying tech. Have you seen the ARM graphics demos using the precompiled Metal stuff? mind blowing…

 

RB

The author of this article must have read some of Joseph and RB’s posts 

http://www.macworld.com/article/2450564/dont-weep-for-aperture-photos-is…

Florian Cortese
www.fotosbyflorian.com

Well of course he/she did… did you notice the PetaPixel article came out a few hours after this post? ;-)

Thanks for the great link! I gotta say - I am impressed by the sheer volume of positive articles I have read in the past several days. Seems to me that as long as we keep our expectations on the rational side we could be in for some very good news.

Having had the opportunity to walk the halls that threaded through the Aperture development team’s wing in Cupertino, I can assure you, Apple cares about photography. Running the full length of every hallway…. on both sides of the hallway is a clothesline-like wire. This wire has photographs displayed using clips…. lots and lots of photographs. When I inquired who shot them, I discovered that “everyone” was into photography and would display their work in the halls.

I discovered I shared a love of Leica with one staff member. Another had just purchased the new Canon 200-400 L series lens. Another discussed the love of her Canon 5D MKII.

Later in my visit with a senior executive (who shall remain nameless), I discovered his camera of choice (along with a nice suite of lenses) was a Canon 1DX.

Not only were all of these people interested in how I used Aperture in my workflow, they were all enthusiastic and hungry to talk about photography.

I would assert that photography is very much in Apple’s DNA and that they care very much about photography and photographers.

Those are encouraging observations, John. With such a premium machine just out of the gate (the new MacPro), the platform seems destined to become the shooters’/editors’ machine of choice. I see a lot of pro photographers in my day job (I work in entertainment as a TV shooter so I visit a lot of high-profile photo sets), and everyone seems to use primarily C1 and Lr (they’re shooting primarily tethered). Photojournalists are using mostly PhotoMechanic, Bridge and Lr (or, custom editing apps developed by Getty/AP, etc.).

But in all the years I’ve been working around pro shooters, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a single PC on anyone’s Magliner. Apple has the hardware for imaging professionals. Let’s see if they can bring us a super-app in a later iteration of Photos someday.

Excellent post.  I’ve been shooting film again for exactly the same reasons.  I choose my film, and my lab, and just start shooting.  It is so liberating, and exciting.  But the seeming convenience of digital is too strong to resist.  The “new” film v. digital movement almost misses the point–just as you write, the lab is (digitally) handling the processing, and the results are beautiful.  I’ve actually considered doing this with raw files, but you’re right, it’s too expensive.  If the new Photos.app can give me a digital equivalent of shooting a roll of Portra 400 and getting gorgeous results, I will never look back.  Just as I haven’t looked back after FCP X.

The other thing that is rapidly changing is the move towards computational photography and Apple is driving on that front with the iPhone 5s. It doesn’t have the same physical elements as the Nokia phones, but is producing high quality images. Does it replace top quality “glass” yet, no, but it’s coming. The camera that you use most of the time will be automagically tagging each photo with metadata to help you do better search. Let’s say you’re looking for an image from 5 years ago with your oldest child, at an amusement park. You’ll find that lightning fast. Especially when you can do it like: “Hey Siri, find a 3 star or better picture of Roxy 5 years ago at Cedar Point.”

I don’t like this news and the condescend and full of hope words of AE didn’t calm me. The explanation is that move of Apple means that pro photographers will lost the capabilities to use complicated controls. I am still scanning an using film both with digital. Usually scans needs a lot more of corrections than raw files. There were things to correct in Aperture 3, like the size of brushes for all the modes, now you only can use big brushes if you pick the all selection, not for highlights or shadows, and others things you surely were waiting to be upgraded.

I think that the behind the lines explanation is simple that there are no enough pro photographers to support financially an upgrade of Aperture. They will bet to the fast to upload thing to share in whatever social media mimic things like all that simple to use filters of some app or filters that are made by third parts.  Is like a designer was only left with ibooks author instead of some professional software to design. I appreciate iBooks author and I am using it, because I am not a designer, same with the new Garage Band. But they are cleaning the pros choice in the field of photography. And this, again, is not a good news.

That is simply not true. Your comments are speculative at best and not grounded in any facts that support them.

People really need to stop feeding on fear and reacting with hysteria.

Come with facts … then we can talk.

Accord Apple this is what will replace Aperture

http://www.apple.com/ios/ios8/photos/

Do you see something useful for pros apart of the “social media promotion”?

And here another article from PDN

http://pdnpulse.pdnonline.com/2014/06/end-line-apples-aperture-photo-sof…

I see iPhones and iPad. I see iOS. I don’t see Yosemite. ;)

Not that I have any more knowledge, insight, or wisdom than anyone else on the topic, I think it’s plausible to interpret this new direction as a top-level, strategic product marketing decision which holds significant promise for advancing the platform (and, at the same time, possibly increasing market share for OS X desktop hardware). The “product” being Apple, the brand, and its OS (in my opinion, the OS is the computer).

If Yosemite and Photos provide an easy path for third-parties to develop more sophisticated apps which reside within the OS and Photos, injecting themselves directly into the RAW-processing stream, then I think the sky’s the limit. If Apple’s strategy is successful in selling more hardware SKUs (whether desktops or mobile devices), the entire “brand” becomes stronger, and will therefore become better positioned to command more development interest among third-parties (i.e., bringing more serious, “pro-oriented” plug-ins and apps to market for both Photos and OS X).

I can barely understand what you wrote.

That notwithstanding, I’ll disagree with any presumption that the pro photographer market is not worth the cost of an upgrade to Aperture. Adobe seems to be doing quite nicely in that market. 

I suspect that Apple is actually investing a lot more money and esources with the complete architecture change from Aperture & iPhoto to the Photos back end services and the associated new extensible Photos platform. 

 

Now a swift coding how to book in plain English…beats IBooks’ swift language book…

Robert, you are pretty funny in your passions but I side with your original post as I did Joseph’s original post. Taking liberty as quoted in (blasphemy) Kindle Fire ad for mayday button, “Joseph, Robert…I like you!

Steve Hadeen

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this discussion.  Thanks Robert.  I just hate the idea of discarding all the wonderful advantages of Aperture and am thinking about a combination of Aperture for cataloguing and Photoshop Elements for editing. What are the pro’s and cons?

Richard what are your thoughts about using the combination of Aperture as an organiser and Photshop Elements as an editor?

What would be the pros and cons of retaining Aperture as an organiser and using Elements as an editor?

Apologies for multiple postings!

You’re a very good writer, Robert. But when did “pros” begin stripping metadata? It has been the “pros” who’ve been advocating for years for the OSPs and social media to STOP stripping their metadata on import to their “services”. Sadly, it is the only way, currently, that the creator’s identity can travel with the image, even though it is invisible to the average viewer. With the practical term of copyright measured in mere days on the Internet, preservation of metadata is quite important.

BTW, I’m staying with the Aperture/Photo path. It’s my base. From there I use DxO, OnOne, Nik, Topaz, etc., as needed. Thanks for your well organized thoughts.

I get what you are saying about Apple dropping old tech without a second thought - Olympus did the same in moving from analogue to digital, which meant that they could concentrate on building lenses specifically for digital, instead of cludging a way for the older lenses to work with the new tech. But that is only good if one’s computer isn’t simply one component in a chain of gear (as is often the case in audio, where many excellent interfaces run FireWire) or one link in an established work flow - between camera and published format (print or web) in this case.

Of course, it matters not which manipulation programme (or even camera) stands between the light reflected from the subject, and the light reflected or emitted by the finished product. But what of Canon/Nikon announced that it was completely dropping all sales and support of the current ranges, in favour of an entirely new form of digital camera? One which was slightly better than the bottom end, but wasn’t quite as good as the top end - but hey, someone will be along later with a better lens or sensor that might improve things for you. I think photographers of all levels would be a bit upset, even though it wouldn’t stop them from using what they have right now.

And I disagree that processing Raw files is no biggie: if that we’re true, we wouldn’t see differences between different program’s, and different Raw formats.

Ultimately Apple won’t care. Photography has become commoditised, everyone carries a camera everywhere, and uploads tons of snaps to Facebook, Instagram etc. - never to be seen again (FB has a term for this: write once, read never, and have started specifying very cheap, very slow media specifically for this kind of cold storage). So long as their customers can do that seamlessly, they’ve done a good job.

Is there a silver lining? Yes. By unifying the code base across both platforms, iOS will gain plug-in capability. And if the potential for selling plug-ins is increased, more people will write them, meaning more possibilities on the desktop. And if edits made on an iPad carry over to the OSX version, that should speed things up - and opens the potential for collaborative working. So it may not all be problematic.

All-in-all, for me it’s a waiting game. I’ll carry on with Aperture for the time being, and wait and see what Photos brings. Ultimately I may just keep with Aperture until the machine I’m running it on dies.

The mac pro is clearly not targeted at 80% of the market. I don’t think either Final Cut or Logic Pro could be thought of as consumer apps either. Apple may just be coming at this from another direction Maybe they will give us the extensible framework and then let the specialty developers add in the “pro” level capabilities. If so, they are opening up the ecosystem rather than shutting it down. How about a Capture One Raw converter option or maybe alien skin film emulations without having to export image. Of course I don’t know, but my point was that Apple does not seem to be only focused on 80% of the market.

Oh… and it was that 20% that kept apple alive through the bad years. I hope they have not forgotten about that. 

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