Apple positions Aperture as a one-stop-shop for managing your RAW digital images, and in most cases, it delivers. However, it’s clear that their RAW conversion engine has a long way to go still, even after the update to 1.1.
Others have written extensively on the subject (Lightroom uses the same RAW conversion engine as Photoshop CS3 beta, which I tested). The lowdown: Aperture rendering still doesn’t look as good as ACR, although it’s an improvement over 1.0.
The last post - the images of King Connor - saw a clear improvement and greater control in Adobe’s RAW converter. I was able to add a nice vignette, control exposure better (bringing blown highlights back more smoothly, add “vividness” (sorta like saturation but better looking), crush the blacks without losing too much shadow detail, fix chromatic aberrations, and maintain a better grain structure - all features that Apple’s RAW conversion engine lacks or implements poorly. I can do most of what I would have done manually in Photoshop right there in the RAW conversion module.
Fortunately, we don’t have to choose just one. Aperture is still the king of photo management, and can use external editors like Photoshop or Lightroom. Our little family of photogs is moving everything to Aperture (more on that later), but I plan on sticking with ACR as my “Develop” module for high-quality images.
An interesting sidenote to me is that we are entering the era of the HDR image, both in video and photography. Software and capture devices (cameras) are now capturing more highlights and shadows than our displays can show at any given time - an important step in quality that makes digital images more like film and closer to what the human eye sees. It’s an exciting time to be shooting digitally; I feel like we’re getting closer to the organic qualities of the darkroom without the nasty smell and cramped quarters. With all this control, however, we’ve lost a bit of the “happy accidents” and randomness that people are drawn to.
Posted in Photography, Tools, Toys, and Geekery, Work
