When Aperture 3 was announced yesterday, I didn’t need convincing to buy it, having been using version 2 of the application for some time. Apple has a detailed list of new features on it’s website, but I do not intend going through those right now. Instead, I will go through the good and bad things I have discovered throughout my initial use.

Read on to continue.

The Good

• Speed of delivery. I ordered via the Apple Store, and the DVD Media arrived the next day. Given past experience with Apple, this was unexpected.
• Presets. These were something desperately needed to quickly apply a number of settings.
• New Tools. The tools were what made me jump, in particular the chromatic aberration tool. This has been something I have waited on quite a while to fix up some of my images in a satisfactory way.
• Brush Application. The fact that nearly every adjustment can be selectively applied is rather cool
• iPhoto Features. The Places/Faces/Web Publishing that we saw debut in iPhoto 09 have finally made their way to Aperture. Whilst I wasn’t desperately needing these features, it’s been something missing.
• Interface. Overall the interface feels a lot slicker – there have been a lot of subtle changes made.
• Printing. A lot of work has been done in the printing area of Aperture, and this is really good news. Very relevant to some of the things I have been doing recently, and struggling due to the settings.

The Bad

• Watermarks (1). You know, I would have thought the watermarking options in exporting would have been made to work better. Nope, they are still second rate clunky. What really annoys me with them is that the scaling feature does not work as desired. It has resulted in me requiring multiple watermark images to handle different aspect photos.
• Watermarks (2). It is really disappointing that you cannot publish your photos to mobileme/flickr/facebook and have your watermark applied to them. It seems bizarre that Apple overlooked this need by so many photographers, in what one would think is a simple process.
• The Social Publishing. As much as the Flickr and Facebook integration is a boon, the interface for them is primitive at best. Those people who have spent time making plugins for Aperture such as Flickr Export aren’t out of a job yet.
• General Performance. Aperture 3 seems to love eating my MBP’s resources be it CPU or RAM. My machine is a 2.4 C2D with 4GB RAM. Aperture performance is Average. My next machine will get 8GB RAM, purely to deal with this problem.

The Ugly

• Noise Reduction Brush Adjustment. Oh my god this kills my machine. the fans speed up, and you sit there for several seconds waiting on the “processing…” to complete. This is not exactly the advertised realtime editing of my photos.
• Importing of Aperture 2 Library. Allow me to preface this by saying I imported my library rather than upgrade. I have a modest collection of photos but by no means huge – a 30GB Library File, 2/3 10.1MP RAW files, the rest JPEG. It took well overnight to import this Library.

Conclusions

I consider Aperture 3 to be at least has good as Adobe LightRoom 2 now. It’s hard to say what Adobe has planned for version 3 of their product as it is still in beta. Aperture 3 does have some performance glitches, but I suspect this may be a combination of “initial release syndrome” and my 2 and a bit year old MBP.

I am really glad to see a lot of the features from iPhoto 09 come through in the form of social publishing, face recognition and places, however I feel they could be better refined. I am really disappointed that no improvements have been made to watermark application for export and publishing.

Certainly the new version of Aperture has many new features, and I have only spoken about my first impressions. I think for the price it is a great product, particularly if you do compare the price to Light Room. If you use Aperture 2, you are going to love Aperture 3.