Aperture 1.5

Today Apple announced Aperture 1.5, with some significant enhacements.

Stolen shamelessly from the What's New page:

1. Flexible Library Management

 

With Aperture 1.5, you decide how and where to store your images.

 

Import them into a managed Aperture library and let Aperture take care of keeping track of your images. This option lets you keep all your images in one location and offers a simple backup mechanism via the Vault.

 

New Open Library

 

Or store your photographs wherever you’d like — on any number of hard drives, network volumes, CDs, or DVDs, and have Aperture “reference†them. No need to copy the entire collection into a single managed library, simply point to them and let Aperture catalog them in place. You can even reference the images in your iPhoto library, using them in Aperture without having to move or copy them anywhere.

 

However you store your images, Aperture 1.5 keeps track of all the metadata you add and versions you create. And because your RAW originals don’t have to be online for you to browse or search through them, you can take your entire library with you wherever you go. On your MacBook, for example.

There is a three pass edge sharpening tool (good, as the previous sharpening controls were a little less flexible than I would desire), Hue/Lightness/Saturation controls with greater finesse (ie control of H/S/L on specific colours only, as per Photoshop), and a variety of other goodness.

Best of all, as a point upgrade rather than a full version upgrade, existing users will be able to update for free via download later this week.

<edited for a typo>

I've been very happy with 1.1 (after upgrading my grpahics card and RAM). So I can't wait for the free upgrade.

I see where they claim it will work on every Mac. Though I have my doubts about my G4 12" PB.

The more I use this program and learn it's features, the more I like it. Runs great on my MacBook Pro and 20" iMac. This appears to fix the problem that some folks have regarding keeping databases in different locations. I look forward to trying the upgrade.

I see where they claim it will work on every Mac. Though I have my doubts about my G4 12" PB.

that's probably every currently shipping mac.

I managed to run it (v. 1.5) on an 12" 1.25GHz G4 iBook 1.25GB RAM, Radeon 9200 video. This involed hacking it to skip hardware checks (there are desciption how to do that on the net). Once the checks are disabled it works fine.

It seems that Apple had set these artifical hardware limitations just to make us upgrade our computers sooner.

It is a bit ridiculous that one has to hack legally purchased software to make it work.

I did that yesterday so I did not spend much time with it. It is slow but works. Actually, once previous are generated browsing images, rating, viewing slideshows is quite usable. Any edits require some patience though, but work. Overall I think Aperture on iBook works good enough for reviewing, rating and maybe some edits while traveling. Than you can move your shots to a faster machine at home retaining all ratings, kewords, edits that you made on the road.

Dave, I guess your PB should do better than my iBook.

i am enjoying the upgrade also - with craig's advice on only opening one file at a time with the external editor option all my previous issues have gone away. i particularly like the selective colour saturation ability and shadows/highlights ability it has also.

I just love the way this programme maintains and stacks all versions of an image. This last week I used it for the first time as my primary browser on a trip and it was great. Having worked on some images now, it's great how it keeps all versions, Black and White, different crops, Photoshop edited versions etc all neatly arranged for easy access.

i am enjoying the upgrade also - with craig's advice on only opening one file at a time with the external editor option all my previous issues have gone away. i particularly like the selective colour saturation ability and shadows/highlights ability it has also.

There's 1.5.1 available now as well as RAW camera updates for the newer cameras at:

Aperture downloads

Speed tests for Aperture 1.5 vs 1.5.1 at Barefeats show that the Macbook Pro is lacking severely behind against the quad core Mac Desktops. And with the ram limitations of the Mac Book Pro to 3GB, Aperture being a memory hog will be alot slower for big file size pics like 1DsII etc.

Barefeats Aperture tests

Looks to me like we need quad core MBPs Drew!

Sounds to me like results were mostly processor/core limited, although as you say RAM is a significant factor.