TUAW Review: Zooming in on Aperture 2, an introduction

With murmurings of Aperture 2 maybe, just maybe, arriving on the scene 'very soon', this morning's store down-time left one blogger hoping not for new hardware (I picked up a new Black MacBook just last weekend) but that Aperture 2 would arrive.

I've been a huge, huge fan of Aperture since I picked up a MacBook Pro in January last year, leaving the then-beta Adobe Lightroom out in the cold. Ever since the launch of Leopard, Aperture has been one of the few applications I've had minor stability issues with -- and the now-resolved incompatibility with Time Machine made me choose my photos over my backups. Others were less impressed with Apple's apparent dithering on Aperture, with a number of customers venting their frustration on certain message boards. Thankfully, if the compatibility issue with Time Machine has now been resolved, and a much-updated Aperture 2 has arrived.

So what on earth is new with Aperture 2.0, and what are our first impressions here at TUAW? Read on...

User Interface

The UI in Aperture has seen a refresh, with a little more modality in both the Library management, Metadata and Adjustment panels no longer being placed either side of the main window area. Instead, we see the consolidation of the three panels into one tabbed view on the left-hand side of the application window.

The tabs ensure that you're never far from the controls you need, but that as much screen-space as possible is set aside for the focus of your work in Aperture -- the photos themselves. Another touch that I found really useful was the large 'View' button on the toolbar allowing you to quick choose whether to only show the 'Viewer', 'Browser' or both in a combined view. When I first started out in Aperture, I frequently lost the browser through errant keyboard shortcuts, and this looks like a great way to help newer users customise the interface.

Another addition is the 'Quick Preview' mode, where Aperture's main priority is to let you sort and rate your photos as quickly as possible. In the next part of looking at Aperture 2, we're going to take a look at the performance of the application in Quick Preview mode compared to Aperture 1.5.6 -- for now, however, we're just giving you a flavour of the new things you'll find.

Tethered shooting

Tethered shooting is a typical way of shooting in a studio. As the name implies, you hook a digital SLR up to your computer (via USB or in some cases WiFi), and as you shoot the computer receives the images from the camera. In past versions, to do this you had to rely on (in my case) Nikon Camera Control Pro and the mighty-nifty Aperture Hot Folders automator action to bring files into Aperture. With Aperture 2 however, the tethered shooting is built in, and is easily set up by plugging in the camera, choosing a project to add to, and choosing the 'Tether' option in the file menu.

We also learned that you can tether your iPhone to Aperture 2. Simply ensure the phone is plugged in via USB and not actively syncing, enable tethering and snap away with the device -- though perhaps that's not the best use of this new feature.

.Mac Web Galleries

Just as you would create a book from a selection of files, the main drop-down menus now allow you to create .Mac Web Galleries like those made via iPhoto '08. One additional feature is the ability to share your Master RAW files via the gallery, allowing visitors to download the original images you used to create the gallery, complete with all the metadata from Aperture. Chances are you'll want to upgrade your .Mac storage limits before enabling this capability.

Background Exporting

To some people, this may be a little thing -- to me, it's a big change that I'm thrilled to see. No longer, when exporting images, is the application made inactive whilst the user waits for the export dialogue to disappear. Instead, just as thumbnail and iLife-sharing preview generation was handled in version 1.5, the exporting is all done in the background too, enabling you to get on with more work within the application during the export process.

Speed Graphic

Even though I'm without my modest library of 6500 images at the moment -- Apple has yet to put Aperture 2 on sale in the UK online store -- the speed of the application is impressive. Notably, scrolling through images (even outside of Quick Preview) and the previously-unsteady Straighten tool are hugely improved. I've got the demonstration version installed both on a top-of-the-range January 2007 MacBook Pro, and my new MacBook. On both systems the straighten tool is completely fluid and accurate, as opposed to the jittery tool in version 1.5.6. With just 50 RAW images in the entire library, it's hard to paint an accurate picture on Apple's claimed speed improvements; however, it's an impressive first pass.

Anything else?

There are touted to be over a hundred new features in Aperture 2. The updated version has also been reduced in price -- a full licence now costs US $199 (£129), less than half the original $499 list price Aperture 1.0 went for, with an upgrade from v1.x costing $99 (£65). That's $100 less than Adobe Lightroom, and it will be interesting to see whether Adobe chooses to compete on price with the new version of Aperture.

Tomorrow we'll throw a full library upgrade at Aperture 2, check out the performance further and explore some of the new features in more detail.