The last 2 days or so have seen a little bit of a Buzz with the release for Apple’s new professional photo-editing tool Photoshop Aperture 3. Some big names like Chase Jarvis and Joe McNally have blogged about it with the same ethusiastic announcement. Finally, it sounded like, there is a real tool for editing photographs and finally, skin smoothing, retouching and even HD video editing can be done in one and the same application only.

Being of sceptical nature, especially when it comes to Aperture – having tried to establish a functional workflow with Aperture Version 1 and 2 in the past – I proceeded to install the new Apple Aperture 3 Trial Version, to give the new kid on the block a bit of a check up. My hope was that we would see the long awaited speed improvement and better workflow. I knew that Aperture’s tool palettes had always been pretty powerful, and was just expecting a few improvements not much more. My main focus was to see how newly advertised features, such as skin smoothing, the video editing and even face recognition would perform.

Importing just 47 RAW images (Nikon NEF files, each ca. 15mb, D2X) into a new catalogue was a bit of a blow to the expected joyous encounter with Aperture 3. Only a full 6 minutes later (for 47 images only) was I able to take the next step. This would get interesting when trying to import a few hundred wedding shots. (12mins/100shots? Unthinkable.)

Well, I had some testing to do … I ran a few curves, changed some basic adjustments such as WB, contrast etc. Set a black-point and white-point etc, which all worked fairly flawless as expected. Good one.
Chase mentioned the new presets in his video on apple.com, so I decided to give them a go as well just randomly setting Exposure Compensation to -1. Nothing happend – until ca.20 seconds later. That’s how long it took to see the changes on screen. There we had it again: The old Aperture issue called sluggish response – welcome back home!

Little did I know that 20 seconds in Aperture 3 should be considered "lighting-strike fast". Zooming in to 100% on a shot (Z-key short-cut) the image preview blurs instantly, the processing and the loading weel starts spinning and it took 27-55 seconds for the zoom-in only to be rendered with a refocused image on screen.

Let’s cut this short, skin-smoothing seems to work okay, but response time to see results vary from 10-64 seconds, and I just don’t have that much time (having to wait a minute for every little brush stroke to materialise). I got all sorts of weird display errors when trying to skin-smooth, zoom in or out, or even dare to space-bar drag an image. Blue, black and blue screens all come pre-packed (see below). Aperture 3 crashed, the tools were sluggish and dragging behind the mouse movement at times, flickering scroll-hand when dragging an image in 100%. etc. pp.

Suffice to say, I didn’t end up testing dodging and burning, nor face-recognition or the praised HD video editing. I also didn’t import 1000 or 5000 shots. Working on one shot, just trying to do some basic retouch and adjustments was painful enough. This test was performed on an MBP, with (only?) 3GB RAM. (standalone and attached cinema display, which didn’t make a difference). Perhaps one needs to run Aperture on an 8 Core, 16GB Ram MacPro, but surely that can’t be the answer. Apple, you do a lot of good stuff, photo editing software, it seems, is not one of them.

Well, I am pretty sure it wasn’t that dark that day. Some rendering bug when applying adjustments.

Skin-retouching. Isn’t green a nice color, too?

This actually looked pretty funky. Did they make Avatar like that? Is it an easter-egg? Not sure, but the fact that blue faces started flickering randomly across the scene didn’t give me more hope. Someon explain?

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