I blogged about downloading Aperture 3.0 last week for evaluation. The conclusion, don’t bother during Chinese New Year. Too much eating, drinking and socializing that period. So I finally sat down to evaluate it today. And…one word..IMPRESSIVE! Ok, this comes from someone who have not been using the fastest and best tools for processing so this is a big leap. I’m halfway through the door, with a few hundred bucks in hand, heading to the nearest Apple shop. Until someone suggested I try Lightroom too. Can anything be better than Aperture? I’ve to check that out.

Screenshot of Aperture 3.0

Here’re the things I really like about Aperture:

1. It’s fast. The thumbnails render almost instantaneously and any adjustments can be previewed real time. Bear in mind, I don’t have the fastest machine, just a 2.15GHz Intel Core Duo machine with 4Gb RAM. And I’m happy with the speed.
2. I like the Adjustments Inspector or tools. You can customize to always display your favourite tools. I added in the sharpening and vignette adjustment to the default.
3. White balancing is easy, especially when using the eye-dropper tool and fine adjustments.
4. All the other adjustments are also easy to implement and also easily ‘lift’ and ‘stamp’ed or cut and paste.
5. The full screen feature is a nice touch. You get the entire picture to fill your screen. Very handy for fine adjustments.
6. Plenty of keyboard commands and easily customized too.
7. Exporting to another format is also very user friendly. You can customize the format, eg jpeg, high quality, etc.
8. The very attractive brush-in feature. Use this to brush-in any adjustments, eg, spot sharpening, and after the brushing in, you can still make amendments. Only the brushed area will be affected. Very cool indeed.

Only thing I’m not comfortable with is the library structure. I’m not a big iPhoto fan because I want to know where my images are instead of depending on it to organize it for me. And Aperture will do the same thing. But I think I can get used to it once I understand this better. I just wished it’s like Expression Media, where you can access the files in their original folders without having to copy them into the library.

I’ve probably used only like 20% of the software so far but these are the most important to me and good enough to get me started in processing my wedding pictures. I have not done a detailed evaluation, just using the tools I need to get my work moving along. I’ll discover more stuff along the way I’m sure. I’ve been invited to the Media Briefing of Aperture 3.0 in a few days time and I’m hoping to learn a few more tricks there.