Just five minutes of a youtube video is enough to convince me that I NEED CS5! If you spend countless hours removing pesky litter, poles, pets, unwanted objects and even people, you’ll want to check out Content Aware Fill. This is crazy. You can even stitch your images and fill in the ‘white space’. Makes you wonder how the software creates something out of nothing. This is just magic. And I’m sure this is just one among the slew of new stuff in this package.
According to Adobe, it’ll be launched on 12 April, but available for sale a bit later and guess who’s queuing up then. I always skip versions in PS to save money and since I have CS3, an upgrade is due.
I’m beginning to step into geekdom, buying all this new software and hardware to support all that, but can you blame me when things like this keep appearing?
So I’ve finally made up my mind. It must be the most well-researched and tested software I’ll ever purchase. I’ve ran it to the ground, compared it with Lightroom 2 and Lightroom 3 beta, tried all sorts of funny things with it, go through my entire workflow to make sure I can get used to it fast and I’m satisfied. Unlike Photoshop, where there aren’t many choices out there, Aperture and Lightroom are both great choices but Aperture works better for me. At least for my workflow. I love the adjustment brushes and the slideshow capabilities. Plus working with the full screen. Speed-wise, I thought Lightroom was faster but in the end, the difference was imperceptible.
If you’re using Aperture already or are thinking of it, here’s a very useful website to learn tips and tricks: http://aperture.maccreate.com/.
Well now that I’m ready to buy it, I’ve been told it’s out of stock. Duh! And I think the money I spend deserves a nice little box, a CD and a bunch of useless material, instead of just downloading the key. I can wait. I have 20 more days to use the trial version.
Just came back from a press release of Aperture 3 and to add a bit to what I posted earlier. Nothing much new that you can’t get from the web but having someone go through it was quite an experience. A lot of emphasis was given to the iPhoto and Aperture compatibility. If you use iPhoto and the Faces and Places features a lot, you’ll be very impressed with these. The face recognition algorithm is much more advanced and you can manage it at the project level instead of library level.
What I found impressive was the Places feature. As long as you have a GPS enabled camera, you’ll have a lot of fun with this. Here’s a screenshot of my iPhone images with the location service enabled and the places tagged. You can use it even in the slideshow where your slides can be automatically captioned with the location. Very impressive indeed.
Aperture 3 screenshot showing the Places feature
So Faces and Places are cool. Just that as a professional photographer who works mainly in Singapore and who catalogs images based on event instead of faces, I can’t say I can find a lot of use for it. Sure, if I’m a National Geog photographer, Places will be extremely useful or if I go vacationing a lot. Or if I constantly take pictures of my friends and family, Faces may be useful. But counterintuitively, I find that because the face recognition processing is done all the time, I feel it slows down my other processing. I can see that processing in the status. I’m not sure but perhaps, that can disabled.
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