After much speculation the latest version of Aperture has arrived – during our absence in Canada – and the new baby is looking good.
Courtesy Apple
The new features Apple has added appear to address most, although not all, of the main feature requests from users of Aperture 2, including greater local editing and the use of the 64 bit goodness incorporated in Snow Leopard.
The addition of Faces and Places was expected, given their presence in iPhoto for some time. For many users these options will add some really useful ways of accessing their database of images.
Elsewhere, Brushes is targeted at helping photographers take their editing to the next level within Aperture by providing an intelligent, non-destructive environment for local editing that will heavily reduce the need to leave Aperture for other image editing software.
Altogether, there are some 200 plus reported improvements in some 16 categories from UI changes to data organisation. Many of these changes are under-the-hood modifications focussed on speeding up the archiving and retrieval processing as well as quickly getting your images to the editing point you want.
I can’t wait to try all the new features and will report back on the testing and give our rating of Aperture 3 shortly.
Some reports are already filtering through of some users’ real world experiences. While many seem to have no issues there are many reports of major memory leak issues, leading some computer systems to be reduced to a crawl. This is an issue that really should not have made it through beta testing. Other reported issues include some with Airport Extreme and Time Capsule base stations, adjusting file sizes on email export and the upgrade process itself when the software may unexpectedly quit. Apple has already posted a work around for the last problem at http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3231.
