So I've had a chance to play with Aperture 3 a bit. There are a few things I'm liking:
1.
Chromatic aberration removal. And it works very well!
2.
Curves! I'm not very good at using them, but now I can fiddle to my heart's delight without getting slapped with an 85MB penalty for round-tripping to Photoshop.
3.
Faces. I don't have many pictures of people imported yet, but the handfull that I tried all worked 100%.
4.
Geotagging. Now this I kinda forgot about. I meant to set the logger running on take some shots on the way back from work, so I could test this. Unfortunately I can't get a signal in the house, and there's no way I'm going outside now. But, I'll describe this quickly. It has google maps integrated, and there's a button to import GPS tracks. I'll probably still have to gpsbabel my log files, but I've automated that for the most part, so that's no biggy.
There's also an option to import GPS from iPhone photos. This raises an interesting possibility that I'll test tomorrow. I think if I take a shot with my iphone every time I take one with the big camera, it will merge the coordinates from the iPhone photos with the photos from the camera. Not an ideal workflow, but good if you're going to take a lot of photos in one location or if the GPS logger's battery runs out
I'm not about to start using the GPS tagging in Aperture just yet. I use PhotoLinker to do that and assign appropriate keywording. Photolinker also fills in some fields with geographic names based on the coordinates, that it fetches from one of the servers that provide these, i.e. City, State, Province, which I find valuable. I'll have to test this thoroughly in aperture and see what it adds.
5.
Presets! All sorts of presets when dealing doing work on images, as well as Adjustment *and* Metadata presets when importing. Awesome!
6. Above everything, it's chroma
noise handling. The 50D isn't exactly known for it's great clean high ISO performance, but Aperture 2 was possibly doing the worst job of decoding its CR2 files with respect to noise. To demonstrate this, I took one of my test shots from a while back. It was when I was comparing lenses, so it's just a bookshelf - you know, lots of detail and straight lines. Here are a few crops.
First, the CR2 in Aperture 2, no processing done, everything default. Notice the purple-ish smears on the blue book cover, and in the black on the focus chart:
Now, in Aperture 3, all things left to default:
In Aperture 3, under the Raw Fine Tuning, there is a slider called "De-noise" - it's not quite the pure chroma slider you have in DPP or a tool like Noise Ninja, in that it seems to soften the image as you increase its level, but it doesn't degrade it to the point where I can't throw a bit of sharpening at it.
The above sample is at the default of 0.5. Moving the slider about doesn't seem to change the chroma noise much (although I have to work on more files to get a clearer understanding of it), and moving it to 0 doesn't seem to have much of a detrimental effect, and comes with the bonus of sharpening up the image a little.
De-noise: 0.0
De-noise: 1.0
So far I'm liking it very much!
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