Oh well, Aperture 3.0 release was quite hectic and generated a lot of hair pulling and swearing. And I was certainly not spared.

Among other problems, was the fact that Aperture 3’s memory usage was quite insane and he sometimes even claimed it needed insane storage space, for the sole purpose of Library upgrading.

For example, a user got this quite disturbing request, trying to upgrade a vault he just created:

"Not Enough Disk Space

The vault “ApertureVault” does not have enough space to hold your library.

17179869183.16 GB is needed, but only 68.86 GB is available."

The hilarious answer of a contributor made me laugh and certainly helped lighten the mood, in those days:

Hello Reebo:

I think this is just another example of excess complaining. Disk storage is cheap. I think you should just run out immediately and but a new 17179869184GB disk drive.

Just my 2 cents

Jeff Stulin


Fortunately, the 3.0.1 update solved most, if not all problems. And I’m now patiently waiting for the last faces to be detected, for the second time. And this time’s will be the good one.

Tags: Aperture, , Apple, update, 3.0, 3.0.1

Ah tiens, je n’ai pas été juste avec moi ni Apple, car je râlais ici du manque de réactivité des développeurs de Cupertino. Mais j’avais négligé leur capacité à réagir, surtout quand j’écris un billet, forcément lu par Steve Jobs, donc aux conséquences immédiates.

On peut rêver, non ?

Oh, I was unfair, both with me and Apple, because I was bitching, here, about the lack of reactivity of Cupertino’s developers. But I didn’t take into account their ability to move fast, especially when I write a blog entry, as usual read by Steve Jobs, which leads to immediate action.

I can dream, can't I?

Tags: Aperture, Apple, , RAW, Canon, EOS

A friend of mine just bought a wonderful Canon EOS 7D camera and can’t use it with Aperture 2 yet. Not because Aperture 2 would need an update (it still needs a major update, in my opinion, because it needs to gain more power and functions), but because it uses Mac OS X’s libraries to recognize various file formats, such as specific RAW formats used by various cameras. That’s because it’s handled by the system that you can preview everything right in the Finder. Handy.

Strangely, it seems Canon has slightly changed the RAW format they use on this new camera. Enough to prevent from using it right now.

And Apple still has not released an update for the latest image formats. It sucks. Big time. Shooting in JPEG is far less useful, if you need to make adjustments later, than RAW.

While looking for a release date for an update that would allow to handle Canon EOS 7D RAW format, I found this Q&A that I found quite hilarious in its concise.

Q : Does Aperture 2 upgrade version support Canon EOS 7D RAW?
Best Answer: nope

Come on, Apple engineers, how hard and long can it be to release RAW format updates at the same time as new cameras? Don’t tell me that Canon doesn’t publish their data format long time in advance, to make sure their new models will be usable by photographers the day they are made available.

There is even a Photoshop plug-in that allows importing them. And Aperture 2 can’t handle that? I’m so disappointed.

Come on, update Mac OS X and, while you’re at it, release Aperture 3! The product review is from august 2008. It’s too old, for a software in this area, where things move fast. And Adobe too, for once.

We should all go to the Aperture feedback page at Apple’s and tell them we want support for the latest cameras file format, not months after, but right now.

And that we need to have an Aperture 3 that will blow us away and rip the bad thoughts of switching to Lightroom out of our brains, too.

Tags: Aperture, Apple, , RAW, Canon, EOS

I’m quite disturbed by Aperture 2’s behaviour.

I’ve watched some of the great video tutorials. And, on the one named Editing with Plug-ins: Dodge & Burn, they show, near the end, the comparison of the original image and the one treated with Dodge & Burn.

They are stacked and zoomed.

Ok, that I know how to do. Even if the shortcut to enter the comparison mode is ⌥O and not ↩, as they say in the corresponding tutorial. Return sets the compare image, once you’re in that mode.

Anyway… let’s go back to that Dodge & Burn video tutorial.

At 02:50 into the movie, when the cursor changes to the hand and the right image is dragged around, the left image moves accordingly, showing the same area, making the comparison useful and effective.

And when I do the same, only one image moves, forcing me to move one image and the other in sequence, to keep them showing the same area, roughly.

I’ve read the manual and haven’t found how to perform this magic…

Any reader, by any chance, willing and able to help me with this?

And and, well, Dodge & Burn is a wonderful tool, but isn’t it a shame the changes are saved and not modifiable, as all other Aperture’s changes? Once you click on Save, if you want to go back and slightly modify the changes of any of the Dodge & Burn settings, you must start all over again, loosing any changes you would have liked to keep. That’s a shame.

Tags: Apple, Aperture, tutorial, Dodge & Burn

Why oh why?

I was using iPhoto, as I told you earlier and I was so happy with this fantastic iApp. But iPhoto suddenly decided not to let me apply “reduce noise” or “sharpen” effects on my photos. After lots of efforts and time lost, the only solution left was to switch to Aperture.

Well, ok, why not…

There are quite a lot of issues, the main one being it’s quite slow on my iMac G5 and making the need for a new machine even more obvious.

Another one is the following. And it drives me mad.

While the iPod Touch or iPhone synchronisation with iPhoto’s Library was easy and perfectly working, the synchronisation between Aperture’s Library and the iPhone (or iPod Touch, you got it now, I won’t use both names each time) is simply bugged beyond all you can imagine.

I’ve searched the web around, to find out if there was a solution. And it appeared that some people suggested that Aperture needed to finish generating the preview for the photos for them to appear in iTune’s Photos synchronisation tab.

Ok, well, I let Aperture work (a long time) to generate the previews for my 36,580 photos. And guess what? It only proposes me 111 photos in iTunes! Yes, out of more than 30,000! And only a few of my hundreds Albums and Projects. This is insane. Unacceptable from Apple.

In fact, before it finished generating all the previews, it allowed me to see much more photos from my Aperture Library. This is insane.

They have hired people from Microsoft or what?

Just to be sure and since I still haven’t deleted my damaged iPhoto Library, I switched the sync to that iPhoto and it shows me the whole Library and all the Albums I’ve got. Works perfectly as it should.

So what? I will have to maintain two photo librairies to be able to sync my iPhone correctly? It’s not acceptable. This is a major bug and it has to be solved.

Tags: malédiction, iPhone, , Apple, iPhoto, Aperture, iPod, bug

Because I’m the punch-bag of some evil god, I hold concurrently.

Recently, it’s iPhoto who decided to annoy me. Obviously, I’m not the only one, but we still are not enough to alarm Apple and even less incite them to correct the problem. However, I want to deeply thank Terence Devlin for his kindness and patience.

So, there was little choice and we had to switch to Aperture, since it’s the only way to continue combining archiving, easy sharing and retouching. It’s a lot more demanding than iPhoto and also much slower on our aging machine.

Oh yes, did I already tell you about the other problems? Of course not, impossible, the blog was brain dead…

Well, it “forgot” it had a built-in iSight. And also it knew how to burn DVDs. Obviously, the G5 has been the generation of too much, at IBM, for Apple.

It is more than time for us to put this iMac into early retirement. It is more than time to go for an duo core intel iMac 24”.

Parce que je suis le souffre-douleur de je ne sais quelle divinité malfaisante, je cumule.

Récemment, c’est iPhoto qui a décidé de me faire des misères. Visiblement, je ne suis pas un cas isolé, mais nous sommes suffisamment peu nombreux pour qu’Apple n’y voit pas matière à s’alarmer et encore moins à corriger le problème. Je tiens cependant à remercier chaleureusement Terence Devlin pour sa gentillesse et sa patience.

Donc il a bien fallu se résoudre à passer à Aperture, car c’est semble-t-il le seul moyen de conserver la capacité à combiner archivage, partage simple et retouches. Il est bien plus lourd qu’iPhoto, bien plus lent aussi sur notre machine vieillissane.

Ah oui, je ne vous avais pas dit les autres problèmes ? Ben non, pas possible, le blog était en état de mort cérébrale…

Eh bien elle a “oublié” qu’elle avait une iSight intégrée. Et puis aussi qu’elle savait graver les DVD. Visiblement, le G5 aura été la génération de processeurs de trop chez IBM, pour Apple.

Il serait plus que temps de la mettre à la semi-retraite. Il serait plus que temps de passer à un iMac 24” intel à double cœur.

Tags: malédiction, , Aperture, Apple, iPhoto, bug