I don’t know what kind of crazy voodoo the Devs over at Apple worked, but between 2.0 and 2.1 there is a *huge* performance increase. Granted I haven’t given it a “full load” of thousands of images yet, but earlier versions would become noticeably sluggish even working with a few images. With 2.1, I have yet to see a slowdown – even rotating images (the bane of aperture before) is completely responsive – (dare I say even more than lightroom?)
Tags: aperture, aperture 2.1
Just a note that I’m going to be updating f1point0.com to wordpress 2.5 tomorrow. v.2.5 has a whole slew of new features including built in gallery support (no more relying on greybox embedded lightroom galleries!) and I’m totally stoked to move my site to it. I haven’t had any problems with upgrades in the past, but in case something goes wrong, there is the potential for downtime, so bear with me!
I know, I know… it’s a sensationalist headline, but that was my initial reaction after about 10 minutes of playing with the new Aperture 2.1
In case you hadn’t already read, apple just introduced editing plugins for aperture, including true photoshop-style brush based controls such as burn/dodge etc… Noiseninja and others coming soon!
In what seems to be a largely (as of yet) unpublicized announcement, Apple has just dropped a bomb!
It may just be a .1 release, but I think this is a bigger shakeup than aperture 2 itself. Software like aperture and Lightroom have been great for DAM (Digital Asset Management) and great for doing quick adjustments to exposure/tone/etc… but true “editing” remained the province of Photoshop until now. The addition of brush based tools (particularly burn and dodge) is *huge*. Many photographers have lamented that they’d love to use Aperture/Lightroom exclusively, but can’t because of the need for Photoshop to do targeted adjustments. Not anymore – do all that in aperture itself. With plugins coming from NoiseNinja (the other main use of Photoshop for me) and many others sure to follow, aperture 2.1 may just make Photoshop a “non-necessity” for a number of photographers.
Of course time will tell 
I’ve been using aperture since the (horribly buggy) v1.0 and lightroom since beta2. I kept going back and forth for a while, but finally I settled on lightroom, for 2 reasons-
Aperture v.2.0 seemed to fix some of the performance issues, but was still not compelling to tempt me back from lightroom.
However – in my mind both offerings were missing one *key* feature – some kind of dodge and burn tool. I mean, it’s pretty much the most basic “darkroom editing” technique – bread and butter to anyone with a background in “wet” printing. I was actually kind of surprised that both pieces of software were designed to be a “digital darkroom” (unlike photoshop which is a straight up “editor”) and yet were missing this key feature.
Till now:
With v. 2.1, aperture has finally added plugin support and real targeted “brush based” editing including a burn/dodge tool.
Crap. now I’m going to have to switch again.
I think this is a great move on apples part – opening the software up to 3rd party plugins will ensure a breadth of options that can’t be matched by just the software itself. Heck, I currently only use photoshop for dodge/burn and selective masking/adjustment layer editing. If we’ve got plugins for aperture that do all this now – I may simply never touch photoshop again (not really I know).
So apparently I’ve been living under a rock as the new announcement of Adobe’s “Photoshop Express” took me by complete surprise. There is an awful lot of buzz going on around it, some rather dismissive… To this I say, I will reserve judgement but one thing to keep in mind is:
This is not photoshop – to me, the defining characteristic of photoshop is layers and masks – these are really the foundation on which all the advanced capabilities of PS are built. Without that, this really isn’t “Photoshop” per-se. However, it is a very intriguing product nonetheless – really this strikes me as more of a social network-photosharing stite, with some basic web-based editing capabilities. If you think of it in those terms, it’s actually quite a neat offering. I will definitely be playing with it a bit in the next few weeks.
Edit 3/28: Apparently uploading pictures to essentially gives Adobe unlimited rights to do whatever they want with them. Uncool. I guess it’s fine for the myspace crowd (who this app seems to be targetings) but that is bad mojo for any serious/professional photographer. Guess I won’t be signing up after all.
For all of us “Strobist” folks using off camera flash, life will soon get a lot more interesting. Most likely you ahve heard of these mystical devices called “RadioPoppers” designed to provide TTL flash functionality via RF signal (rather than the limiting optical signal transmission they normally rely on). Many dismissed them as vaporware, but it seems they are finally materializing. According to the radiopopper blog, FCC approval has been granted and the actual first production batch is manufactured! Some folks (including David Hobby of Strobist) have already gotten to play with the actual units.
Color me excited. I’m all about the manual off-camera flash, but having the option for RF based TTL is just too cool to pass up and opens up a bunch of possibilities (including non-line-of-sight high speed sync) Pretty cool stuff.
Tags: wirelessflash, wireless, strobist, radiopopper
At the risk of skirting dangerously close to a political diatribe, this like THIS are really getting out of hand. (link goes to article, click the pic for larger image)
There are already plenty of reports of the general camera-unfriendliness that is growing in our ever-expanding surveillance society, but this is essentially painting anyone with a camera as a terrorist (god help you if you have a big slr & tripod). Have we as a people really sunk that low? (not to mention the obvious disconnect in that the folks usually being harassed are SLR users, whereas wouldn’t you expect a “terrorist” to want to use something small and inconspicuous? – quick round up all the G9 users!)
This is really an ugly reflection of our changing society. Honestly I was shocked (although maybe I shouldn’t be) by that poster – without hyperbole, it is something that could have come straight out of Soviet Russisa (“Report any suspicious activity, comrade! It’s your patriotic duty!).
I am a fairly young guy, but I can’t seem to ever remember this level of general paranoia and fear mongering being foisted upon the public ’till recently. It really makes you wonder why.
And here I was getting all excited about the DP-1, along comes olympus and drops this unexpected bomb:
The e-420, a brand new e410 form factor slr (tiny), with the e-3 sensor, *and a 25mm/2.8 PANCAKE prime!*
Very cool stuff, this is practically a pocketable SLR – smaller even than my k100d+40mm combo. Plus the 50mm equiv. offering is a great general purpose focal length.
This is very encouraging – along with the success of the canon G9, the DP-1 and now this seems to indicate that there really is a strong market for a compact form factor paired with high IQ and robust features. If Olympus makes a 17mm pancake to go with this (35mm equiv), it could almost tempt me to switch from Pentax! 
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