Lóránd Somogyi

Well, its been a while when I last wrote about my Mac adventure. This is the third part and the fourth post on this topic. (To find them all, just click the “apple project” category.)

Meanwhile I bought the same Mac I’ve been testing. So no doubt, I liked it, (for the price I get it.)

To be honest, small things does count (double):

• size – it fits my photo bag
• weight – not too heavy, I still can carry my bag if I do not pack it up with too many lenses

On the other side, Mac proved to be reliable companion. I brought it with myself to a journey to Croatia and to two weddings. Worked each time, no complains. Boots up fast, (if there is no updates) and that’s crucial if you’re in rush. And if you act as a wedding photographer you’ll need to be fast or you’re about to miss the most important moments. Same goes for the battery life, about at least 3 hours of uptime is more than enough for a photo companion.

I’ve been testing Aperture 2.1. Well, here… too much ravin’… Aperture is nice. It is great as a photo catalog software. But no, it is not a RAW processing software, nor a photo editing software. Of course there are neat features in Aperture, like versions, tagging, light box, etc.. But the RAW processing is not comparable to BibblePro or CaptureNX and the photo editing far behind CaptureNX, LightZone (or Photoshop – though I don’t use it).

Main features for RAW processing (for me) are:

• Highlight recovery, fill light
• 16+ bit color processing
• Lens (distortion) corrections with lens data – without lens data the correction is nothing but guessing.
• Good and adjustable noise reduction (with acceptable speed)
• Color adjustments – curves, white balance, saturation, contrast
• Color management
• Tagging
• Batch processing
• At least TIFF, PNG, JPEG output support

There are other features I use, but without these I feel uncomfortable. I do not want to get too deep into this, but Aperture does not have out-of-the-box lens correction and batch processing. – Or I just could not find it. – Noise reduction is not too sophisticated, or at least no too adjustable.

Of course, as I’m getting to used to it, you could get extension to Aperture. You could find there Noise Ninja, HDR image processing, but still no decent lens correction. I found NikSoftwares Coror Efex Pro 3.0 really neat, althought it’s not “just Aperture” software, it integrates with CaptureNX2 and Photoshop as well.

Integration for Aperture is lousy. It’s not natural. It’s just like opening the same file in another editor. Just compare Color Efex Pro in Aperture and CaptureNX2.

Do not get me wrong. Aperture is a great software. It’s just not a RAW processing or a photo editing software. It is great for managing your collection of images, although for that I would need a desktop Mac and not a laptop with small hard drive. – I was just misled by the things I read on the Internet and with Apple’s marketing, which is astonishing.

Otherwise CaptureNX2, Photoshop, BibblePro, etc. all runs fine on Mac. So no obligation here, MacBook is a great photo companion.

All I’ll do in a near future is, I’m going to pack a bigger hard drive into the MacBook. And that’s it.

Am I satisfied as a photographer? Definitely YES.