Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple to Cease Development of Aperture and Transition Users to Photos for OS X

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 135 posts

Re: Apple to Cease Development of Aperture and Transition Users to Photos for OS X

#71

Post by iSnow »

mortenjorck wrote: post #68
caycep wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one worry, and this is more of an ancillary one, is that now without the Aperture competition, Adobe will let lightroom development slack off. Lightroom is (was) one of the adobe apps that don't totally suck, and I always credited this w/ them getting taken off guard by Aperture (competitions is a great thing, etc etc). That being said, I suppose the writing is on the wall and whatever changes in direction were i…

I'm not even so worried about Adobe letting Lightroom languish as I am about them using their newfound monopoly position to at last move Lightroom into the mandatory Creative Cloud subscription model that ate the Creative Suite last year. As an enthusiast photographer and avid Lightroom user, there's no way I'm paying a recurring subscription for the same app when I'm not using it to make an income. That said, there'…

Apple never does simple/advanced mode UIs

Re: Apple to Cease Development of Aperture and Transition Users to Photos for OS X

#72

Post by 0x0 »

jakejake wrote: post #27
0x0 wrote: post #8

I really hope thet will allow for (optional) manual control of where jpeg files are stored regarding the file system. The opaque "photo library" thing was really inflexible especially as the size eventually outgrows the internal SSD drives.

Aperture has a pretty nice method where you can save photos in the library or in a separate location. You can also have multiple libraries (which are basically just packages and you can go in and access the jpg and raw files as well) I'm kinda bummed, I have been a pretty happy Aperture user for a while even though I know most people use Lightroom. Not exactly sure what I'm going to do now.

I tried it once and it was pretty horrible, the folder structure on disk didn't stay in sync with the aperture library. Moving or renaming photos or folders in one stop didn't update the other spot, so when you thought you had organized stuff physically, only the aperture library links updated or vice versa.

Re: Apple to Cease Development of Aperture and Transition Users to Photos for OS X

#73

Post by nickm12 »

lips wrote: post #39

Sometimes I feel as though I'm in a minuscule minority, as an avowed Mac user who gives a wide berth to any of their software. From the saga of FCP/X, to mail.app changing archive formats, to the auto-save/save-as clusterquack - I've long preferred finding niche vendors for my niche needs. I chose Lightroom at version 1 for exactly this reason.

+1 In the modern Apple era their applications, particularly the consumer or pro-sumer oriented ones, have tended to (1) not live up to their demos (2) and get constantly redesigned and yanked around. What made using a Mac a joy was the culture of quality espoused by third-party software vendors.

Re: Apple to Cease Development of Aperture and Transition Users to Photos for OS X

#74

Post by lutorm »

Do pros really want to store their photos "in the cloud"? I'm just an amateur and have ~500GB of photos. Uploading that much is almost impossible over a normal asymmetric home internet connection, and I imagine professional photographers must have multi-terabytes of data easily.

Re: Apple to Cease Development of Aperture and Transition Users to Photos for OS X

#75

Post by mjw00 »

georgemcbay wrote: post #43
potatolicious wrote: post #21

I really wish the Pixelmator guys will do a product in this category. They've already got the core engine, and they have a perfect 100% intersection with the Aperture userbase (Mac-only). I for one would like to see a OSX-only photo editing suite. If it's anything like Pixelmator (no UI/UX compromises for the sake of cross-platform, insanely fast hardware-accelerated-everything) it'd be a real treat.

The amount of work required for software of this type that can reasonably compete with Lightroom is really massive. Beyond the obvious editing features you've got colorspace handling issues that most image editors don't bother with (Pixelmator actually handles this fairly well already), the need for a very robust plugin system, non-destructive editing, cataloging features (including image stacks), and a huge amount o…

RAW conversion is provided by MacOS if they wanted to go that way. They could easily position themselves as product to handle those cases when the new Photos app isn't enough. This probably won't suffice for a professional workflow, but it might capture a significant portion of the enthusiast market.

Re: Apple to Cease Development of Aperture and Transition Users to Photos for OS X

#76

Post by potatolicious »

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #40
potatolicious wrote: post #21

I really wish the Pixelmator guys will do a product in this category. They've already got the core engine, and they have a perfect 100% intersection with the Aperture userbase (Mac-only). I for one would like to see a OSX-only photo editing suite. If it's anything like Pixelmator (no UI/UX compromises for the sake of cross-platform, insanely fast hardware-accelerated-everything) it'd be a real treat.

Photo editing (non-destructive) is nothing like bitmap editing, I don't see how they are well positioned for coming up with a product.

The same way Adobe was well positioned to coming up with a product in the same category.

Photo editing is bitmap editing, and Pixelmator is well positioned to implement the non-destructive property.

By virtue of being OSX-only, they can abstract out the trickiness of RAW conversion (something Adobe must heavily invest in by virtue of being cross-platform), and rely on Apple's very good implementations instead. (side note: Apple is sometimes faster to implement RAW demosaicing support than Adobe itself).

This simplifies the problem to purely that of bitmap editing. It's important to note that unlike Lightroom, Pixelmator is already hardware accelerated from top to bottom, this allows real-time rendering of the entire edit stack on top of the unaltered original data, potentially giving us much more responsive feedback as users (sliding a slider and having it respond with much less lag than Lightroom, for example).

Re: Apple to Cease Development of Aperture and Transition Users to Photos for OS X

#77

Post by jasomill »

Osmium wrote: post #48
georgemcbay wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of work required for software of this type that can reasonably compete with Lightroom is really massive. Beyond the obvious editing features you've got colorspace handling issues that most image editors don't bother with (Pixelmator actually handles this fairly well already), the need for a very robust plugin system, non-destructive editing, cataloging features (including image stacks), and a huge amount o…

> a huge amount of largely unnoticed work that goes into simply keeping up with RAW formats for new cameras Could this be largely mitigated by only working with DNG files and letting Adobe handle the conversion? Their RAW->DNG converter is free after all.

Raw DNG is no more a standard for sensor data than MKV is a standard for video encoding.

In other words, raw (as opposed to linear) DNG is basically a container format for sensor data and related metadata. So even assuming Adobe's DNG converter perfectly supports your camera, you still need code to handle its underlying sensor data format (your Bayer demosaicing code won't be much help in processing data from, e.g., a Foveon sensor) and whatever mandatory image correction it requires (e.g., many cameras and lenses rely on software correction driven by camera- or lens-supplied metadata, and will yield heavily distorted images if this correction is skipped).

In other words, until camera development stagnates, raw processing is a moving target by its very nature.

With that said, AFAIK, Aperture uses public OS X APIs for raw support, so potential Aperture replacements on OS X can get up-to-date raw support "for free". Given that Photos will support camera raw, this announcement gives me no reason to believe Apple won't continue to add support for new cameras in future OS X updates. Which is not to say Apple will support as many cameras as Adobe, of course — I'm pretty sure they already don't — or that support for new high-end (think $20K+ medium-format, not Nikon DSLR) camera support will decline now that no first-party professional software requires it.

Re: Apple to Cease Development of Aperture and Transition Users to Photos for OS X

#78

Post by andymcsherry »

iSnow wrote: post #71
mortenjorck wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not even so worried about Adobe letting Lightroom languish as I am about them using their newfound monopoly position to at last move Lightroom into the mandatory Creative Cloud subscription model that ate the Creative Suite last year. As an enthusiast photographer and avid Lightroom user, there's no way I'm paying a recurring subscription for the same app when I'm not using it to make an income. That said, there'…

Apple never does simple/advanced mode UIs

Not the best example, but the OSX calculator app seems to have this.

Re: Apple to Cease Development of Aperture and Transition Users to Photos for OS X

#79

Post by dublinben »

mortenjorck wrote: post #68
caycep wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one worry, and this is more of an ancillary one, is that now without the Aperture competition, Adobe will let lightroom development slack off. Lightroom is (was) one of the adobe apps that don't totally suck, and I always credited this w/ them getting taken off guard by Aperture (competitions is a great thing, etc etc). That being said, I suppose the writing is on the wall and whatever changes in direction were i…

I'm not even so worried about Adobe letting Lightroom languish as I am about them using their newfound monopoly position to at last move Lightroom into the mandatory Creative Cloud subscription model that ate the Creative Suite last year. As an enthusiast photographer and avid Lightroom user, there's no way I'm paying a recurring subscription for the same app when I'm not using it to make an income. That said, there'…

The copy of Lightroom you have right now isn't going to suddenly stop working, even if the next version becomes part of CC. If somehow it does fail to do the job for you in the future, you can switch to DarkTable, RawTherapee, CaptureOne, or any number of other programs.

Re: Apple to Cease Development of Aperture and Transition Users to Photos for OS X

#80

Post by sbuk »

caycep wrote: post #53
ghshephard wrote: post #33

As a multiple-times-a-day Aperture user for the last several years - I'm really glad to hear this. Apple has made it abundantly clear, that they were longer going to invest any effort into Aperture, and so we're going to get the best of all worlds. The application is absolutely rock solid for me - most of the database crashes, and corruptions have stopped occurring for over a year - so in the interim, I have a produc…

The one worry, and this is more of an ancillary one, is that now without the Aperture competition, Adobe will let lightroom development slack off. Lightroom is (was) one of the adobe apps that don't totally suck, and I always credited this w/ them getting taken off guard by Aperture (competitions is a great thing, etc etc). That being said, I suppose the writing is on the wall and whatever changes in direction were i…

Lightroom isn't the only game in town. Both CaptureOne from PhaseOne and DxO's Optics Pro handle raw files better than ACR. Bibble also still exists in the guise of Corel After Shot. There are a few decent OSS options too. it looks like Apple are incorporating the Aperture toolset into the new photo app, so it's not necessarily the end of the world.
Post reply on HN