I have been waiting to write this for a while now considering I was one of the people who was like WOW it has been released let me go right out now to the apple store and buy it. That was a bad idea. I learned the lesson about waiting for the first patch on a new piece of software. So I did not want to give a review on software that was broken. So now that they have fixed the memory leak issue with 3.01 patch I feel its time to do my review.

I am just going to go over the features that really impact me as a professional photographer. I know faces and places is cool, and flickr and facebook export are nice additions however I am sorry people, but theses are not features that professional photographers wait to tear the doors down for. If I only cared about those features I would of just stuck with iPhoto.

Brushes:

The first feature that came to my attention when reading about all of the new features was the new non destructive brushes with edge detection. Theses types of operations in the past had to be done by photographers in photoshop or gimp by using masks and layers. Each adjustment creates a new entry in inspector that allows you to just for example adjust certain colors in a selection

Here is the brush selection menu that you can chose the non destructive brushes from:

One of the cool features which you can apply when using the brushes is a color overlay that shows you exactly where your brush strokes fall. This is very handy and seeing exactly what has been modified.

When it comes to architecture and scenery photos this tool is a must. I was able to recover an over exposed sky and brighten the colors with ease.

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Presets:

One other feature that I have really been craving after using Lightroom 2 when I was on windows was the ability to save and use presets. In Aperture 2 you had to save a preset for each individual adjustment. However now with Aperture 3 you can create fully custom presets and also use the nice handy presets the provided. I have yet to really use this feature much, but when I start adding artistic effects to photos from a shoot I will create a few nice presets I will be using.

Full screen:

With Aperture 3 you now can basically live in full screen edit mode. This is one of the things that I absolutely love about Aperture 3 and Aperture in general. I have yet to find an editor that will do this the way Aperture does. When editing an image I want to have it in all its glory shown on my screen as large as possible. I do not want to be bogged down with menus and other program elements that take up my screen real-estate. They added a few new features that is very handy is that you are now able to change and browse projects. This means you never have to leave full screen mode. Another cool feature is that you can hold down shift while sliding an adjustment and the inspector will fully disappear only showing that one slider giving you the full view of the image you adjusting.

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Conclusion:

Aperture 3 was a pleasant refresh of their professional line of products. To me it was worth the upgrade. The additions to brushes, presets and full screen editing were very refreshing and The new ability to leverage dual cores and 64bits increases the performance. I would recommend this software to any Professional Photographer working on a mac. You can see all the other 200+ new features here. http://www.apple.com/aperture/features/

Tagged: aperture 3 review photography software