Apples Aperture 3 – a Perfect Wedding Photographers Choice? wedding photographer surrey
Adobe Photoshop has always been seen as the benchmark when it comes to editing, enhancing or re-touching images and for wedding photographers has been the standard for many years since the start of the digital photography age.
Issues with Photoshop as a batch editing tool
The problem with Photoshop however is the time it takes to edit each image. Ok there are several ways to speed things up with the use of Adobes sister program Bridge. You can create an action (a set of adjustments to images), then apply this via bridge to multiple images, or apply individually. Photoshop is an excellent option for precise photo editing and virtually anything can be achieved with time using this application using a variety of advanced techniques, due to the ability of use effects,layers, blending modes and mattes/masks. A big draw back is the learning curve to achieve the knowledge to be able to use these advance techniques.
Aperture as an alternative
In a way aperture is a filling/browsing photo application such as bridge, however it also brings with it the ability to edit the images within the application. When Aperture was first launched these adjustments to the images were quite constrained and often photographers found themselves having to round trip with Photoshop with many to the images to achieve the acquired results.
With new realises of Aperture, more and more adjustments have been added so it has now become quite an editing powerhouse, whilst providing an excellent way of storing and sorting your images. As a creative wedding photography you will appreciate the need to edit images quickly whilst having the ability to make fine adjustments ( such as selective dodge and burn, retouching and skin smoothing) without having to take images to an external image editing software such as Photoshop.
Aperture also has another ace up its sleeve with ‘Presets’ – they have always had the abilty to lift adjusments and then stamp them onto multiple other images and then make fine adjustments later. Now you can save these adjustments for later in terms of a preset. In many ways it works in the same way as Photoshops actions. You do however get a thumbnail preview of how your image would look if you applied the preset (which is nifty!) and you have the ability to download and install other photographers presets.
Another big ace for Aperture for wedding photographers is the ability to design and order photo books from multiple suppliers within the software, without the need to export the images first.
So can I give up Photoshop?
Not just yet! Photoshop is still the King and Aperture are not really trying to replace them! For photographers who only need to work on one or two images Aperture is not worth considering, as photoshop gives the flexibility to do virtually anything you want to an image( Aperture can not[without plugins] for instance apply filters, liquify,layers or blending modes). Affordable wedding photographers need to work on hundreds if not thousands of images in a matter of days and Aperture offers a quick, convenient way of doing this and they are constantly adding features such being added such as brushing in and out adjustments to specific areas.