When Aperture 1.0 was released, it was the RAW workflow tool I had always wanted and it quickly became my mainline workflow tool. Sure, it was slower than it should have been and it had a few warts. But it quickly progressed from 1.0 to 1.5 and each iteration brought improvements. But, it remained hamstrung in the speed department. When Lightroom 1.0 shipped, I test drove it and then ended up switching to using it most of the time because it let me get my job done so much faster. It shaved hours off of a work day during my conference shooting.

Now, in early 2008, here's Aperture 2.0. As soon as it was released, I pulled it down and kicked the tires enough to tell that the Aperture team had indeed listened to what we needed and took it to heart. In order to see how well they had done for my particular needs, however, I had to subject it to the acid test. I had to actually use it as a primary workflow tool. Over the last two weeks, I've been doing just that. I've used it for processing my photographs from both the ETech 2008 and eComm2008 conferences.

To be sure, I started off carefully. The first day of ETech was a tutorial day. Tutorial days are typically slower paced days and this allowed me exercise things a bit before getting into faster paced main days of the conference. If things had gone badly, I would have turned around and fallen back to Lightroom in a heartbeat. But, the new Preview Mode did the trick. I was able to zip and zoom through my photographs quickly enough to make it through the day as fast as ever. With a bit of confidence, I proceeded into the main three days of ETech and Aperture kept up just fine. Occasionally, I would see some performance lags here and there, but these weren't regular and I've seen bumps in performance with Lightroom in the past as well when working with large sets of images.

The trick to using Aperture 2.0 at full speed is to leave it alone while it imports photos and builds previews. Then, use Preview mode as much as possible while ranking and keyworking photos. For the final bit of ranking, you can pop in and out of Preview mode to closely examine differences in images. Then, once you're down to your selects, processing goes smoothly enough.

Speaking of processing, one of the places where Lightroom excelled over Aperture 1.0 was in its Develop module. In my own experience, I found that I could finish photographs faster in Lightroom than in Aperture 1.0. By finish, I mean perform the standard set of adjustments that almost every photograph I make goes through: levels, contrast, definition, sharpness, and the like. Because Lightroom's Develop module is so good, I was curious to see how things would go in Aperture 2.0. The answer is that they went just fine. I didn't see any impact on my processing speed using Aperture 2.0. 

Overall, I still think that some of Lightroom's Develop module tools are more intuitive, and that the Lightroom histogram and Tone Curve tools are brilliantly easy to use, but I had no difficulty in making photos pop quickly in Aperture 2.0, in roughly the same amount of time. You can see the results for yourself in my ETech 2008 Flickr set. I think the images came out quite well, indeed. And, any failures in the images are mine and not the fault of the tool I was using to process them. I'm especially happy with the photo of John McCarthy to the right, which you should check out at large resolution.

After shooting ETech, I went on to shoot eComm. Even though eComm was a smaller conference, it was actually a more demanding event to shoot. This is because it was a fast-paced single-track event with five days of content crammed into three. There were lots of 15 minute sessions which meant that the flow of speakers was non-stop resulting in a very intense pace of photography. As well, the lighting levels at eComm were, ahem, low. I shot the entire event at ISO 3200 which narrows the exposure latitude available and makes things trickier to process. Aperture 2.0 kept up and let me get the job done. A good example image from the eComm set is this photograph of Sheldon Renan.

It was at eComm where Aperture 2.0's library and workflow tools, including it's iLife integration, really shone. In fact, I really enjoyed using Aperture's organization tools again. And, the iLife integration let me do something really neat. I set up an AppleTV in the venue to display processed photographs to attendees. Because Aperture integrates with iTunes which then integrates with the AppleTV, I was able to keep a fairly up-to-date photo show running in the conference hallway without a fuss and without impacting my workflow at all. And, based on the feedback I received, the conference attendees really enjoyed seeing the photos on a big 50" plasma display. You can bet I'll be looking into doing this more in the future.

So, after shooting almost 6000 images at ETech and almost 5000 at eComm—totalling a whopping 136GB of data—what's the verdict? The answer is that Aperture stood up to the test. It did the job. And it did it well. Did it do everything perfectly? No. But then again, Lightroom doesn't do everything perfectly either. These tools are still evolving and maturing. 

In the process of using Aperture so intensely over the last few weeks, I've found quite a few things that go beyond my list of Aperture 2.0 Quick Impressions I posted last month. I'll be writing these up over the next few days and weeks.

Related Posts:

• Aperture 2.0 vs. Lightroom 1.3 at High ISO
• Aperture 2.0 Quick Impressions
• Aperture 2.0: They Listened
• Extreme Aperture 2 Shadow Recovery

Also in posts elsewhere on the web: 

• Fraser Speirs, author of Flickr Export for both Aperture and iPhoto, has posted his thoughts on using Aperture 2. 
• Greyscale Gorilla (aka Nick Campbell) has taken the jump and is working with Aperture 2 despite it's lack of a Cuves tool. He follows that post up with one comparing Lightroom vs. Aperture (vs. Bridge).