Aperture is incredibly slick. It tears through 6MB D100 RAWs like buttah.

I installed it on one of the lower spec machines: first generation dual G5 with an ATI 9800 Pro. Right off the bat I had some bad mojo: The install went fine but Aperture crashed half way through importing my iPhoto library. A corrupt image it couldn’t handle (from my treo) was the culprit. Removed the rogue image and the library imported fine. It scared me that Aperture could be typical version one Apple software. Half baked and buggy.

Not the case at all. Aperture is rock solid. Wicked fast with RAW images. It’s the most intuitive and well thought out pro app I’ve used (I’ve never thought Final Cut was all that intuitive). I really hope this UI raises the bar for all apps to come.

After a full night of playing around with it I built a book. Photobook construction is 100 times better than iPhoto. Pages can be redesigned. A la Keynote, page items try to snap to grid or align with other objects. This thing is going to radically change the event/wedding photography world.

Some first night observations:

• In all my years of Photoshop, Quark, Illustrator, InDesign… this is the first app that truly needs dual displays. A 30inch Cinema display just isn’t enough

• Unlike iPhoto, images are not stored within a directory hierarchy as individual files. They’re stored within a package within a package. To the end user you see one massive file. Corruption to that file would essentially be devastating. Loss of all images and data. (note: the thought here is that Aperture is actually a database. You can’t see the file structure of an Oracle DB, and you can’t see the structure of Aperture. It’s setup like this to manage the multiple image revisions… Take iView Multimedia for example. Removing an image from the catalog path and iView has lost the picture. Aperture manages the original, meta data and multiple image alterations. Changes and meta would be lost if an image ever went missing. For those that must find the original files… control click the Library file and “Show package contents”. You need to do this a second time get to the files within the Library package.)

• That being the case, Library files can be backed up to “Vaults.” However Vaults cannot be a network volume. So much for backing up to my secure RAID or to an off site location. To securely safeguard your image library Aperature needs Vaults saved on portable firewire hard-drives that you take off-site. However current portable external hard-drives can’t match the storage of my Terabyte RAID.

• I’ve loaded 200 images into Aperture and my Library (and Vault) is 1.2 GB. I have over 20,000 digital photos going back to 1998. I shudder to think how large that library is going to get… and the Vault isn’t going to fit on a portable Firewire drive.

• Meta tagging your images is smooth and slick. It’s just going to take me MONTHS to try and tag the attributes of all of my images. It’s a daunting task, but the rewards when it’s done are well worth the menial data entry monkey job.

• Despite all the the bitching that white balance is based on 18% grey cards— I haven’t seen a white balance problem

• I can’t explain this one… but I swear my pictures look better. I think the thumbnails and images are more saturated and sharper than iView, Photoshop or Nikon Capture produce. I’ll need to do some testing on this.

• Two progress bars popped up at different times with all of their dialog text in an Asian character set. I have yet to be able to reproduce this. I’m thinking this app was not made in Cupertino.