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About two years ago I purchased a Canon EOS Rebel XTi in anticipation of the arrival of our new baby girl. Until that time, I had been using Google’s Picasa (then at version 2) along with the Canon subcompact du jour. I was pretty happy with the usefulness of this combination. Picasa is simple, extremely fast and doesn’t obfuscate the underlying photos in any sort of database or binary file.

Around the same time, I had switched to a Mac for my primary home computer. I didn’t care for iPhoto *at all* and there was no OS X version of Picasa (there now is, and I have yet to try it). I started looking around for alternatives and came across the professional digital photography workflow applications like Apple Aperture and Adobe Lightroom. These applications combine rich cataloguing and metadata features with semi-advanced image manipulation capabilities. Both offer free trials so I grabbed a copy of Aperture and gave it a whirl.

Aperture’s code is designed to use the GPU to do much of its work. This is great when you have a lot of GPU at your disposal. On a Mac mini, it’s a world of pain. Apart from the slow editing, I was dismayed at how sluggish it felt overall compared to Picasa. My mini is a Core Duo 1.66 with 2G of RAM and most of OS X is quite snappy. To Apple’s credit, they do not recommend using Pro apps on machines without proper discrete video adapters. Be that as it may, I pushed forward and wound up purchasing Aperture, never having tried Lightroom.

I’d never gotten very familiar with Photoshop and how to do proper digital photography post-processing. When I acquired Aperture, I was more or less starting with carte blanche. I learned the basic import-and-review workflow first. I didn’t touch most of the adjustments beyond the basic automatic correction. Over time, though, I started adding tools to my repertoire. First white balance. Then Highlights/Shadows. Then Exposure. Then some of the color adjustments like Vibrancy. I still have a lot to learn but I find that whereas I used to stay displeased with a mediocre shot, I now have the ability to turn all but the worst ones into pleasing results.

Last month I was vacationing in Florida. We took a 5-night cruise and spent several extra days afterward with family. I had around 500 or so RAW images I needed to go through, post to the web and send to friends. I’d left my Mac at home (it’s small but it’s still a desktop) so all I had was my work laptop running Fedora Linux. Google ships a version of Picasa for Linux so I figured I’d give my old friend a try.

I brought in the RAW shots and started to go through them. Picasa is definitely FAST — a breath of fresh air when you’re used to Aperture on sub-par hardware. But as I began to work on individual images, I realized how severely limited Picasa is. Perhaps it’s the RAW converter, perhaps it’s the tools, but I could not get images I was happy with. Picasa’s Fill Light is weak in comparison to proper level and exposure adjustments. The white balance is decent but the highlight/shadow tools work the opposite of how Aperture’s do. In Aperture, the Shadows slider starts at 0 and as you increase it, the shadows brighten up. Very useful for those situations that needed a fill flash. Picasa’s go the opposite direction!

All this is to say that despite the slowness, I am 100% pleased with Aperture. I’ll be ordering a new MacBook Pro soon so hopefully slow photo editing will be a thing of the past for me.