Author: Matt

Well, after all my problems with Aperture’s book printing, Apple has now announced that Aperture is being end-of-lifed. This brings with it conflicting emotions.

Aperture was developed in a time when the general Mac OS was somewhat more primitive than it is now. The capabilities demonstrated in the WWDC 2014 videos show that quite a lot of Aperture’s abilities have been migrated into the OS as a whole, and Aperture is to be replaced with a (lighter weight) iCloud-focussed Photos app. One of the themes of WWDC has been that applications are now highly plugin-able. One of Aperture’s great weaknesses was that third party filters and effects weren’t non-destructive. So if you wanted to apply a border to a photo, it had to be flattened into a TIFF file (an extra 100+mb for a whole image vs an insignificant addition of metadata to the original RAW file), and the border applied to it – negating the purpose of shooting in RAW.

The non-destructive plugin-oriented paradigm Apple unveiled at WWDC leaves me hopeful that even if Photos is a stripped down product from Apple, whatever is lost will be able to be replaced by third party plugins, which won’t require this stupid flatten-to-tiff workflow we have currently.

My biggest fear, is that the manual management facility – the ability to arbitrarily arrange projects with folders, subfolders etc will be lost. It’s a feature Aperture has, but which iPhoto does not, even when they share the same library. Tethering and fine-grained output options could potentially be replaced by third party plugins, but the representation of the library itself – the core functionality of the app is different between Apple’s two current photography apps, I would be surprised if that could be altered.

Right now, Aperture is a little under $90. If Photos is free, and the abilities of Aperture today can be aded as plugins for less than that, it could end up being a net win. If not, there’s app packages from Corel, DXO, and even Adobe if you’re a masochist.

After yesterday’s post on problems with a photobook produced and printed through Apple’s Aperture software, I thought I’d conduct a more thorough test. The conditions were setting up the same image as I’d used in Aperture, in Adobe InDesign, and Apple’s pages. The image was set up at the same physical size on the page, and then the page was output using various quality settings.

As can be seen, the basic problem is that Aperture is doing something in the PDF which puts white fringing on the black lines, which destroys them optically. In places in the book, the white fringing is more prominent than the black lines.

• Aperture
  • The Print Proof when ordering a book.
• InDesign CS5 Export to PDF
  • High Quality Print
  • Blurb print on demand books plugin quality
  • Smallest File Size
• Pages Export to PDF
  • Good
  • Better
  • Best

Each pdf was then opened in Preview, the same area was zoomed to the same size on screen, and a screenshot of the window taken. Images were then opened in Photoshop CS5 and Saved for Web at 100% size with jpeg compression set to 100 / Maximum.

I just received my first attempt at printing a fine art book of The Metaning with Apple’s Aperture printing service. There were major problems which make Aperture a no-go for this project.

This is the artwork for the cover spread, taken directly from the pdf proof Aperture generates prior to ordering the book. As you can see, the front cover on the right, and back cover on the left, each have design elements which align to centre, and have equidistant left and right gutters.

Here is what the actual printed product looks like. What has happened, as far as I can tell, is that the artwork was blown up in size, either to provide a bleed, or to accommodate the thickness of the spine. They’ve then centred the artwork to the front cover, which has meant all the horizontal growth pushes around to the back.

The other big problem is the compression used for the pdf files that get sent up to Apple’s print service. While it looks OK for photographs, when you have linework – high contrast changes from light to dark, the compression causes white fringing to occur. In this example, the image in the Aperture book maker is compared to its PDF output at the same size. As you can see, all of the lines have effectively lost their strength because they have their optical opposite right next to them.

Update: Further investigation of the problem shows a comparison of the PDF compression Aperture is using, as compared to InDesign, and Apple’s Pages app.