Apple releases Photoshop killer: Aperture. Where's GIMP?

Rich wrote:
[snip]
Pfft! It's a PS killer like Microsoft's "Acrylic" was.
Laugh, laugh, laugh.

Today? True. In five years time? It could be developed to be a better
raw processor and photo-editor than Photoshop, if Apple choose.

I've been thinking about what Apple could achieve using their approach
of non-destructive adjustments to raw files. I've come to the
conclusion that they could actually develop Aperture into a
comprehensive photo-editing tool that would be very serious competition
to ALL of Bridge + ACR + Photoshop. In much less time than it took to
develop Photoshop to its current state.

Here are two "paradigms" for holding photo-edits. One is to hold
"instructions", the other is to hold "results".

Photoshop started life holding "results". It held a digital image as a
rectilinear array of pixels. As you edited, it changed those pixels.
You saved the results of the editing as changed pixels. Over the years,
it added the ability also to hold "instructions". An adjustment layer
is a set of instructions for changing an image. It doesn't actually
change the pixels directly. (They get changed temporarily when you
print or display on a screen, or permanently when you flatten the
layers). So Photoshop has become a hybrid, but sometimes a bit uneasy.

ACR, Aperture, and I believe LightZone, don't save the results. They
save the instructions. This is potentially very powerful. The downside
is that it needs a lot of processing power, because, to use the results
of lots of editing, it has to apply all of the instructions so far,
instead of the just loading up the changed pixels from previous
editing. That processing power is becoming available, and is what
Aperture exploits.

Examples of the differences between these two paradigms:

To crop in Photoshop, it basically discards the unwanted pixels, and
the result is the rest of the pixels. To crop in ACR, it creates simple
XMP metadata describing the coordinates of the corners of the crop, and
leaves the image data unchanged.

To do red-eye in Photoshop, it changes the values of the pixels
concerned in the image array. If ACR did red-eye, (which Nikon Capture
and Aperture do, so I expect ACR will in future), it just needs to hold
about 4 numbers: the x & y coordinates, and the pupil size and
darkening amount, in XMP.

In principle, just about ANY editing should be possible using the
"instructions" paradigm. After all, you could record everything you did
with Photoshop, then instead of saving the "results" (as pixels), save
the record of the instructions. These could be applied later to the
original image. So if the instruction-metadata also holds the order of
editing operations, it can in principle to do anything Photoshop can
do. But it would use one single model, not Photoshop's hybrid approach.
Potentially, much simpler.

Once it is the instructions that are saved, there are some super
possibilities. Think about the way that lots of HTML web pages can all
use a single CSS file as their style sheet. Change that CSS, and all of
those pages change their rendition without changing their data. Imagine
lots of image all refering to a single instance (not multiple copies)
of metadata. Edit one of those images, that metadata changes, and all
of the images change simultaneously. This is the sort of thing that is
becoming necessary when handling 100s of raw images at a time. With
ACR, and probably with Aperture at the moment, you have to apply the
change to every image, perhaps by some sort of copying operation. But,
in future, by sharing metadata, changing one bit of data would change
them all. All the computer science concepts of OO, type hierarchies,
and inheritance, could be used to make the workflow easier.

It is clear from Apple forums that Aperture is just at version 1, and
they are already working on later versions. I hope Adobe are working on
the enhancements to Bridge+ACR to achieve similar capability.

--
Barry Pearson
http://www.barry.pearson.name/photography/
http://www.birdsandanimals.info/

In article .com,
"Barry Pearson" wrote:

Rich wrote:
[snip]
Pfft! It's a PS killer like Microsoft's "Acrylic" was.
Laugh, laugh, laugh.

Today? True. In five years time? It could be developed to be a better
raw processor and photo-editor than Photoshop, if Apple choose.

I've been thinking about what Apple could achieve using their approach
of non-destructive adjustments to raw files. I've come to the
conclusion that they could actually develop Aperture into a
comprehensive photo-editing tool that would be very serious competition
to ALL of Bridge + ACR + Photoshop. In much less time than it took to
develop Photoshop to its current state.

Here are two "paradigms" for holding photo-edits. One is to hold
"instructions", the other is to hold "results".

Photoshop started life holding "results". It held a digital image as a
rectilinear array of pixels. As you edited, it changed those pixels.
You saved the results of the editing as changed pixels. Over the years,
it added the ability also to hold "instructions". An adjustment layer
is a set of instructions for changing an image. It doesn't actually
change the pixels directly. (They get changed temporarily when you
print or display on a screen, or permanently when you flatten the
layers). So Photoshop has become a hybrid, but sometimes a bit uneasy.

ACR, Aperture, and I believe LightZone, don't save the results. They
save the instructions. This is potentially very powerful. The downside
is that it needs a lot of processing power, because, to use the results
of lots of editing, it has to apply all of the instructions so far,
instead of the just loading up the changed pixels from previous
editing. That processing power is becoming available, and is what
Aperture exploits.

What *really* makes Aperture work is Core Image, which can offload most
graphics processing to the 3D hardware on the video card. While
processor performance has, to some extent, stagnated in the last couple
of years, GPU performance is still scaling up very fast. Today's cards
can work with 16-bit/channel data, and they're insanely fast.

[snip]

It is clear from Apple forums that Aperture is just at version 1, and
they are already working on later versions. I hope Adobe are working on
the enhancements to Bridge+ACR to achieve similar capability.

Adobe is going to be severely limited by their apparent unwillingness to
exploit platform-specific technologies like Core Image.

--
"It's in our country's interests to find those who would do harm to us and get
them out of harm's way."
-- George W. Bush in Washington, D.C., April 28, 2005

On Wed, 19 Oct 2005 19:03:11 -0700, Randall Ainsworth
wrote:

|In article ,
wrote:
|
| Karen Hill wrote:
|
| Apple is just amazing.
|
| Appil Stinks
|
| Appil are only purchased by pretentious retards (pretards)
| who don't know what a computer is and pay over the odds for it.
|
| Oh yes and they also can't turn off the DRM when viewing movies.
| They those stupid appil payee retards have to watch all the stinkin adverts
| for hours on end before they get to watch the movie.
| So much for a pretard way of life and happiness.
|
|OK, let mom have her e-machine back.

check the headers... if it is an emachine, it's an emachine running linux
User-Agent: KNode/0.7.2

Isn't Aperture in pre-sell only mode right now. How can you compare
what you can't use? Or, am I confused?

http://www.crcoupons.com/apple/