Ars reviews Aperture 1.1, and concludes: “I have to admit, I was very skeptical that Apple could whip together professional-quality RAW conversion for numerous camera models in a few months. Either they bought some existing technology we don’t know about or there are some seriously overworked software engineers getting some much-needed sleep right about now. But who cares? The plain fact is that Aperture 1.1’s high-quality RAW processing says “we can move quickly in areas where we’ve had little experience” and the discount/refund says “users won’t be expected to beta test at their own expense again.” Ars’s review of Aperture 1.0 was quite negative.
RAM buffer in camera is full of values, some metadata about camera settings are appended.
All RAW data is, is a big array of values and a set of parameters that can be used as a reference for further adjustment and colour-corrected display.
I mean, its only since the 1960s that this kind of data has been manipulated by computers.
Sure, camera manufacturers obfuscate and compress the data in proprietary ways, but its hardly rocket science – license spec from camera manufacturer, implement data extraction routine.
Apeture is just an interface that allows photographers to manipulate and process a bunch of images quickly.
Useful, sure, but some kind of demostration of herculean software engineering prowess? I think not.
Really, wtf?
You don’t seem to understand what a RAW image is. It’s not just a big array of RGB values, it requires substantial processing to turn a RAW into an image you can display on a computer. Why do you think it’s taken years for Capture One, Bibble and Adobe Camera Raw to get good at processing RAW images?
And all of that is ignoring what they’re doing regarding the image processing tools they’re providing which works with the RAW data.
Writing software like this is hard enough that Nikon has stopped trying to keep up and is having nik provide further updates to Nikon Capture (now called Capture NX).
In addition, we should mention that the RAW data is, in fact, “raw data”. The image data has not been processed in any way.
When a JPEG is created, for instance, a suitable white balance is chosen, and the RAW data is converted into a viewable image. This means that the JPEG, in addition to loss of resolution/details. is also fixed to a specific white balance. If we use TIFF instead of JPEG, we lose less* of the details, but we’re still stuck at a predetermined white balance setting.
When the picture has been stored as RAW, however, we can do much more post-processing on the image. Not only can we use a better RAW-JPEG/TIFF conversion algorithm, but we can also adjust the white balance of the picture correctly as we see fit.
In other words, there are a lot of reasons to shoot RAW images, especially for professional photographers, but for most users, the RAW conversion is just another step they’d rather avoid.
*Even though TIFF is a lossless image compression method, data is still lost in the transformation. Often sensors have 12-bit resolution per pixel, while common TIFF and JPEG images have only 8-bit resolution per pixel. (Per color, that is.)
I didnt say RGB values, I know very well what a RAW file is.
But tools like dcraw that support over 200 camera formats are available open source and for free, its hard to see what makes Apeture such a big deal.
Simply supporting the formats is meaningless. The point is that there is no ‘correct’ interpretation of how to convert from RAW sensor data to RGB/sRGB, hence the widely varying results in the resulting images processed by various apps. Dcraw may well support all those cameras, but how good is the resulting output?
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Pretty damn good, better than most manufacturer-supplied tools.
http://www.aim-dtp.net/aim/digicam/dcraw/
has side-by-side comparisons and theres plenty of other resources on the net. A google search for ‘dcraw’ will also be educational, i’m sure.
dcraw is pretty good but you won’t find many professionals seriously using it. Bibble, Adobe Camera Raw and (for Nikon users) Capture are much better. The fact that Canon’s software produces shoddy images is well known and that’s pretty much all that page you linked to shows. Which, by the way, also completely invalidates your original point; if the camera manufacturers have a hard time writing a good quality RAW converter than saying that it’s easy or that Apple should have gotten it right the first time is retarded.
I’m just saying if one guy can write an app to support 200 cameras in 6000 lines of C with no documentation and no access to proprietary specs, I just don’t get what the problem for a team of Apple programmers is, and I dont see why the reviewer is skeptical that Apple could whip together professional quality RAW conversion in a few months.
I don’t know what you are arguing here. The point is that RAW conversion is a solved problem – if anyone wants to know how to do it, they can look at dcraw source, there is no way it should take anyone months to do it, much less a team of Apple programmers when they already had functional RAW conversion built into Core Image before Apeture even shipped.
All I’m trying to say is that I don’t understand the reviewers surprise at the fact Apple could revamp its RAW processing engine – as if there is something complex or difficult about RAW image conversion, when there just isn’t, especially when you have tools like dcraw that provide every detail you could possibly need to interface with cameras and perform RAW conversion.
Also, how are Bibble, Adobe Camera Raw or Nikon capture better? I should point out that Bibble and Adobe Camera Raw use dcraw source code internally, so while these tools provide a gui, they use the dcraw source code to do the conversion work.
You can get directly comparable quality or better as *any* ‘professional’ RAW converter for free using dcraw, but please, feel free to show a significantly higher quality result between dcraw and your tool of choice.
I should point out that Bibble and Adobe Camera Raw use dcraw source code internally, so while these tools provide a gui, they use the dcraw source code to do the conversion work.
Actually, Bibble doesn’t use dcraw for its conversion, afaik. only a very limited part of dcraw.c is used by it.
And Aperture is more than just RAW conversion. It’s a workflow tool.
Although I am pretty disappointed with it, even at the recent 1.1.1. I still prefer to use bibble for my RAw conversion.. Aperture has a lot for it (stacks, versioning, lighttable), but it’s over-designed imo..
I guess Dave Coffin took some time to write such as extensive program as dcraw. If Apple manages to do better in few months considering their first version of Aperture was overpriced and useless, then yes, it is some engineering feat.
Reviewer was sceptical because the first release of Aperture was shit but marketed as non-shit. He didn’t believe they could make it right on the second try. But they did, at least partially. Therefore it can be assumed that some engineers had to work on the problem.
It all quite clear, isn’t it?
Good!!!??? I don´t think so, not the imaages on the page you linked to.
Look at every image and see how distorted every edges are on the dcraw images, way to much unsharp mask.
Those are awful and i would never be happy with those results. And yes, i knw what i am talking about i am using Bibble, RawShooter and Capture One and know what good image quality is when converting my RAW images.
If you take a look at for example this:
http://www.aim-dtp.net/aim/digicam/dcraw/CRW_1992-d.jpg
picture (10 MB) and look at the tree branches in front of the sky, they look terrible.
The edges in every image tend to tear out as hell, so i really don’t think this is a pretty good tool. From reading the article on Ars i think this tool would be the worst in the whole comparision test.
“I also think it’s a safe assumption to say that Aperture was designed as a killer app to sell hardware.”
From page two of the review. Could well be true.
Think, think hard, about the implications of that one.