Aperture gone ... Phase One, are you listening ?
Apple stopping Aperture development is now all over the net, and more will be come in the upcoming days. Out of curiosity, I checked a few articles and the users' comments.
Phase One, are you listening, are you watching what is going on ? Not sure you are interested, but everyone is for some reason talking about Lightroom as *the* alternative, as if it was the only possible one. You need to advertise, now. It is already a shame that so many magazines (at least in Europe) ignore you completely (or mostly completely). You need to build presence - that is, if you are interested. In my case, I would like to see your application and your name much more branded and out there, it deserves it.
Hope I'll see you reacting in some ways. Meanwhile, continue improving Capture One / Pro !
Phase One, are you listening, are you watching what is going on ? Not sure you are interested, but everyone is for some reason talking about Lightroom as *the* alternative, as if it was the only possible one. You need to advertise, now. It is already a shame that so many magazines (at least in Europe) ignore you completely (or mostly completely). You need to build presence - that is, if you are interested. In my case, I would like to see your application and your name much more branded and out there, it deserves it.
Hope I'll see you reacting in some ways. Meanwhile, continue improving Capture One / Pro !
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Just my opinion Jacques: I don't mind that Lightroom is touted as being the product for everyone at all. The Lightroom user forums are full of soccer moms and dentists who own extremely obscure off brand digital cameras screaming for support and tools that in no way add to the value of the product for professional users. The way I look at it, C1Pro is still the professional's choice and a tool used by very savvy prosumers, and Lightroom is the choice of everyone else. I would rather keep the headaches, heartaches and crying in the Lightroom forums and out of here and away from what is already a very powerful and robust product. Will Capture One ever be an "everything to everyone" product like Lightroom is trying to be? Maybe, maybe not. You have to see a value in not trying to jam everything that Photoshop and Capture One does into one package, it would be a total system resource pig. But in the meantime I don't mind selecting my new vacation point and shoot based on C1Pro's compatibility list and having a professional tool that works with professional cameras for my everyday work. 0 -
Presumably Apple have done some analysis and decided that supporting and developing Aperture into the future is not worth their efforts. It does seem, however, that they may have an alternative and all new product in the pipe line. Presumably this is aimed at the iPhone/iPad generation of online users rather than the Pro/Enthusiast market.
Herding existing users towards Adobe products is entirely logical in terms of an ease of transition. Adobe, like it or not, has a substantial presence and influence which would be difficult to challenge in the short term. A year or so is short term.
They may also have some insights into what the future holds for the camera manufacturers - both in terms of sales and potentially new advances in imaging technology - which lead them to conclude that they no longer need to be part of a RAW converter industry nor any kind of DAM developer for local storage concepts when they might expect some changes to online storage technology that almost eliminated local storage requirements in the medium term future. (Speculation - but who knows what they may be working on in that respect?)
Maybe music streaming is seen as the big cash flow opportunity for the next decade and anything that produces less than, say, 10% of music streaming related revenues could be a candidate for pruning.
Who knows? Pure speculation from me.
How are dedicated camera sales progressing in 2014?
Grant0 -
The little that we've seen of the Photos app seems to be more Aperture DNA than iPhoto. Who knows where it will lead ... but if Phase can incorporate some of the missing features that Aperture has in the near future, you may bring more across from going to Lightroom.
I'm an Aperture user, who is here because I'm looking for quality, and Lightroom doesn't suit my brain.0 -
[quote="MidWestTech" wrote:
Just my opinion Jacques: I don't mind that Lightroom is touted as being the product for everyone at all. The Lightroom user forums are full of soccer moms and dentists who own extremely obscure off brand digital cameras screaming for support and tools that in no way add to the value of the product for professional users. The way I look at it, C1Pro is still the professional's choice and a tool used by very savvy prosumers, and Lightroom is the choice of everyone else. I would rather keep the headaches, heartaches and crying in the Lightroom forums and out of here and away from what is already a very powerful and robust product. Will Capture One ever be an "everything to everyone" product like Lightroom is trying to be? Maybe, maybe not. You have to see a value in not trying to jam everything that Photoshop and Capture One does into one package, it would be a total system resource pig. But in the meantime I don't mind selecting my new vacation point and shoot based on C1Pro's compatibility list and having a professional tool that works with professional cameras for my everyday work.
Don't get me wrong MidWestTech, I do not mind C1 being used by less people than Lightroom. I am just being careful as these days, products (and companies) get killed / sold off as soon as the majority of short-term future shareholders decide to change the strategy of the company due to lesser revenue from a specific business entity (C1 in this case). I wish C1 was a bit more visible; having everyone on the Internet talk about Lightroom as the alternative to Aperture is not good press in my opinion.0 -
[quote="MidWestTech" wrote:
The Lightroom user forums are full of soccer moms...
I'm a regular contributor on Adobe's own Lightroom forum (less so than I used to be) and all I can say is, ain't that the truth? Add to that what you folk in the US call MWACs, and you've got pretty good idea of the Lr forum catchment.
They're clueless. The general standard of knowledge of posters on there - of the application and of photography generally - is infuriatingly low, and it makes providing help both frustrating and unproductive.
Yet there's no question that - despite all the noise about Creative Cloud being a "terrible" idea - people of all stripes continue to flock to Lr in droves. Including actual pros, it must be said: Capture One isn't the only game in town there, although it seems to have established a pretty good niche in studios.
But that's not the beginning and end of pro work, and Lr is very popular with the pro wildlife and sport photographers I know.
Personally I don't think the Aperture situation will significantly change the landscape for Phase One - As Grant points out, Apple has already confirmed that its migration strategy for Aperture users includes Lightroom, and Adobe is already on record as being "committed to helping" Aperture users make the move.
For what it's worth I reckon most people in this boat will make the move to Lr.
Know why?
The low cost of entry, and the likely ease of the move.
Whether you like Lr or not, it's the market leader for good reason: there's nothing else more feature-rich, effective or efficient out there, and certainly not at anything like the price. Once Apple and Adobe sort out a migration mechanism, it's going to be a closed ecosystem, most like...
All Phase One can do to get a slice of this pie is drastically to cut the price of Capture One Pro (Express isn't in this game) - and I sincerely doubt they'll do that.
And they'll piss off a lot of current Pro users if they do...screaming for support and tools that in no way add to the value of the product
To be fair, plenty of that on here too...
🙄0 -
"Once Apple and Adobe sort out a migration mechanism"
Can you point to where this came from? Apple want people moving to Photos for OSX, not Lightroom.0 -
Phase One, are you listening, are you watching what is going on ?
I think Phase one is listening to what was happening, as DxO. I do not think much at random, and these two companies have maintained their promotion far beyond the original dates. Finding themselves in a favorable position at the time of the announcement of Apple. 😉0 -
[quote="meanwhile" wrote:
"Once Apple and Adobe sort out a migration mechanism"
Can you point to where this came from? Apple want people moving to Photos for OSX, not Lightroom.
Well it seems that there are reasons to believe that original reports of an Apple/Adobe effort to help people migrate to LR may have been, at best, incorrect. I wonder how the rumour started?
It also seems a little premature to be worried about even having to change much. Presumably things will continue much as they are for some months. Apple's new software will be launched and will take a year or two to settle in during which time people can decide whether they wish to move to it at some point or head off elsewhere. Trying to guess where the market will be that far ahead is probably difficult for the insiders let alone the user based distant from the board rooms.
Maybe Apple just feel that they need to take the opportunity of what seems to be a major revision of old (in computing terms) products to update the branding and expect life to continue much as before through that process and beyond.
Of course I could see Adobe using the news to instigate a marketing policy to try to tempt existing Aperture users towards Adobe products anyway. It would be their call about how much time and development cash to deploy for such a purpose.
Elsewhere I have seen some figures produced from a running survey of users of an open source RAW converter application that seeks to understand which primary Operating System each respondee uses.
At very nearly 11,000 responses one might feel the numbers are probably useful pointers to the mix of real users. If we accept that then we can perhaps extrapolate the results to commercial use too, though perhaps with some adjustment figures to take into account those who are happier using paid for software than Open Source.
Windows 55%
Mac 23%
Linux 22%
Obviously if you are looking at the commercial market you need to take out Linux. In theory that leaves with about a 2:1 split in favour of Windows. Whether that is actually likely in reality is another matter. I suspect another adjustment factor may be required that would revise the result to 1:1 as a minimum for serious and committed photo enthusiasts and professionals who pay for licences rather than relying almost entirely in Open Source. I don't mean that as a negative comment; rather that it is likely that the demographic for heavy users in Professional Photographic environments is likely to have a different mix of hardware choices compared to the representation in the survey results I have mentioned.
Where Aperture and its replacement fit into the numbers I don't know. However it seems certain that it would be a no more than a part of the Apple 50% (Estimated) and mostly subject to how many Mac users select Abobe and other products for the majority of their processing work.
Does anyone know of any research that makes such an analysis?
Grant0 -
[quote="meanwhile" wrote:
Can you point to where this came from?
Various references such as the one on this page, this one quoting Apple Insider (is that a reliable source? No idea, but I've seen similar elsewhere):Update: According to Apple Insider, “Apple also said it is working with Adobe to help users transition to its Lightroom app for Mac.†As pointed out to us by Google+ commenter David Fraser, this solidifies two notions. First, this means that in due time there’s a very good chance that an Aperture-to-Lightroom plugin/app/script will come to life. Second, this also means Apple does not at all consider their Photos app to be any sort of professional replacement.
I will say though, that I'm not finding as many such references as I was yesterday, so maybe there's been a change of heart, or perhaps earlier posts have been amended: I do recall something from Adobe outlining their intention to make the migration seamless - the clear implication of that article was that Adobe and Apple were talking about how best to achieve this.
This article however, is one explicitly referencing an Apple source [pun intended] as confirming that:its developers are "working with Adobe to work on a transitionary workflow for users moving to Lightroom"
As an aside, I really don't see that Apple sees Photos as the migration path, based simply on how they themselves describe it.
Most "serious" photographers will have little or no time for the idea of having all their images on iCloud (Photos looks as much like a glorified front end to a cloud storage solution as anything, and few people want or need their several tb's worth of images in The Cloud); and everything I've read and seen about Photos suggests it's a casual user/comparatively limited functionality option, not an Aperture replacement...0 -
With the current 50% off Capture One Pro sale, at least the price difference is narrowed.
And I find the Capture One Pro workflow to be more Aperture-like than Lightroom-like.
The C1 catalog functions allow for the creating of projects, folders, alums and smart albums - much like Aperture. You can customize the tools on the various tool panes - again, much like Aperture.
Aperture is still more mature and smooth. There are customizations there that C1 can't match, such as custom metadata groups, custom metadata tags, and a hierarchal keyword structure.
C1 is is very light on export abilities to other programs (I haven't figured out how to open with Photoshop, for example) and other sites (such as Facebook, 500px, Pixoto, etc.).
But if I have to choose between Lightroom, Capture One Pro, After Shot Pro and DxO Optics Pro, C1 looks like then best option.0 -
[quote="BobRockefeller" wrote:
With the current 50% off Capture One Pro sale, at least the price difference is narrowed.
(I haven't figured out how to open with Photoshop, for example)
Now I have. It was my attempt to open with Photoshop CC 2014 that was the problem. Doing the same, but with Photoshop CC, works fine. I guess we'll need an update from PhaseOne to handle that case.0 -
Well, I'm one of the Aperture refugees being discussed. I've been using Aperture almost exclusively for about 8 years, and with Apple's recent announcement Friday I was thrown into a flurry of research on alternatives and ended up here, taking advantage of the discount on Capture One Pro. DAM was what drew me to Aperture originally (when they were the only one really doing it), and the feature set has always been just-good-enough for me. The last few years its stagnancy has been frustrating, but I'm so deeply embedded in Aperture's DAM that it was never worth the effort to move to anything else. So even though Aperture isn't going to suddenly stop working, I didn't want to waste any further time putting more work into a library that I know is going to obsolete.
Since Lightroom and Capture One seemed to be the only pro-level integrated DAM solutions out there, I tried the demos of both and was blown away by C1's capabilities and elegance. It makes me wish I'd switched earlier. Everything about it is focused on giving photographers who know what they want and understand digital imaging the tools to get there as easily as possible with the highest quality. Lightroom by comparison seems designed to maximize codebase sharing with Photoshop for Adobe and feels patched-together, albeit very capable and "well supported" plug-in wise. I'm hopeful that there will be a segment of people like me who won't just default over to Lightroom.
I think the best thing Phase One could do would be to smooth the library transition for these users as much as possible. Of course adjustments will never transition over, but I wonder if there's some method of importing into C1 the organizational structure a user has built up in Aperture, as well as logically pulling the RAW files into them along with frozen-adjustment JPEG/TIFF files that are associated with their RAW originals. Doing that manually is possible of course, with some exports-with-sidecar files. But with almost 500 projects and about 13000 photos, that is not something I'm looking forward to at all. Could some combination of instructions for Aperture plus a clever import script mitigate this at least in part?0 -
I wonder how scriptable (via AppleScript) C1 Pro is? Maybe something could be built with AppleScript. I may dabble a bit and see what I see. 0 -
[quote="BobRockefeller" wrote:
I wonder how scriptable (via AppleScript) C1 Pro is? Maybe something could be built with AppleScript. I may dabble a bit and see what I see.
Yeah, that's an excellent idea for the C1 side. On the Aperture side, it does look like you can export files into a project-based folder structure, but I need to play with how far that really goes and if you can, say, export the RAW originals and JPEGs into the same structure side-by-side so that they could (in theory) be grouped together when imported into C1.0 -
A brief look around with Script Editor and Automator suggests the Capture One Pro 7 has very few scriptable commands. I'm thinking there are not enough to make the import work.
Does anyone with more C1 and ApplesScript experience know otherwise?0 -
I played around with Aperture export a bit. Since C1 is going to be importing everything into its own date-driven file structure, there doesn't seem to be a good reason to get Aperture to export into a date-driven structure. So I tried the "project" option on "export originals", and it does indeed create a folder for each project. And if you "export versions" to the same location with the same options, it does indeed put the jpegs alongside the raws in the same folder structure (rather than creating a parallel folder structure or something). So that's good.
But of course you lose any other non-project organization (folders, albums) you had. And unfortunately if Aperture runs into multiple projects of the same name (in different folders obviously), it just puts everything in one folder of that name. So if you ran an export on an Aperture folder that looks like this:
2014 (folder)
Event 1 (folder)
Canon images (project)
Fuji images (project)
Event 2 folder
Canon images (project)
Fuji images (project)
You could get an export folder structure that just looks like this:
Canon images
Fuji images
So if you really wanted to automate this like crazy (and not force the user to do a bunch of separate exports), you'd need some Applescript magic in Aperture to walk through the folder structure, duplicating it as it goes. That's unless there's some magic way of getting Aperture to create a file-system version of its internal organization somehow that I'm missing.
But anyway, worst case, it wouldn't be *horribly* difficult to spent the time on a bunch of exports into various folders to try to represent the Aperture organization. But there's still the matter of getting C1 to "translate" that into its own organization scheme on import...
In short, this doesn't seem to be going anywhere unless PhaseOne wanted to spend some time on a tool to make life easy for Aperture switchers...0 -
Maybe Phase One should consider a modular approach. CAPTURE - COMPOSITE - PRINT. You buy only the modules that you need, or buy all three at discount. This could be a viable Photoshop alternative. Also, consider crowdfunding with a significant discount for early investors. 0 -
[quote="NN635385092093700924UL" wrote:
Maybe Phase One should consider a modular approach. CAPTURE - COMPOSITE - PRINT. You buy only the modules that you need, or buy all three at discount. This could be a viable Photoshop alternative. Also, consider crowdfunding with a significant discount for early investors.
Noooooo!
That would end up with modal modules like Lightroom has. C1 is much more Aperture-like to me. I'd rather see them flesh out some of the deeper library features such as hierarchal keywording, configurable metadata display and custom metadata tags.0 -
[quote="ymatto" wrote:
I played around with Aperture export a bit. Since C1 is going to be importing everything into its own date-driven file structure, there doesn't seem to be a good reason to get Aperture to export into a date-driven structure. So I tried the "project" option on "export originals", and it does indeed create a folder for each project. And if you "export versions" to the same location with the same options, it does indeed put the jpegs alongside the raws in the same folder structure (rather than creating a parallel folder structure or something). So that's good.
But of course you lose any other non-project organization (folders, albums) you had. And unfortunately if Aperture runs into multiple projects of the same name (in different folders obviously), it just puts everything in one folder of that name. So if you ran an export on an Aperture folder that looks like this:
2014 (folder)
Event 1 (folder)
Canon images (project)
Fuji images (project)
Event 2 folder
Canon images (project)
Fuji images (project)
You could get an export folder structure that just looks like this:
Canon images
Fuji images
So if you really wanted to automate this like crazy (and not force the user to do a bunch of separate exports), you'd need some Applescript magic in Aperture to walk through the folder structure, duplicating it as it goes. That's unless there's some magic way of getting Aperture to create a file-system version of its internal organization somehow that I'm missing.
But anyway, worst case, it wouldn't be *horribly* difficult to spent the time on a bunch of exports into various folders to try to represent the Aperture organization. But there's still the matter of getting C1 to "translate" that into its own organization scheme on import...
In short, this doesn't seem to be going anywhere unless PhaseOne wanted to spend some time on a tool to make life easy for Aperture switchers...
I'm in the same boat, a long time aperture user that did not want to move to lightroom and found CapureOne to be the best solution for me. Just out of curiosity I looked at the contents of my Aperture library (it's just a directory) and discovered that the file structure organizes the pictures by date so that won't help with converting over the folder/project organization. I've done some Aperture applescript programming in the past (the documentation is horrendous) so I'll look to see if I can get Aperture to export into a Folder/Project hierarchy. I'll let everyone know if I make any progress.0 -
[quote="BobRockefeller" wrote:
[quote="NN635385092093700924UL" wrote:
Maybe Phase One should consider a modular approach. CAPTURE - COMPOSITE - PRINT. You buy only the modules that you need, or buy all three at discount. This could be a viable Photoshop alternative. Also, consider crowdfunding with a significant discount for early investors.
Noooooo!
That would end up with modal modules like Lightroom has. C1 is much more Aperture-like to me. I'd rather see them flesh out some of the deeper library features such as hierarchal keywording, configurable metadata display and custom metadata tags.
Yeah, I agree. C1's current base/pro split makes a lot of sense and modularizing it would be a change in philosophy from the very nice integrated approach C1 has right now.0 -
[quote="tazthecat" wrote:
I'm in the same boat, a long time aperture user that did not want to move to lightroom and found CapureOne to be the best solution for me. Just out of curiosity I looked at the contents of my Aperture library (it's just a directory) and discovered that the file structure organizes the pictures by date so that won't help with converting over the folder/project organization. I've done some Aperture applescript programming in the past (the documentation is horrendous) so I'll look to see if I can get Aperture to export into a Folder/Project hierarchy. I'll let everyone know if I make any progress.
Cool!0 -
Aperture can export originals using the project name to create folders, it can also create an xml sidecar file which will contain ratings and keywords. CO can then import that structure and will read the sidecar files too. 0 -
OK, day one with re-acquainting myself with applescript (argh). I wish Apple would document applescript in a language that humans can understand. I think I have things working so I can traverse the Folder/Project/Album hierarchy and I'm working on creating the file structure to match the hierarchy (I didn't realize how undisciplined I was in my organizational structure in Aperture) After I get that working I will work on exporting actual image masters. I'm not sure how this is going to work yet because I'm unsure whether it will export a master image for each version (with the name of the image version) or whether it will only export the original master file (with the name of the original master file). I can check to see if a file already exists and not re-export it if that is the case but if we have master files with the name of the version then I'm not sure what to do.
Also the way I'm approaching it now, there will be no differentiating the type of "container" (e.g. folder/project/album) in the file hierarchy. Would this be OK or would people prefer separation in the file structure between folders, project, and albums? Luckily every object in Aperture includes all the parent objects so unwinding the hierarchy for each image is fairly straightforward.
Sorry for all the technical details for those that don't care but I wanted to let those that do know how I am progressing.0 -
Thanks for blazing the trail on this!
Since there's a good match between Aperture containers and C1 containers, would it be possible to take advantage of that with the export?
Project = Project
Folder = Group
Album = Album0 -
I hope Phase One will listen … 😉
Don't make the mistake to be substitute for aperture. Don't try to be compare or compete with Lr.
Go back to your roots and try to be the best raw-converter available. Be reliable, comfortable, fast and stable, remember there have been a lot of problems in the last years. Try to be the good pro-tool you have been and not a mix of functions for hobbyist, flower-photographers and holiday-shooters.0 -
Great work, taz!
I wonder if we shouldn't move this discussion over to a new thread? I'll start one and post my reply to your post over there.0 -
[quote="BobRockefeller" wrote:
Thanks for blazing the trail on this!
Since there's a good match between Aperture containers and C1 containers, would it be possible to take advantage of that with the export?
Project = Project
Folder = Group
Album = Album
Yes. It is possible to determine the type of container (folder/project/group) and do something differently based on what type it is. In my case (I'm very bad at organization) I have a mixed bag of hierarchies (projects in folders, projects in projects, and albums scattered randomly about the structure) so for my case just dumping it into a single file structure makes sense for me and I can reorganize once I get everything into C1. For people with a more organized structure it might make sense to separate the file structure in to logical segments. You still need to live with the fact that you are importing a file structure not a database so it will still require the manual process of putting the collections of images into the desired C1 container type. At least all the images will be separated into directories that match the original Aperture structure.
It is also possible (at least according to the documentation) to save a sidecar xml file when exporting. I do not have enough experience with C1 to know if that would be useful or not and what information is contained in the xml file.
I hope this makes sense…0
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