OK, so people (other than me) have had a chance to get a taste of Aperture - and the reviews are coming in.

Here's a selection of them:

Aperture 1.0: from the venerable and respected Ars Technica.

Paul over at ILikeCameras points to the Ars review (above) and summarises:

"the main faults are poor quality in the RAW processing algorithms, missing filters such as curves and limitations in the filters that are included.

The good bits are; the interface, image organisation, stacks, good quality multi-channel B&W and the live-edit system (though with a few filters it slows down somewhat.)

The bad bits are; the sharpening tool is very basic, the noise reduction tool is ineffectual, essential curves adjustment does not exist, the histogram is misleading, it is buggy and for $500 with those system requirements you expect a killer app."

AnonymousExAppleGuy (not his real name) says:

"My first impressions are not good. They should put it back in the oven, 'cause it ain't done yet."

Apple Aperture RAW Photo Workflow Software Review

"Most activities are highly interactive, at least on a Quad. In playing with automatic stacking, however, I managed to lock up the UI for the better part of a minute despite only having about 70 images in the project I was working with. I had a similar lockup while attempting to remove the same set of images from an album. It recovered but it took awhile; long enough that I was expecting a crash dialog."

Firstly, I'm really envious of this guy's hardware - He's got a Quad!

In conclusion (but please, follow the link and read the whole thing) he says:

"It's hard to believe that this is version one of Aperture. It has an astounding number of features and, in general, they work extremely well. The user interface is extremely well thought out and puts its competitors to shame. Despite overall excellent performance, at least on a Quad, there are some performance quirks that need to be ironed out and several long-duration operations are modal.

This product is going to sell a lot of Powermacs to photographers. "

Aperture: First Impressions from Studio2f.com who said

"Aperture is rock solid. Wicked fast with RAW images. It's the most intuitive and well thought out pro app I've used (I've never thought Final Cut was all that intuitive). I really hope this UI raises the bar for all apps to come."

Ted Leung has Aperture working on the bottom of the range hardware specs, and says

"Given that my hardware is at the botttom of the pile, I'm pretty happy so far. It sure beats iPhoto, which is all I really have to benchmark against."

Ted also made the very smart move of putting his Aperture Library on an external 7200 rpm disk - smart guy.

Bambi and Tera weigh in as well.

Apple, of course, hosts their own discussion forums on Aperture as well.

My verdict? I'm waiting. The big issue that everyone seems to pick on is the RAW handling - and I need that to be right. I can keep managing my own workflow, it's not that much of a hassle...

Maybe next year, unless Apple NZ come to the party with that review copy we talked about a couple of months back...

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