UPDATE MARCH 2010: the release of the Aperture 3.0.1 update seems to have fixed many of the reliability problems. I’m back running in 64-bit mode with Faces working, and things haven’t crashed horribly for a while. YMMV.

After a long wait for the release of Aperture 3, I ignored my own rule about waiting until the first incremental update of new software before installing it. Big mistake.

Upgrading my 20,000 image library meant I fell foul of the apparent memory leak problem that seems to beset the new version.

First I was told I hadn’t enough room on my HD to complete the update – it had filled the spare 35GB on my MacBook Pro internal drive with a giant swap file.

Then the whole machine would hang while Aperture 3 performed some mystery ‘processing’ work on my images. I had no idea if my library was intact, and no way of actually using the product for real work.

The Fix – sort of

Thanks to the useful advice from fellow sufferers on the Apple Aperture Support forums, I binned my first attempt, and cobbled together a solution. I’ve no idea if these will work for you, and hopefully there’ll be an update along soon that will help us all out, but here’s what got me working again.

1) Switched to 32-bit mode.
This should be as easy as checking the box in the Get Info pane, but along with a lot of folks, that box didn’t appear for me until I’d booted the machine in Safe Mode, and then restarted in normal mode again.

It seems users who got a boxed version (like me) were more likely not to see the 32-bit mode checkbox

2) Created a new library

3) Switched off Faces
Under Preferences, there’s an option to disable this. The heavy processing required to scan all the faces in a large library can lead to runaway memory problems.

4) Restored from an Aperture 2 vault
Since my main library had been banjaxed by my first attempt, I went with restoring from a vault. Which is yet another reason why having at least 2 extra copies of your libraries (with one at an offsite location) is a good idea.

Aperture 3 told me it would have to update the vault because it was from an older version, and it took a long time, but everything came in properly.

Other options

Other folks seem to have enjoyed success deleting previews, recreating thumbnails and rebuilding the database of their version 2 library before updating.

And others still have exported projects one at a time, and imported them into a new Aperture 3 library.

And finally, there have been people (probably the silent majority) who have had no trouble at all.

Macworld has some troubleshooting tips, with useful links to follow for particular symptoms.

But it’s unacceptable that a product on which so many people rely on for their livelihoods was released with this kind of problem in it.

The Green/Magenta box issue

As well as the memory leak – new in Aperture 3 – there’s an old problem that’s been afflicting some Aperture 2 users who were using Snow Leopard that hasn’t been fixed.

When making adjustments, some or all of your image suddenly turns into a crazy geometric patchwork of green or magenta lines and blocks.

This too is well known on the support forum, but there’s yet to be a solution.

Spoiling the ship for a ha’peth of tar

There are lots of great new features in Aperture 3 – including the crucial issues of non-destructive local adjustments, and comprehensive presets that I talked about in my comparison of Aperture 2 and the Lightroom 3 beta.

But it’s a shame that the first thing most people are going to hear about the new version is how flaky and unusable it is.

Like many an impatient Aperture user, I recently took the Lightroom 3 Beta for a spin. What follows is an informal review of my experience of Lightroom 3 Beta as a long-time Aperture user, and Apple Certified Pro in Aperture.

I mainly looked at the adjustment settings rather than the organizing or exporting options.

I hadn’t looked closely at Lightroom 2, so many of the things I liked about Adobe’s product were probably there in the earlier version too.

My overall view is that Lightroom includes some very valuable adjustment features that Aperture 2 gets nowhere near. The rumoured arrival of Aperture X (the rebranded Aperture 3) means I’m not making any snap decisions, but the revised Aperture needs at least to match Lightroom’s strengths to stay competitive.

Baked-in local adjustments

Aperture 2 has a plug-in architecture that saves out a tiff of the image you’re working on, and then lets you make adjustments to that. This is the only way to make adjustments to certain areas of an image (aside from the patching tools).

But these are pretty blunt tools for local adjustments, and they also depend on destructive editing – you have to create a new version of the file to use them. Since one of the main benefits of Aperture (and Lightroom) is that your adjustments (and multiple versions of different files) don’t create a bunch of new files, this is a big drawback.

Lightroom’s local adjustments are more subtle (the iris enhance feature is simple and effective, the spot patching more intuitive), and crucially, they’re non-destructive. You’re working in the regular file, and can go back and forth with edits, and go in whatever order you like. In Aperture, you have to dodge and burn last, or you’ll be adjusting on the tiffs, rather than the (preferable) RAW version.

Lightroom’s gradient adjust feature is also a powerful feature that Aperture can’t match. The default use would be to darken the sky while leaving the foreground untouched, but it needn’t be set vertically, so you could it use for some funky sideways effects to lead the eye to one side of the frame or the other.

Preset joy

In Aperture you can only save and apply presets in particular bricks – so you can apply preset Exposure settings using the Exposure brick, or preset Enhance settings from the Exposure brick. But there’s no simple way to apply a whole range of preset settings in one click (you could Lift and Stamp from an existing photo, but that’s a bit of a kludge).

Lightroom includes default presets that work across its range of adjustments with one click – very handy for getting close to what you’re after quickly, before fine-tuning images individually.

You can also save your own presets (or download others). Aperture also supports these type of options, but again only brick-by-brick.

Distracting interface

It’s not all fun and games though. Compared to Aperture, Lightoom’s UI seems a little cluttered and distracting. The white balance picker is big and clunky, the gruesome red eye reduction rollover effect is unnecessary, and the crop icons again too big and graphically prominent.

Do you really need a large-ish picture of a spirit level to accompany the angle adjust control, especially when there’s a big ‘Angle’ label right beside it?

While I’m sure with time I’d start to see past these, but it definitely feels like Aperture is more understated and controlled in its UI – which is exactly what you want when you should be concentrating on your images.

Conclusion

When it comes to adjustment controls, Lightroom Beta 3 clearly has the edge over Aperture 2. That said, if Aperture X includes image-wide presets, local adjustments and gradient filters, I’d stay with it in a heartbeat.

Fingers crossed, then, for Aperture X.