Schinckel.net

I finally got around to installing a demo of Aperture. Since I’m under spec. for the app, I had to firstly hack the Installer (not easy, I had to copy the ApertureTrial.mpkg ‘file’ (it’s a package, which is really a folder) to the disk, and then go inside it. I then had to enter the Contents folder, and finally edit the ApertureTrial.dist file. This file is the file that tests to see if it can be installed, and since I’m on a desktop, I needed to change the first non-intel test: if (!checkCPUFrequency(1590000000)) I removed one of the zeros, so that it was testing for a much slower clock speed. I then needed to fix the RAM check: if (!checkRAMRequirement(1000)) { I changed this to a 1. Both of these edits can be done in any old text editor. This meant that Aperture could be installed on my Mac. However, it still wouldn’t run. For this to happen, you need to actually edit the application file itself, which must be done in a hex editor. If you don’t know how to do this, then you probably shouldn’t. The location of this file is: /Applications/Aperture.app/Contents/MacOS/Aperture I found the instructions at david.djsiska.cz, which deal with version 1.1, to be enough to enable me to succeed here too. There are also instructions for 1.5 at aperture 1.5 hack. Ignore the offsets, and just search for the first and second location of: 40 9e 00 80 to: 48 00 00 88 And then, if you need it, the resolution hack; the next appearance of: 40 9E 00 E0 becomes: 48 00 00 D8 I’ll just point out that you should be working on a copy of this file, in case it fails. I also suspect that in the updated version (1.5.2) this hack will still work. • Now that that is out of the way, how does it stack up against Lightroom? Perhaps it’s because I’ve spent quite a few hours working in Lightroom already, but I didn’t warm to Aperture much at all. It seems to have most of the same tools, although there are a couple of differences (colour tinting, for instance, allows for black/grey/white tinting, rather than just shadow/highlight tinting, but I didn’t find the ability to alter some channels but not others, which is a pretty cool feature). I also found the application somewhat slow. Of course, the laptop I’ve been running Lightroom on is a bit newer than my Mac, and has twice as much RAM, so perhaps I’m just being unfair in that aspect. Having the ability to fix red-eye would be good, but that is something I am sure Adobe will be implementing soon. My Desktop PC is fairly tooled up - the only advantage of the iMac is the lovely large screen, so perhaps that will become my main working machine for photographs. So, I’m going to stick to Lightroom for now. I hope they make it better in the next couple of revisions, and I hope I can come up with a way of making my previews accessible via my Xbox and xbmc, so that I can view them on the TV. That would be cool. Like I used to to with iPhoto, when albums were stored as a series of aliases within folders of the album name. As I think about it, there is one thing I liked about Aperture: you can work on a new revision of a file. This is something I was trying to do in Lightroom just a couple of hours ago (I was resizing some images to be my screen backgrounds on my phone!), so I had to make the modifications, and then export, and then undo the modifications. It would have been much nicer just to have a revision of the original photo. I also think that there is no reason that the develop tools can’t be accessible in the library mode of Lightroom. Why have that distinction? You can already do some minor edits, why not just allow the whole gamut? It just complicates everything. Just saying that reminded me I haven’t really used the final three sections of Lightroom. For printing, I just export without restricting the size, and for Web, I export restricting the width to 500 (that’s the column size on this blog). Perhaps I will investigate those features, as well as the slideshow.