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Weblog:		Aperture on a PowerBook, Pt. 2 - Raw Files & CS2
Subject:		Nondestructive editing
Date:		2005-12-09 08:51:15
From:		clarus

Your master image is left untouched while you apply corrections...And the best part is, Aperture is using metadata to perform this magic, so you're not adding tons of Megabytes to your hard drive with each version. I'm wondering why this is a point to make versus Adobe Camera Raw. All the reviews say "oh my god, nondestructive RAW editing!" but don't you also automatically get this with other raw editors like Camera Raw? I was under the impression that you can't write back to a raw file, meaning every raw editor that lets you make corrections before the conversion is a nondestructive raw editor. Camera Raw certainly stores your settings in metadata as well, this is especially obvious if you use the distributed cache option. So why do people breathlessly parrot Apple's marketing line about nondestructive editing as if Apple was the first company to do this with raw files? Or am I missing something? (I would, however, like Adobe to add versions capability to Camera Raw, since it only lets you associate the latest metadata changes with the raw file. And as far as I know, Adobe's Version Cue doesn't work inside Camera Raw.)

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RE: Nondestructive editing
2005-12-09 10:09:23 Derrick Story | [View]

I see your question here. I think the statement that Apple is making with Aperture is that it uses metadata to handle the "versions" of your Raw file. So you can adjust your Raw images in Aperture and have an adjusted "version" (that's really only XML data) in your library without having to save the image as a .psd or .tiff. This is a big deal because it saves you tons of hard disk space. Version management in Aperture is cool. The criticism leveraged against Aperture at the moment concerns the actual Raw conversion compared to Camera Raw.