New bug with 10.6.3 and Aperture 3.0.2 UPDATED

I know I've been pretty silent about Aperture 3 since it came out, especially considering how much I had been waiting for this upgrade. Fact is, I was waiting to see what a few updates would do to smooth the landscape, one that has been riddled with crashes and various bugs since day one. Unlike others I didn't suffer serious library upgrade problems or slowness, although I did have to immediately turn off both Faces and Places. My problems were mainly instability and crashes, with Aperture 3 being the only application on my system causing it to freeze completely. We're talking hard reboot here. Not good.

But after two pretty swift updates, things were starting to settle. I still had crashes here and there but they were becoming less and less frequent. I was slowly beginning to see light at the end of the Aperture 3 tunnel/mess.

Until yesterday.
Now, I just don't know what to say anymore.

The latest chapter in the saga? With the 10.6.3 update Raw Fine Tuning no longer saves my changes between restarts. Sometimes. On some pictures. We're talking same camera, same memory card, same lens (!!!!). Here's a video of the  bug in action:


This is pretty huge. Especially when combined with another post-update incident where certain files from yesterday morning's import session lost ALL adjustments I had made - brushes, crop, curves, everything. And they hadn't just reverted back to their RAW state: the contrast slider had been set at -0.1, making the pictures completely washed out.

I have no words. I'm now scared and having serious trust issues with Aperture. And don't get me started on print presets… I'm just too tired to get into that right now.

Anyone else seeing this bug? Or am I one of the lucky random few?

UPDATE: Another video trying to make sense of it all:

Comments

[Is there a point in getting bo]

[...] New bug with 10.6.3 and Aperture 3.0.2 | dual(ité) [...]

[AlexK]

Well, what can I say? I've been playing with Lightroom 3 beta since it came out, and while it had a fair number of bugs, I have not experienced a singe problem in areas related to database integrity.

Conversely, upgrading my Aperture library to 3.x (I've been a user since it first came out) ran into tons of problems, one of which I'm still struggling with [it seems to have lost all links to my referenced files, and while I can reconnect them, any time I try to reconnect more than a few hundred at a time, Aperture hangs]. And this is *after* waiting for the 3.0.2 update, seeing as I don't trust Apple any more to produce quality s/w on first try. Haven't had other crashes/hangs in 3.0.2 yet, but one of the adjustments (chromatic aberration) garbles some of the images (e.g., part of the image turns b&w, with random color stripes in it; looks like problems using the graphics card).

So Adobe's beta is more stable (at least in critical areas like database integrity) than Apple's 3.0.2 *product*. Also, I find it produces much more pleasing white balance for my Panasonic GF-1 files than Aperture, especially under any lighting other than plain daylight.

A final subjective niggle: I am used to Photoshop's additive brushes (additive in the sense of: set the opacity to, say, 10%; every time you go over an area, you add more of the effect). In Aperture, only the eraser works that way --- but if you cross two brush strokes, one with X% and one with Y% opacity, the place where they intersect will be at MAX(X,Y), which is annoying more often than not. Plus, Aperture brushes are way too hard; even at maximum softness setting, it can be difficult to make smoothly feathered regions (yes, I can apply the feather tool in a separate step, but why not let me select a softer brush).

Most likely, I'll be switching when LR3 release becomes available. Not happily, mind you; I'll have to learn to live with a few idiosyncrasies that I'd rather do without, but at least I won't have to constantly worry about my database integrity.

[Thomas Boyd]

I see you are making adjustments in the RAW Fine Tuning brick. Is the RAW Fine Tuning the only adjustment brick you're losing your adjustments?

I just tested this on my MBP and it did in fact save the changes I made in RAW Fine Tuning.

Thomas Boyd

P.S. Alex, you can do two things with brushes. One, you can turn the amount of brushing up or down after the fact with slider in the brick that appears after the brush. Secondly, you can "Add New brush Adjustment" in the brick. Once you wrap your head around it, it makes a lot sense and works really well.

Take a deep breath. You don't want to use Lightroom. That's no way to live. ha!

[Patrick]

Thanks for the feedback guys.

Alex: I don't have any of those graphic bugs on my end, but I agree that the brushes need some getting used to. What I'd like is for all brushes to at least allow the same stroke diameter - I don't understand why I can get a Contrast brush that almost fills the entire picture while the Dodge or Burn brushes max out at a much smaller size. This would also help with the softness issue quite a bit.

The tip Thomas gave about using multiple instances of a brick is a great one - I use that quite a bit, especially for vignettes, dodge and skin smoothing (although performance on this last one tends to be problematic).

Thomas:
Glad to know this isn't widespread. Yes, I only have problems with the RAW Fine Tuning brick. Everything else gets saved normally - otherwise I would've been forced to move on… and as you said, that's no way to live ;-)

As I read the forums and various reports I can't help but be taken aback by the number of seemingly random issues. There seems to be a lot of hardware dependent bugs in this release, which doesn't make for easy troubleshooting...

[Patrick]

Thanks for your help guys - bug solved. Check out the new post: http://diode.tv/blog/2010/04/05/aperture-bug-follow-up-solved/