Apple Aperture Exporting on a Hexacore Mac Pro

I recently upgraded from a 2008 Apple iMac to a 6-core 3.33GHz Mac Pro. The iMac is an awesome computer with a beautiful screen, and I never complained about its speed (3.06GHz dual core) until I bought a Canon 5D Mark ii DSLR. The 21mpx RAW files and stunning HD video took its toll on my hard drive and processor.

In the week that I've had the Mac Pro, I've been nothing but pleased with how great this machine is. Along with that, however, is the painful realization that most software has yet to take advantage of all twelve of those logical cores. Aperture is *much* faster than it was on my old machine, but I'd expect to see more parallelization of bulk tasks such as importing.

Importing isn't ideal, but I just noticed that exporting is! Here's a screenshot from iStat of an 80-file export, successfully using my machine's full potential.



I won't hold my breath for better use of the cores in other areas of the app right now, but I will definitely enjoy knowing that exporting will be nearly as fast as it can be.

Noise Ninja - Why don't I use this more often?

I purchased Noise Ninja several months ago, but never spent much time with it. I dusted it off tonight, and now I'm wondering why it doesn't have a fixed spot in my photography workflow.

I need to read up on the science and techniques of noise removal to understand better how to use Noise Ninja, but after 5 minutes of basically just using their automatic settings, I was able to clean up this ISO6400 shot from earlier this year.

Click the following to see the difference (open in new windows)

Original:


After Noise Ninja: