A long-time Aperture user, in early 2015 I started to use Capture One (“CO”) but for various reasons switched to Lightroom (“LR”) in February 2016. I use a dedicated iMac for my images.
Background: I have long-term project (8 years so far) that is almost finished and because most of it was organised and processed in Aperture, I am keeping it in Aperture. What I do now to add to the project is first import to Aperture, keyword, geotag, etc. and then export the original RAW file with an xmp sidecar file. Last year I would have taken these to CO, this year it is to LR. Once processed in CO/LR, I export 16-bit tiff files back into Aperture so as to keep my complete project all in the one place. Back in Aperture I also normally add edge-sharpening and some vignetting.
Issue: Yesterday I revisited my project collection in Aperture and found that for some, but not all, of the tiff files I had re-imported last year from CO I am getting the dreaded ‘Unsupported Image Format’ black box message - haven’t seen that for ages! I find this very strange. These are definitely tiff files, albeit CO uses “.tif” on export. If I then export the original CO tiff file from Aperture, it doesn’t open in Preview either, but is fine with Photoshop. I am wondering if something has happened with the patch to 10.11.6., or perhaps earlier. I have restarted the iMac, tried repairing the Library but the issue remains on some files, although others appear okay. While I have not tested things extensively, those files processed in LR and reimported into Aperture appear unaffected.
That is a summary of my main concern but here’s another observation … earlier today I processed a photo of my son for his university ‘mug shot’. I used Aperture for the RAW file as I already have a number of family images in a Library. It took me several attempts to persuade the Levels and Curves tools to activate. With Levels I had to exit and re-open Aperture before it activated.
Update: I carried out more tests and found there was also a problem opening the files in Preview. These files were all 16-bit tiff’s incidentally, 8-bit tiffs were unaffected. And so I contacted Phase One Support earlier today - as I have found to be the case, they are always quick to reply and I already have an answer, as follows:
“If you are experiencing blank thumbnails in finder and issues opening files in preview when processing 16bit TIF’s which can be with 8bit in some cases as well.
Then what you have is a very specific Mac OS 10.11.6 bug which did not exist in Mac OS 10.11.5 and any previous Mac OS.
The workaround solution is to change the options in Capture One. When you have selected Tiff as your process recipe format an options field appears below the format field. Click on it and select a Tile dimension of 128.”
And so it’s a bug in the system rather than some devious plot to break Aperture prematurely!
Case closed.
Nick
Hong Kong
It is interesting that you mention the “Unsupported File Format” problem again, as I had one myself the other day. This was a Canon CR2 RAW file from a 5D3. I imported about 40 images to a Library and one of the images showed the error. I quit and relaunched A3, just in case, but it did not help. I then duplicated the image to a new version and the new version looked fine. I then deleted the original version and edited the duplicate version and everything worked as expected.
Maybe just a glitch?
I use a 5D3 too and have not encountered that problem. Perhaps just a one-off glitch as you say.
Nick
Hong Kong