Editing with Apple Photos 1.0

I decided to sign up for Apple's OS X Beta Program to download the Mac OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 beta so I could get my hands on the new Photos app.  Photos has received significant attention in the Apple community because it is the much-anticipated successor to both iPhoto and Aperture, Apple's consumer and professional photography workflow applications respectively.  Here are my first impressions.

After updating from Mac OS X 10.10.2 to 10.10.3, the Photos app was already installed and sitting in my Applications folder.  I also have both iPhoto and Aperture installed, and those were untouched by the installation, although the iPhoto icon in my dock was replaced by Photos.  A Feedback Assistant application was also installed and placed in my dock, and the name is self-explanatory.

Upon first launch of Photos (version 1.0, build 205.44.0), I was provided the options to start with a blank Photos library or to import a library from iPhoto or Aperture.  I imported my iPhoto library, and even though I only had approximately 2,200 photos (which is probably less than 1% of all the content in my entire library), the import process took about 15 minutes, and I did not have any other programs running in the background.  Once you begin using Photos to store new photos and edit them, you are essentially committing to a new source of truth, as your photo libraries between iPhoto/Aperture and Photos will begin to diverge.  In fact, upon launching iPhoto after my initial Photos import, it warned me that any changes that I made would not be reflected in my Photos library which I thought would be helpful for users who might not have understood that.

I was primarily interested in the photo editing options, so I will review them here.  The navigation options are very simple and clean, true to my perception of Apple's philosophy about user interfaces.  Upon selecting a photo, an "Edit" button appears, and upon clicking it you are presented with the following options:

• Enhance.  This appears to attempt enhance your photo, and there are no options--you either do it or you don't.  I suspect that depending on your photo, you may or may not get good results, but I suppose it would be worth it for people to try it out.
• Rotate.  By default, clicking this option will rotate your image counterclockwise, but you can right-click to reveal options to rotate clockwise.
• Crop.  Clicking this option reveals an intuitive interface that allows for both cropping and rotation.  An Aspect option allows you to select freeform or any number of common predefined aspect ratios which is nice.  You can also flip your photo along its vertical axis.  Curiously, there is an Auto option which seems to do all of this for you, but I haven't played around with it enough to judge whether it is useful or not.  I would not plan to use it very often.
• Filters. This option simply presents a variety of 8 preset filters such as Mono, Noir, Fade, and Instant to produce a variety of effects.  Personally I am not a big fan of filters so do not plan to use them.
• Adjust. Clicking this option reveals 3 groups of adjustment sliders.  Each group displays an AUTO option when you mouse over the group, but there are also finer controls which I describe below.
• Light. Under this group, there are sliders for Exposure, Highlights, Shadows, Brightness, Contrast, and Black Point.  While each one can be adjusted individually by sliding or typing in a value, adjusting the Light group slider results in simultaneous changes to all 6 parameters in that group.  My initial impression is that this may seem very useful for quick edits, and I'd have to play around with this a bit more to see if the Light group slider produced the desired effect or if I would still find myself needing to adjust the individual sliders in that group.
• Color. Under this group, we have sliders for Saturation, Contrast, and Cast.  Similar to above, you can drag individual sliders or the Color group slider.
• Black & White. Under this group, we have sliders for Intensity, Neutrals, Tone, and Grain.  While you can drag the Black & White group slider, it has no effect on the sliders within the group.
• Retouch. This option provides what seems to be a hybrid of spot removal and clone stamping features, for those of you who are familiar with Adobe Photoshop terminology.  There is a Size slider that allows you to define the diameter of the area you wish to edit, and there are simply instructions to "Click & drag over spots to remove" and "Option-click to choose the source area".  I prefer Photoshop's options to let me either remove spots or to clone stamp because they produce slightly different results, although I can understand why Apple would cater to the masses by simplifying these two similar functions into one.

I was hoping that there would be options for lens corrections (e.g. to remove barrel distortion) and noise reduction (very helpful for photos shot in low light) options since I frequently use them when processing photos in Photoshop or Lightroom.  There are also many other features of Photos such as RAW processing, iCloud Photo Sharing, etc. that I have not reviewed, as this post was focused on the editing capabilities of Photos.  For a quick and general overview, see David Pogue's review of Apple Photos.

In conclusion, Photos feels very much like a replacement for iPhoto.  Its options are elegant and simple which will probably cater to the needs of most novice photographers.  However, I doubt that many Aperture users will migrate to Photos--instead, they will move their photo assets to Lightroom or other similar applications.  For me personally, I have historically only used iPhoto to store photos that I want to sync with my iPhone and iPad (whereas I've used Photoshop and Lightroom for RAW conversions and photo editing) and will probably do the same with Photos upon its official release.