Dear Aperture, I hate you.

Ok, so not totally. But Aperture, baby, you got me down. I love your organization, your free form workflow, your cute little icon in my dock. But I have grown increasingly annoyed at some issues with image quality and today I am sorely disappointed in your RAW decoding.

The problem seems to occur when an over exposed image has a smooth fall off into a normally exposed area causing posterizing around the highlight area. It is most noticable in certain tonal ranges as we see. The worst part is Adobe Camera Raw has non of these problems, neither does DPP(canons raw decoding software). It turns out that the problem is also noticable in OSX's Finder previews, but to a much lesser degree. This seems to imply to me that the problem goes beyond just Aperture, and is applicable to everything that uses Apples Camera Raw decoding. It also means Aperture is doing something special in addition, which is exacerbating the problem. One can only speculate as to any other issues that Aperture has with image proccessing...

Oh, no need for speculation. I am starting a list to keep on stand by I think.

Higher res jpeg_examples available.