Thank you Joseph.

I have noticed that the behavior of the Raw Fine Tuning controls have changed a bit. In the past, with my 5D MkII -CR2 files, the Raw Sharpening control defaulted to about 80% of max. And, there was no visible change in the image when adjusting that control. Recently however, the slider is defaulted to 50% and adjusting it makes a huge difference in sharpness/artifacting.

Is this part of the new Engine, or a Version 3.4 change, or my imagination?

Another obvious change is that the “Edges” slider is now called “Details”. And, the new Raw Processor just works better. I get nice clear, sharp images.

However, I’m not sure what is going on because I only see the new Raw Processor with 5D Mk II files. My 40D shots still seem to happily use the old processor with no Update notice.

I hope somebody can explain this behavior, I would like to use the new processor for all of my shots. I’m a bit confused.

I didn’t see mention of the new raw processor in any of the recent release notes. It also seems a little unusual because it was not just a tweak, but they changed the behavior and the name of the sliders. Seems odd to make those kind of changes for just a few cameras.

I wonder if it was an inadvertent inclusion of a beta feature in the release version. Is this a peak under the curtain at a 4.0 feature? I can always hope ;-)

Okay, maybe I have too much time on my hands, but this is really bugging me. Aperture added anew raw processing engine (4.0), with a new interface that only works on specific cameras. I saw no mention in the release notes, no explanation of what changed. However I found for most of my images that it works better at sharpening than the old version. On one image it made obvious changes to the overall color of the image.

I found this thread on the Apple Aperture Support Forum - https://discussions.apple.com/message/19957317#19957317
Similar observations are discussed there. One poster added this link to an Apple note from late September with a list of supported cameras. However, the list is incorrect in that it lists the 40D as supported, but in my hands it is not. See that list here http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3946

Any information on what was changed in the new processor would be appreciated.

Apologies for having to add a correction - My post immediately above referred to an Apple list of supported cameras for the new Raw Processor. On closer review, that list was for an earlier update (one year ago) to the raw processor. I can only infer that they did something similar in Aperture 3.4.1 this month, and left off more of the older cameras (such as my 40D).

My 40D files still use the version of the Raw processor that has the Edges slider. Aperture gives me no option to process with a newer Raw Processor. The 5D MKII files, on the other hand, generate an upgrade message, and when I reprocess with the newer processor, the Edge slider becomes a Details slider and the sharpening slider is much stronger. I’m not sure about Noise Reduction, that may be a little better also.