Aperture

[Ted Scalzo]

Is anyone working on a Mac using Aperture. I would love to know more about workflow regarding these two items.

[Gyorgy Szimuly]

I am exclusively working with Aperture. I am very satisfied with it though it needs lots of memory.
What exactly would you like to learn or hear?
Szimi

[Ted Scalzo]

I am curious what and how much editing people are doing in Aperture vs. Jumping out to CS3. Settings etc.
I have been using it for a year but find myself going to Photoshop to edit. I would like to get better at editing in Aperture.

[Alfred Forns]

Ted try to do as much as you can in Aperture

I tried Aperture but had to retreat to LR I have New Intel Mac with 5 GIG Ram and still feel is slow The interface is great but it is memory hungry

[Ted Scalzo]

Thanks Al-I will work on this.

[Gyorgy Szimuly]

I am curious what and how much editing people are doing in Aperture vs. Jumping out to CS3. Settings etc.
I have been using it for a year but find myself going to Photoshop to edit. I would like to get better at editing in Aperture.

What I do in Aperture is complete RAW management. I catalogue, rate, crop, straighten and do the necessary adjustments (levels and saturation if needed), slight sharpening and then exporting in the desired format. I fully fill the metadata concentrating a lot for the keywording.

In CS3 I normally do the dust spots removal, noise reduction if needed and the sharpening (USM). Text and canvas adding I also do with CS3.

I would highly recommend to go through these online learning sessions which I found very helpful.
Aperture 1.1 Essential Training (http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/modPage.asp?ID=242) and then the Aperture 1.5 Beyond the Basics (http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/modPage.asp?ID=321) online training.

Szimi

[Robert Amoruso]

Sorry, can't help on this one as I don't use it.

Welcome to BPN Ted.

[Miro Zumrik]

I am also using Aperture exclusively. Last week I was near to switch into LR, ( due missing in Aperture D3,D300 converter).
Than I came into conclusion, that every Post process SW has strenght and weakness. Therefore is useful within Trial period to test all steps of workflow. Using so many systems is not very productive mostly because each Library has their own structure - so flying from SW to SW takes a lot to rework al Library , keywords, ranking style et.
For Managing, cataloging with high Nr. of pictures - Aperture have probably most advanced technology ( time saving) Once many of you pictures need to be highly corrected (PS) - than look somewhere else. Aperture definitely missing local adjustment capability and more "professional" layout options for Web galleries albums etc.
So I am not sure if my post will help, but probably there is always piece of subjective assessment to each SW on the Market.

[LouBuonomo]

Eddie Coppa is an Aperture man.. Drop him and email with questions. I am going to try and getting him for our DAM discussion

[Ed Prete]

When I was at the Apple booth at Photo Plus expo, I asked the Apple rep to sell me on Aperture over Lightroom, since I am already a Lightroom user. I even told him I'd buy it as soon as I got home. He quite didn't know how to respond and had someone else help me. Everything he showed me, I already knew how to do in LR.

Had he given me even something remotely beneficial (that I didn't already do in LR), I would have considered it. He even mentioned one of the Apple guys there that used both Aperture and Lightroom as there are some things that do things a little differently. Aperture is very memory intensive and I don't find that to be the case with LR, as I am running it on a G4 Dual 867 with 2GB of ram and still adequate speed for the amount I shoot.

Best bet is download trials of each and see which you prefer.

[Ted Scalzo]

Thanks for the response I am using Aperture already. I will e-mail Eddie for sure.
I just want to know what people are doing edit wise in Aperture. At my stage of the game I need to get some things into more of a routine. Also looking to make my images pop just a bit more.

[Ed Prete]

Ted, you'll definitely want to attend the February and March NWPLI meetings if you can. The agenda we have in place is going to address some of these issues, which are more workflow specific. Either LR or Aperture will do what you need, and software-wise it can often become a matter of personal preference, but a solid workflow will really make things pop and come together nicely.

[Rick Baumhauer]

Ted - I use Aperture almost exclusively on both my Core Duo 17" iMac and my Core Duo MacBook (the latter only when I'm traveling, as it's a bit pokey for Aperture). I needs lots of RAM and as fast a graphics card as you can give it (my iMac is adequate, but a bit slow). While it's easy enough to send photos out to Photoshop for extra processing, I rarely do - I'm just not one to obsess that much over any given shot.

While there may be other RAW converters with more capability (I have PS CS3, Lightroom, and CaptureOne 4, each of which has its strengths), Aperture suits my needs best. My particular favorite feature is its ability to use a multi-monitor setup particularly well, as I have a 21" Samsung hooked up to my iMac as my primary monitor, with the iMac itself off to the right side. I use the Samsung to display the Aperture interface and thumbnails, with the iMac screen used for large single- or multi-image previews. Lightroom or CaptureOne would both be much more attractive to me if they could make proper use of the second screen, but neither does at this point.

The only thing I don't do with Aperture is import - I have an organizational and naming system set up from when I was using Windows, and I found that Photo Mechanic was best able to duplicate that system on the Mac. I could approximate it with Aperture, but I'm still happy with Photo Mechanic and its ability to download to two locations simultaneously. Since I use referenced images in Aperture, this gives me an easy way to keep a second copy of each image on a separate drive, as well as an Aperture vault that I update very regularly.

The other major benefit of working with Aperture is the OS integration. I can use my 5-star images from my Aperture library as a constantly-changing wallpaper on one of my monitors, as well as the system screensaver and the screensaver on my AppleTV (which I bought primarily for showing video from my HD video camera on my HDTV without buying into either Blu-ray or HD-DVD). I can also carry nice versions of my best images on my iPhone, and none of these uses requires me to export even a JPEG, let alone a huge TIFF or PSD - they all use some variation on the JPEG that Aperture maintains internally for each image.

Ellen and Josh Anon have a nice book that I found very useful - "Aperture Exposed". While it was written for v1.1, Ellen has a v1.5 update on her website. I learned quite a bit about the various nooks and crannies of Aperture that I hadn't explored on my own. I'm also still learning new things about Aperture, well over a year after switching to it - for instance, I only recently started experimenting with the Brightness control, after years of avoiding anything with the word "brightness" associated with it due to Photoshop's historically poor implementation (finally improved in CS3). I also still haven't made much use of the Levels adjustment in Aperture, primarily working with Exposure, Brightness, and Highlights/Shadows for most of my shots. I've been very pleased with my results, and nothing has convinced me that it will do such a better job of conversion that it will make up for all of the things I'd lose.

[Ted Scalzo]

Thanks Rick-I am looking at getting Ellens book after I finish the Apple Certified Pro book.
Appreciate your input.

[Mike Poe]

Several people have mentioned the memory short comings of Aperture. As Rick alluded to above Aperture depends more on handing off work to the graphics card than internal memory. I think most Aperture experts will suggest after about 2GB of memory (which most computers have these days) you will see better performance / returns by spending money on upgrading a graphics card than by adding additional memory. Speculation is that Apple may address this in future releases but some argue it will best to continue to keep the graphics card as the workhorse. Upgrading graphics cards in laptops or the consumer Mac models though is not really feasible IMHO.