Apple Aperture?

[800]

Have been using iPhoto from iLife06, and love the elegance and simplicity for organizing images (as well as the fact that it integrates so seamlessly into all the other Mac software)
However, now having had the D50 for a while and shooting in RAW, although iPhoto can handle RAW and the MacBookPro zips through them, if you modify the image, iPhoto converts it into jpg. Clearly this is defeating the object of shooting in RAW.....

So, is the sensible option to graduate to Aperture? (which appears, amongst other advantages, to sepcialize in RAW workflow).

Any advice from anyone who has used it and iPhoto would be most welcome.

[Bacardi]

Aperture is still work in progress, I wouldn't spend the money just yet. If you want to play, Have a play with Lightroom.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/li

The beta's free, it's universal binary, and it's not bad.

[jimothy]

Personally I love aperture. The use of 2 screens makes it so easy to do things, the zoom tool is superb and it is so easy to use. It's got to the point where I don't use iPhoto anymore.

[flameop]

Whats the RAW conversion like compared to Lightroom or ACR?

Are they all pretty much the same? I kinda like lightroom, but Aperture seems a step ahead.

are the conversions really that different?

[Bee_Jay]

I have tried both, and use Lightroom for one simple reason.

With Aperture you HAVE to import the pics into their database, which when you are working on 1000's makes no sense. They also have problems scaling and replicating the database. I also work on multiple machines (PC and Windows).

I keep mine in a specific file structure, which is real-time backed-up.

Lightroom lets you work on them in-situ without having to 'import' them.

[800]

Bacardi said:

Aperture is still work in progress, I wouldn't spend the money just yet. If you want to play, Have a play with Lightroom.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/li

The beta's free, it's universal binary, and it's not bad.

Thanks for that, I'm downloading it and I'll give it a go.

[flameop]

You can have external librarys in aperture though.. :-/

Is the Lightroom RAW converter just the same as CS2 ACR ?

[Bacardi]

IIRC, Adobe inherited Lightroom when they bought Macromedia so it started out from different companies, so different RAW processing. However, I would expect them to make it the same in the long run... it would make sense, using the best bits from both along with some of the technologies from newly acquired RawShooter (hopefully not as I think it's one of the weakest).

flameop said:

are the conversions really that different?

Yes they can be. They will all produce different results. The difference is greater depending how fussy you are/closely you look. If you are prepared to spend time and money on getting the best out of your pictures, I would suggest you look at Phase One's Capture One. IMHO it's the best (although I would say the PC version stinks in terms of interface and workflow). The cut down version is cheaper than Aperture and may have enough features for you. You can download a demo to try it out. One point, it's not a cataloguing software like Aperture and Lightroom, if you want that, one of the best is most probably iView (just bought my Microsoft... which is a bummer).

Which ever you choose, they will all produce better files than in camera jpegs.

[flameop]

Cool thanks.. I think in Lightroom I saw a camera calibration menu that had a drop down to select ACR2.4 :-/ hmm..

Downloading the demo of cature one pro .. £500 :-/ take it because its just aimed at pros...

[Bacardi]

Warehouse express sell the pro version for £299, the LE version for £69. Comparison chart here:

www.phaseone.com/upload/capture_one_versions_comparison_003.pdf