aperture vs elements

I'm a very amateur photographer looking to start tweaking photos more than what iphoto offers. i have $100 to the app store, and am wondering if i should get aperture 3 or photoshop elements. i downloaded the aperture 3 trial and while i like it, it ran pretty slow. does elements offer what aperture offers in terms of making slight adjustments to photos to make them look better?

I would definitely go with Aperture between those two choices. With Aperture you'll also get a catalog management system.

.. but... elements is more of a pixel editor.

I think there's an elements trial as well?

Yep, they do.

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/tdrc/index.cfm?product=photoshop_elements&loc=en_us

Might also want to look at Pixelmater in the APP store. I have it and Elements (and Aperture too).
I still use Elements as my editor, but from what I have seen and read Pixelmater isn't bad either.

Is Iphoto good just for amateur photographers for editing and such?

Or should one step up to Aperture? Aperture sounds like a bargain but if I can do good basic editing on Iphoto then why spend the money?
Aperture looks so awesome though

For photo editing, I would highly recommend Adobe Lightroom. Simple to use, but very powerful. I do not think Apple Store offers it separately, so that's bummer.

Adobe Lightroom? Never heard of that but I will check it out
thanks!

c1688 said:

For photo editing, I would highly recommend Adobe Lightroom. Simple to use, but very powerful. I do not think Apple Store offers it separately, so that's bummer.

Click to expand...

Lightroom is also more of a Digital Asset Management tool than an editor, but... it does a great job of basic (and completely non-destructive) editing.

It's also $200.

Aperture is a nice program but it is somewhat limited. There will come a time when you want to do more. So for that reason I would suggest Elements.

Elements now has Layers (the reason i just upgraded from version 8 to 10), Aperture doesn't. I guess it boils down to deciding what you want to do and then look at what program does it. For me Elements does absolutely everything I can ever think I'll need (famous last words...) so I'd vote for that - check out the free trial and see what you think.

I was using a combination of Aperture and Elements before Aperture 3 arrived. With version 3, Apple has bought in a far more extensive set of adjustments including curves and brushes to cover pretty much all my needs. The brushes in particular are very intuitive and quickly accomplish tasks would previously have had me messing about with layers.

Of course, there's a lot more to Aperture than just image adjustments. It covers the whole work flow from importing, to selections, cropping and straightening, adjustments, captioning and publishing (with numerous plugins for all the major imaging sites).

I like Aperture as a photo library manager, and it has decent editing capabilities. But, the main project I am working on is retouching and cleaning up scans of old family photos and slides, and for this Adobe PSE is head and shoulders above Aperture.
I bought Pixelmater because I tend not to be a fan of Adobe as a company, but haven't worked with it enough to decide if I will eventually switch to it.

Adobe Lightroom is the most powerful tool a photographer can use. It organizes and edits photos in ways that photographers actually work and think. Best of all its only $200. If you need to do work in layers (you know who you are) you can pair Lightroom with Photoshop and switch back and forth. In my workflow I use Lightroom for 95% of my production work, using Photoshop only when I need to do something like HDR, photomerging and intense layer work on a single image.

Elements combines several but not all of the features of Lightroom and Photoshop so its a perfectly reasonable alternative that's low cost as well.