About Aperture............

I'm using photoshop cs2 currently and it's very nice.
But I looked up Aperture at Apple.com and I find that it's tools and interface are more photography-orientated. I use photoshop cs2 mainly for the postprocessing of photos so I want to know if Aperture is worth the price.

well, it certainly looks fantastic to me. Check out this link for a trial version of Aperture.

That depends on what you want Aperture for. It is not primarily an image editing tool, it is primarily a work flow tool for high volume photographers. It does three basic things:

1/ Import of images from digital cameras
2/ Automated manipulation of those images as they are imported
3/ Export of images with writing of additional things like attribution, metadata, etc.

So, this isn't an either/or. A pro photog will want BOTH Photoshop and Aperture! ...or Adobe's competing product, Lightroom. It does the same basic things.

Speaking as someone who has Photoshop and Apperture, i just cant get excited by Aperture, Photoshop wins hands down. But then again its an unfair comparison as both were designed for two very different roles. Editing v Organising

Both Aperture and Lightroom (and Nikon Capture, C1, other aps) are great for processing your RAW files. If you shoot RAW, you really want to do as much processing to the RAW file as possible before converting for a JPEG/TIFF and processing in photoshop or other editing software.

If you shoot in JPEG, they really just become digital asset management software.

I guess I have to get Aperture!
I use RAW a lot and I take many photos.

I missed one key function in my quick highlight of Aperture above. It is also (I guess this is point number 4) a great photo cataloger. This is an absolutely required function if you are a high volume photographer.

that`s quite true. I always find catergorizing photos really difficult

Odin_aa said:

If you shoot RAW, you really want to do as much processing to the RAW file as possible before converting for a JPEG/TIFF and processing in photoshop or other editing software.

Click to expand...

Actually the goal is to do as little processing as possible, by ensuring you get as much as possible right "in camera"!

But yes RAW files have more latitude when it comes to post processing.

Del said:

But then again its an unfair comparison as both were designed for two very different roles. Editing v Organising

Click to expand...

Exactly, if you take lots of photos and need to file them without having to spend hours putting the same logo or something on each one then apperture is amazing. But if you spend time on all of them and edit them to perfection then photoshop is your choice.

Del, if you shoot RAW then nothing is applied in camera for your saturation, color space, sharpening, noise reduction, contrast... what you see when you open the image in any RAW converter is simply that the RAW data. The advantage you have shooting RAW vs JPEG is the ability to change these settings to fit the photograph, and correct white balance. None of these things are set in camera unless you are shooting in JPEG or TIFF then these settings are applied in camera.

These are the tasks I was speaking of.

Taking an image the best you can in camera is how to perform photography, these tweeks to the RAW image are simply your darkroom work. Any real manipulation of an image cannot be performed in either application except for correcting a poorly exposed image.

I hope that is expressed well.

Don't forget another of Aperture's primary functions: it's a non-destructive editor. All of the effects are individually removable (including cropping). You can also have multiple versions of one image, each with their own set of effects.

The simple fact that you can apply a set of effects to multiple images simultaneously (for example, having taken 15 different pictures all under the same lighting conditions and having to clean them all up) is worth it alone.

Aperture's cataloging abilities take some getting used to after having used iPhoto for several years, but they're much more powerful. Organising 'rolls' within folders, keywords with sub-keywords, much more powerful smart rolls...

I think it's a great piece of software, and I'm probably only using about 5% of its capabilities.