Aperture

I have had a look at the aperture website but it just seems like a combination of iPhoto and photoshop. Am I correct in this or is there more to it? Is it worth getting if im in to photography?

I'm no expert on Aperture but I've been lightly playing with it for a little while. Calling it iPhoto and Photoshop might be a little overkill. While it's definitely like iPhoto, Photoshop is way more powerful based purely on editing.

Does iPhoto allow you to edit RAW pics? I know Aperture does. Once nice feature of Aperture is that it doesn't make edits to the pictures, it just overlays the edits on top of the original picture. iPhoto makes a duplicate of the original when you edit a picture and then changes the copy. If you are managing a lot of pictures, those original pictures could start to take up a lot of space.

The loupe feature is really nice in Aperture. If you are serious about pictures, I think Aperture is worth it. If you are more of a casual hobbiest, you might not find the value in it. The Aperture page has some good info on the "selling features" of Aperture: http://www.apple.com/aperture

The first software package i bought for the Mac was Aperture, i ended up rarely using it. For editing photos i use Photoshop, and for viewing/cataloguing i use iview media pro.

I recently upgraded to Leopard and so far i havent bothered to reinstall Aperture!

I'm a long-time photoshop user currently using CS2 on my PC, and I'm also probably going to buy an iMac in the next month or so... maybe sooner. Its my understanding that Aperture is skewed more for the advanced digital photographer. a friend also likes Lightroom but I'm not sure if its on the mac.

Lightroom and Aperture are basically the same product (both are available for the Mac too). Check out this review from Macworld for a comparision: http://www.macworld.com/2007/06/features/digitaldarkroom/index.php

From my memory of the article (I subscribe), Aperture was deemed the "winner" but basically you can't go wrong with either.