APERTURE

I’d also like to try Aperture, but it won’t run worth a damn on my 12” G4 Powerbook. So for now, it’s out of the question.

I’ve been using Adobe Lightroom, which is still in beta so you can use it (for now) for free. I’ve seen reviews of both, and they seem very similar – some say Aperture’s better, others love Lightroom. Check it out.

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

thanks Matt I will try it …but still dont know what to do or if there are any solutions with the Aperture in my 1GB memory and 1.64 GHz Power book G4…maybe sell it and get a new one….or give it back form were it came from…...(internet)i think that is dificult the truth is that before buying aperture they should warn the buyers about these things .

Ciao

VALERIE

Digital technology is still beta and volatile, so there is this constant push to get people to buy the latest version of X (bigger, better, faster!) when in fact your older versions probably work just fine. I am sure Aperture would be nice to use, but I dont use it, and I dont feel an overwhelming need to buy it either, or the upgraded computer that goes with it. These things just enchain you to consumerism. I prefer to keep things simple, that way your expenses are lower and your profits are higher. Our profit margins have shrunk over the years, fees have remained pegged at the levels that prevailed over ten years ago, but our expenses due to the digital revolution have increased. When running your own business, you have to think about the basic mathematics sometimes and forget the lure of new equipment or you will go bust.

Hey Valerie,

I use Aperture for 90% of my editing work and am very happy with it. I have a 15” 1.67 G4 but I do have 2GB of RAM, but I think you’d be OK without it. Aperture uses video memory more than RAM and if you’re on the same machine I am, you’ve got 128MB of it. It’s not fast, though and that’s my only real complaint with it. Personally, I’ve looked at Lightroom (I even went to an Adobe Lightroom seminar.) and it’s just not for me. But, it is free for now, so you may want to test it out. Just remember that when it goes live, you’ll have about a month before you have to buy a copy… and it won’t be any cheaper than Aperture.

Just my thoughts.

Buena suerte.

-Art

dear valerie: take heart: you can still use Adobe Bridge, you can still use Photoshop. and you can also check out LightZone, a little known but quite powerful photo editing and image management package. see it here: http://www.lightcrafts.com/products/lightzone/. and if you do not like the image management portion of it, you can buy just the editor part and integrate it into Lightroom or Aperture or what have you. i am not endorsing Lightzone but i am testing it now myself and it has frankly just been nice to step away from the Aperture behemoth :) Lightzone will work with 512MB memory and does just fine on my old powerbook G4 as well. check it out. oh, and its cheap $150 or try it for free for 30 days which is what i am doing now.

(a small aside: some time soon someone has to raise the issue of the immense sucking sound that digital photography makes. that is the sound of your hard earned cash heading down towards new cameras, lenses, software, printers, scanners, RIP software, etc. etc. etc. each few months there is something that makes us feel that we are being left behind, or that we are simply unprofessional if we do not have the latest or apparent best. but a lot of this is just hype and nonsense and as professionals we have to find a way to challenge the insistence of the industry to push us towards more spending (e.g. by incompatib software upgrades or intentionally downgraded image processing software etc. common sense has to prevail and i say that it will. at least when shooting film i feel like an adult and spend 99% of my time focusing on photography and not on whether my digital workflow is streamlined or looking cool :)

asim

Amen!

I think it’s a big plot to make us all go broke from spending all our hard earned money constantly having to up grade our computers or software,when will it stop?

I use C – 1 pro 3.7, good results, not the quickest,but reasonable cost,and they do allow a few free up grades,interested to see what people think of this program and it compared to other programs that are out there,used by L.S. members.

So what exactly is so wrong with Photoshop and Bridge that people are even considering the purchase of Apature ($500) or Lightroom? And why is Adobe undermining their own well touted programs with this Lightroom stuff. Can’t understand it but maybe I really do.MONEY! Just when you learn to play the game the “Suits” change the rules and the equippment! I love the power digi gives me that I never had before but for God”s sakes stop the BS “new” stuff already!
G.

I just purchased Aperture two days ago (US$299 BTW). I am running it on an iMac G5 2Ghz 2GB Ram 128MB VRam and I find that it runs ok except for previewing images. It can take 5 to 15 secs to render my D2x NEFs (And JPEGs sometimes?). Everything else is acceptable considering i don’t have the fastest and latest. I can’t imagine using it on a G4 Powerbook.

I didn’t get it because I was unhappy with my Photoshop CS2 quality. I bought it to organize my images AND do processing in one place. So far the quality is equal to CS2. But I am still learning. As I find new features I get excited about how easy it could be to use in the long run. We’ll see how long I last with my forced conversion.

Cliff,
You don’t exactly sound thrilled with your new , better than chopped liver program.
HA!!!
G.

There’s nothing wrong with Photoshop and Bridge, Aperture was not designed to replace Photoshop. Granted Aperture has a lot of the adjustment feature’s that Photoshop has but it’s a workflow, cataloging, editing, exporting and comparing program. I agree with Art’s claim in that I use Aperture also for 90% of my editing work and then Photoshop for some final tweaks or for adjustment features Aperture does not have. It has to many unique feature’s for me to list but I would highly recommend sitting down with someone who has had it for a while and look what it can do, I think you’ll be amazed by some of it. I run it on a non-intel Dual 1.8 G5 with 256 of video ram and it runs great as expected. Recently replaced my 5 year old Powerbook with a intel 2.0ghz Macbook Pro and it run very well on it too.

Hope you guys get to check it out, the price is also down to $300.

Bill

I was actually pretty unhappy with it at first. But the more I use it the more the new professional features prove their worth. A faster machine would make this program run perfectly.

Iv’e got it running on our paper’s G5’s and it rocks! It has a steep learning curve. So of course I am spending somebody elses money so I can try out new stuff without going broke myself. JEJE

Tomas

Enough of the bitterness! Buying a computer or a computer program doesn’t undermine anyone’s photographic purity, or leave their family hungry. Upgrading every time a new Mac is released might, but who’s doing that? The right gear saves you money – in fact MAKES you money.

My friend, Jason, worked exclusively on a 12 inch PowerBook with his 1D (mark 1) cameras for a couple of years. Then he upgraded his computer to a Power Mac G5 with a 23” display and bought a 1d mark II. Those two pieces of technology (somehwere around $AUS10-$AUS11k in total), he tells me, save him up to 70% of time in post production for his mostly corporate work. Avoiding gratuitous references to day rates and income here, it didn’t take Jason long to recoup that outlay through time spent shooting pictures for paying clients that would overwise have been spent in photoshop.

Now..Aperture…I think it’s terrific. But as a newspaper photographer it wouldn’t do you any good … in fact for any fast deadline, small quantity filing scenario I think photoshop is still the goods. But for advertising, commerical, wedding, portrait or other independent photographers shooting RAW and managing an archive, I think it’d really be worth your time to have a look. Mark my words – lots of the technologies in Aperture are going to become the STANDARD within a couple of years. It’s very well thought through stuff – just a little undermined by its hardware requirements and maybe a little under baked in version 1.0 too.

http://www.apple.com/aperture/resources/tutorial/

Wade.

I’ve been a happy user since version 1.0. It allows me to keep all my shots organized and I haven’t seen a program that can help me compare shots as fast and as well. I use it for quick adjustments and quickly allows me to get down to my select few final images, which usually end up in Photoshop or DPP.

For me Aperture is all about dumping a few GB’s worth of shots onto the computer, comparing them and selecting the best shots quickly. If I had to open each one seperately in Photoshop it would take me forever. It’s really changed the way I post-process.

Thank you, Wade! Personally, I think it’s pretty funny that people get personally offended by technology. These are the same folks who 10-20 years ago were saying the same stuff about new film technology. Yelling about Kodachrome and “my cold dead hands!!”. If you’re happy with your “digital Kodachrome”, great! But I happen to like new technology. It’s fun. Learning new stuff is cool… and as Kenneth and Wade so elequently pointed out, it can actually make things easier. Go figure.

“Mama don’t take my photoshop, mama don’t take my photoshop awaaaaaay”

I love Aperture. It has really revolutionized the way I archive and find my images. The non-destructive, never touch the raw files approach is the way of the future. It is like getting your slides back and sticking them in the plastic sleves never to be touched again until you need to make a print.

The program is a little slugish even on my MacBook Pro with 2 gig ram! But it is worth the initial wait while it renders your previews. For deadline stuff I still turn to Photomechanic+Photoshop combo as it is lightning fast (will be even better when the Universal PS comes out). But even then, when I am back at home and ready to archive all my stuff I import them into Aperture and use it to find outakes.

With the new library structure you can keep you files anywhere. It is designed very nicely and now I have all my files on DVD’s or a big hard drive I leave at home, and I can take my entire Aperture library with me, either on my laptop or on a smal firewire drive. While I’m away from home I can edit caption info, do backlogged work on organizing, keywording of images. Everything except edit the images themselves. I can even mark the ones I want to work on for later very easily.

It really rocks. I know this whole thing with digital and upgrading over and over sucks. But this is how it is these days. That is just the nature of the game I think.

As for Cliff up there somewhere in the thread. Try upgrading your ram to your computers max. It will improve your perfomance and is a pretty inexpensive upgrade.

If you’re not sure if Aperture will work on your system you can download a ‘Compatibility Checker’ from Apple’s website (at the bottom of the Aperture Tech Specs page). This little program checks out your computer and tells you whether Aperture would run with what you have.

I’ve just started using Aperture at work. Initial impressions are not great. I wasted the first morning, importing images while keeping the master files in their original location (a supposed advantage of version 1.5). The program quit unexpectedly while I was adding metadata and all the imports I had made that morning were completely forgotten when I opened it again. Nothing was in there, none of my new projects or albums. Hmmm. So beware. If the program quits, it might not remember anything you did during that session.

But it looks nice :-)