New Mac Need Help

[h.r.ford]

Ok so we are getting a Mac Pro delivered soon (Merry Christmas and birthday and Anniversary to us). Here is the problem. Right now I have LIghtroom beta and Elements. I really like Lightroom for all colour control but I still need Elements for cloning, shapening (cause Lightroom is rubbish at this) and the like. Now I'm thinking that when Lightroom comes out for real it will have these tools that I use elements for but there is no guarantee. I'm getting to my question somewhere... Should I buy Elements again and continue to use Lightroom thus wasting some money if LIghtroom is as good as I hope should I just suck it up till Lightroom is launched and live without elements or should I just throw everything in the air and buy Aperture??? I've never used Aperture so I don't know anything about it maybe someone with a mac can enlighten me. Thanks a bunch!

Renee

 

[Grendel]

I've not used Aperture myself as I'm more a PC man than MACS but I guy I work with uses it and absolutely swears by it, reckons it's the dogs dangleys!

 

[petemc]

Aperture is by far the best photo package this side of Photoshop. It beats anything else around.

 

[mho]

all depends what you want to gain from it and what you are using it for, Fine art, weddings, jpegs, raw, etc.

I use and implement Raw workflow systems etc and you have to decide what you want to start with and ultimatly where you need to end up (image wise), I use 3 diffrent workflows depending on where and what format the final image needs to be used for.

1. Bridge, ACR, Photoshop, Iview. - Photo Agency.
2. Aperture or Photoshop or both, Iview. - Web, Magazine's.
3. PhaseOne, Photoshop, Iview. - Fine Art.

Maninly due to what i need to do to a file to get the desired file easily.

Book a session at Apple to be shown what Aperture can offer its free.

 

[Darryn]

Is agree with petemc on this one, Im using Aperture on my Macpro and its awesome.

One thing to mention though, you havent stated what spec Macpro youre getting, I found with 1gb RAM Aperture would end up using my HDD as Virtual memory and become sluggish, I upgraded to 4gb and all my issues vanished. This was using Aperture v1.1 and a 12000 RAWphoto library, Aperture has since been updated to v1.5 which may well have improved performance.

 

[h.r.ford]

Thanks everyone. We are getting the 2.68 processor (I think) and 2gb of RAM to start.

Now I've been doing research on them both and it seems like Lightroom is Adobe's answer to Aperture. The reason I'm saying this is that I'm still going to have to buy Photoshop as well since both of them (whichever I go with) only make changes to the entire photo.

If I've misread about Aperture please let me know as I've never actually seen or used it.

I mainly do child and animal portraits with a view to taking up equestrian events in the near future.

 

[Darryn]

I have only used the basics of Aperture and have also bought "PSCS2 for mac" to work alongside it. Looking back I wouldnt have bought PSCS2 if id have researched it properly,

To begin with its a PPC binary not a universal one, which means that when running on the Intel based Macpro it is in fact basically being emulated, its still quite fast, but noticably slower than when I run "PSCS2 for Windows" using a Bootcamped XP-pro on the same machine.

Secondly, Aperture seems to offer more features than I initially thought,

Aperture lets you easily crop, straighten, reduce noise, correct red-eye, and eliminate dust

So... if I learnt to use Aperture fully I probably wouldnt need PSCS at all, as all I currently use it for is dust removal and final touchups.