[LilmaK]

Hey I"m thinking of going to Aperture full time but have never seen it in operation...Can anyone help me out? Is it worth it?

[icu400]

I just switched to it and I love it.
For small projects of like 20-50 pictures it doesn't really show its true beauty, but with projects of over 200-300 pictures where you have to select and use like 10-15, its an amazing program. I lets you go through all your pictures and tweak them without worrying about it, rate them, group them into albums based on types/keywords. I shoot sports a lot, so I can make an album for different players, offense/defense, different kinds of shots, etc. (and you can assign keywords to the pictures and have smart albums copy the shots to them automaticallly).
Its obviously not as editing intensive as photoshop, but its a leap above iphoto. It was always a huge pain for me to copy a picture to photoshop, play around with it, then take it back to iphoto because thats how I liked to look at my pictures together. This way you can edit (at least enough as you would normally have to...normal photography doesn't require too extreme edits most of the time, at least the photography i've been involved in) and organize without leaving the app, i love it.
My favorite feature is the web gallery's/web journals. Its great to be able to post pictures (this is more of my free time/personal fun tool, since for my photo job I don't have to post anything online, but since I have .mac I can have fun with these utilities) in almost no time at all. It will take the pictures, organize them to a theme, and put your captions/names and even meta data on the pages, and either post them to .mac or export them to html. Its truly unbelievable.

[Martian]

Can anyone compare Aperatue to Photoshop Elements? ]
Aperture doesnt compete with CS2 (and it would be a major strategic blunder for Apple to undercut that market as long as Adobe supports it or unless Apple could DRAMATICALLY and CONCLUSIVELY top it), but for those of us who want a bit more editing power than iPhoto, where do we go Aperture or Elements?

[icu400]

if you are an iphoto fan and have been using iphoto for a while (i have several thousand photos in my iphoto library) then I would switch to aperture. While photoshop is great for editing, i've never been a huge fan of adobe interfaces, but I love iphoto and aperture (and for that matter, the way all of apple's apps) are built.

[maflynn]

I use it, and I like the workflow it provides and the DAM. If your a serious amatuer or a professional I'd say this is a good move. If you don't take a lot of images, it is an expensive app, but it is your money.
Aperture really shines when you shoot RAW, if you typically shoot in JPG then I don't think its worth the money.
Mike