Macworld Forums: Aperture 1.5 - Macworld Forums

Still too expensive for me. Won't buy it until it downs to an acceptable $99, though by the time it may get down to that, other competitive software similar to Aperture would be propping up to challenge it.

I must be missing something. Photoshop will and always has run on almost any hardware and works just fine on a G3 iMac with half a gig of RAM. So in one corner we have Photoshop, an application of great power and depth that easily matches Aperture in terms of the complexity of the tasks it can handle. And in the other corner we have Aperture, which may have a well-designed interface but is not exactly moving mountains in the image processing department yet has astronomical hardware requirements and runs slowly even on some of the machines that support it. What's going on here? What I'm hearing from Aperture users doesn't make any sense at all.

Aperture is still slow enough to be a real irritation for professional use on a Dual 2.3 G5 with 4.5 gigs of ram and a stock graphics card. It may be zippy working with Jpegs but at the file sizes demanded by professional situations the app bogs down.
Additionally, freedom from the previous library restrictions has only partially been realized. Apple has still not resigned itself to the fact that final, finished, printable images, the ones that professionals get paid for, are almost always treated to some post-capture editing at a pixel-level. The kind of editing that cannot be accomplished with the kind of global tools available in Aperture, Bridge or any other first-stage (selection and RAW conversion) image management software.
Yes, you can make Aperture aware of images in a folder outside of Aperture's library, but if you send an image to an external editor (Photoshop for instance) and save the changes the new image is saved INTO THE APERTURE LIBRARY. Not into the external project folder. If you performa a Save-As from within Photoshop of course you can save it back into the original directory or a sub-folder therein, but if you do that then Aperture loses track of it.
In either case you must manage Aperture, either exporting the new version to your external folder or manually making Aperture aware of the new version in the external folder IT is supposed to be managing.
Eleven months and a 40% discount later the application still makes more work than it saves compared to other, cheaper solutions.
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so wait a sec... it seems to me that you're saying that in order to really get good performance for RAW editing you need an Intel Mac.
Are you saying that my PowerMac G5 Quad, just because its PowerPC, is going to drag using Aperture? I have yet to see many real-world pro applications running on Mac Pros beat out a Quad by more than 30-50%, which doesn't seem to make the difference you are making.
Am I understanding the article wrong, or are we seeing some kind of ominous turn towards Apple really not spending any time at all optimizing their apps for PowerPC and spending all of their time optimizing for Intel, so that comparisons can be so dramatic that they can sell more Intel machines? I'm sorry, but I don't plan on updating my Quad any time soon, and I for one am hoping that Apple is good enough not to be so low as to not provide ANY kind of kick-backs to its previous customers...

Here's a link to the Aperture Card Importer, an application that processes up to eight camera cards at once. It will copy the card image files to disk, import into a predetermined Aperture project, and apply sets of IPTC data. Enjoy!
http://automator.us/aperture/aci.html

Well. I recently got Aperture 1.5 because I had heard the improvements over previous were significant. However, reading all the concerns about its shortcomings now, I may have waited for the next upgrade. After all, I'm just running it on a MacBook (2 MB RAM).
From what I have learned about it (tutorials & other documentation), and the little I have used it to this point, I am convinced that waiting would have been a mistake. Unlike Jedi's concern that this will just become a fancier iPhoto, it is my hope that it will indeed become iPhoto on steroids. iPhoto is simple and is good as far as it goes - which isn't far enough. Aperture clearly goes further. I am excited that I can so easily put my thousands of photos into a vault - and then back it up to a second external drive for a second vault back-up. My MacBook's 120 GB HD is already too crowded. Moving my photos off - and backing them up to one or two or three separate places - seems pretty good to me. Further, some of the features in the main review here sound more positive to me than Jim Heid finds them. I have no doubt, though, that Jim (and others) are some levels above my competence and professional level. That would put my own opinion on all this in perspective - except a variety of professional do use and like Aperture (even while knowing there's room for improvement). Leicaman here is certainly one of those.
So, as I understand it, the current Aperture has a small number of important-to-some-professionals technical shortcomings. And it is too slow on certain machines, and on most machines working with RAW images. I hope Apple releases fixes for all that but I suspect that I can live with those things (I'll find out as I do heavier work with my RAW library). I am also influenced by Leicaman who has moved to include it in his workflow and to whose opinion I give weight. My bottom line: I like Aperture 1.5. I'm sure there will be future improvements and I'll upgrade at some point to get the new goodies. (I hope the fixes will be free.) But, so far, I am liking it a lot. I haven't nearly mastered the shortcuts and the subtler features (just got it), but I hope to quickly. As it should be with any good application, I'm enjoying it - not just working with it.
And for Alansky who wonders why use this instead of Photoshop, Aperture is a different application. Photoshop does far more in the way of adjusting photos - but isn't as smooth at simply handling them and comparing and culling and managing large groups of photos. Photoshop complements Aperture (notice I didn't say that the other way around). Neither replaces the other - yet. If you see no need for it, then you probably don't need it.

I understand very well that Aperture complements Photoshop's feature set. What I don't understand is how a program whose primary function is organization of large photo libraries can be so slow? WHY is Aperture so slow when Photoshop can perform seemingly much more complex tasks way faster?